Re: On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

>>> Bill Hamilton <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com> 03/03/06 3:00 PM >>>wants
me to spell it out. I will.
> 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."
>

Ted: The debate about ID is very substantially about public vs private
faith. This is surely how it is seen by leading ID advocates such as Phil
Johnson, Nancy Pearcey, and others (here I name the most articulate
advocates of the dangers of the privitization of religion). And on the
other side, some of the most vociferous opponents of ID, including Dawkins
and certain regulars on pandasthumb, have never met an intelligent theist.

> 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.

Ted:
The enlightened will realize that there's "a whole lotta spinnin' goin'
on," relative to ID. And it comes from both sides, so that the actual truth
of the matter is often mighty hard to discern. Ultimately we have two
master rhetoricians (Johnson and Dawkins) playing very prominent roles in
the current controversy about evolution, its meanings, and its role in
public education. Further than that I do not intend to go.

T
Received on Fri Mar 3 15:22:53 2006