Re: On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

Ted

Pardon my density, but I don't understand what you're driving at here. I can
only characterize the article you posted as dripping with sarcasm. Am I
missing something?

As for you not committing to one side or the other wrt ID, I understand your
position. There is much to be said in favor of teaching philosophy of science,
and ID has a place in philosophy of science. Teach the controversy -- yes. But
in the appropriate venue: philosophy, not science.

--- Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu> wrote:

> One of our campus ministry staff posted the following column from the NY
> Times. I think there is much food for thought here, and I offer it as an
> apology (in the older meaning of that word) for staking out a middle
> position on the ID controversy that is so divisive in many places right now.
> I realize that the ground I occupy on that issue is pretty small, and I
> don't expect it ever to be much bigger. Partly I occupy that ground b/c of
> my own convictions about what the truth actually is, but I also occupy that
> ground b/c of the kinds of things talked about in the second and third
> paragraphs below. Discerning readers will see which parts of this apply to
> the context in which I am using it, and they will begin to understand why I
> find the politics of this issue so discouraging.
>
> Ted
>
> ****************
>
> Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
> The New York Times
> March 2, 2006
> Author: DAVID BROOKS
>
> I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're
> beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school
> you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic
> notes,
> students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd
> expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a
> hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at
> all."
>
> But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up
> with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great
> education, no matter what college you attend:Read Reinhold Niebuhr.
> Religion
> is a crucial driving force of this century, and Niebuhr is the wisest
> guide.
> As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if everyone read Niebuhr, "The
> devout
> would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must
> play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some
> people
> who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that
> good and evil really do exist -- and that it is never as easy as it seems
> to
> know which is which. And none of them, so long as they absorbed what they
> were reading, could believe that the best way to divide opinion is between
> liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other."
>
> Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The
> explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of
> philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of
> persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that
> the
> worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker can all too easily
> erode one's devotion to truth -- a devotion that is critical to our
> integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially
> soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about
> politics
> and punditry.
>
> Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the
> core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like
> Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire,"
> Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble
> actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is
> impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."
>
> That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago,
> during a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was
> lost,
> the entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've
> got
> to find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who
> will
> serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use
> to
> measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard
> Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to
> weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."
>
> Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My
> impression is that many students have turned into cunning little
> careerists,
> jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly
> impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should
> especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another
> culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a
> matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger
> stage."
>
> Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland
> believes
> that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence
> suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for
> students that lasts a lifetime."
>
> Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations
> you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and
> function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.
>
> Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to
> know what a standard deviation is.
>
> Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message
> from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have
> developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing
> the
> full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by
> the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that
> narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're
> surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little
> subdisciplinary empires.
>
> But you can do it. I have faith.
>
>
> Edition: Late Edition - Final
> Section: Editorial Desk
> Page: 27
>
> Index Terms: Op-Ed
>
> Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times Company
> Record Number: 2006-03-02-814830
>
>
>
>

Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
586.986.1474 (work) 248.652.4148 (home) 248.303.8651 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

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Received on Fri Mar 3 15:00:38 2006