Creationist Tactics
I am sure Jim Ring is correct when he says we are on the winning side of the creationist battle [Forum, Summer 1997], but there is no room for complacency. As he says, the castrated form of biology taught in American schools has resulted in a minority of Americans believing organic evolution has occurred.
While I haven’t seen any figures, I hear stories of fundamentalists stacking school boards in this country and attempting to influence the content of science classes, or enrolling as teacher trainees to the same ultimate end. A sixteen-year-old I spoke to recently had been given the clear message by her biology teacher that evolution was “only a theory” and that if it conflicted with the beliefs of anyone in the class they didn’t have to accept it. The American experience, very quietly, may be starting here.
I well remember the prominent visits overseas creationists used to make. I attended a couple of lectures myself, by Duane Gish and Richard Bliss. Both were well-publicised, and well attended by people with opposing views. There was lively debate, and the creationists in this climate did not fare well. I was out there fighting too, Jim, and I agree we won most of the battles.
The point of my article was that the creationist tactics have changed. The visits and the tours continue, but with a very low profile. Audiences consist almost entirely of the converted, and if a skeptic does manage to hear of a meeting and get along to it, it is as a lone voice easily silenced. The faithful, awash in a righteous glow, then go forth to spread the creationist word on a one-to-one basis.
The creationists have recognised that their old tactics were not working. It is too early to say how the new approach will fare, but we need to be aware that the change has occurred, and not assume they are in retreat merely because they have lowered their profile.
David Riddell
Skepticism and the Liberal State
So now we have politically correct skepticism (David Novitz Summer 1997 No. 46). His choice of John Rawls as the arbiter for the ethics of skepticism is surprising. No mention is made of Rawls’ critics such as Robert Nozick.
Rawls’ book is an attempt to justify the restrictions that a socialist government must place upon its citizens. Rawls wrote in the tradition of Plato and Marx, favouring the state against individual freedom. I wonder how George Orwell would have reacted, particularly to such phrases as “liberal theories of the state”? I know it sends a shiver down my spine.
Novitz writes, “[Rawls’s] view of the liberal state is widely held.” Now this may have been true when Rawls published (1971) but since then we have seen socialism all but defeated. Communism has collapsed and the milder forms of socialism that Rawls favoured have almost disappeared. If restrictions had been placed on skepticism, none of this might have happened.
Rawls wanted citizens to have the “freedom” to hold and propound beliefs without fear of persecution or ridicule. I am in favour of no persecution, but to link this with ridicule is a slippery argument, chilling in its implications. Consider how much easier it is for church or state to control minds if no one is allowed to ridicule a ridiculous idea.
An adult human must take responsibility for his or her own belief system. We can help holding our beliefs. We can change them and, presented with facts or a rational argument, we should be prepared to do so. Sincerity is no virtue on its own.
The basis for a selective approach to skepticism should be pragmatic not ethical, let us keep going after the testable claims and ignore the woolly beliefs.
Novitz wants to set us four new targets:
The Bell Curve etc: But this has drawn such a vigorous debate in America skeptics are hardly needed. In any case it seems a specifically American issue.
Evolutionary Psychology: does this mean sociobiology? However sociobiology is a respected part of science. Attacks on it as a “pseudoscience” have come from a small group of academics with Marxist affiliations.
Received medical practices which are under-researched and of dubious value: This was a major target for Dr John Welch’s excellent column.
The Spurious Science of Economics: Could this be because economists have done much more than philosophers to demonstrate the falsity of Rawls’ arguments? A word of warning however. There is quite a collection of Nobel Prize winners on the other side. Are we going to line up with the nutters this time?
Jim Ring
David Novitz replies:
Mr Ring is mistaken about Rawls, as he is about political correctness. Rawls’s aim is to ensure that the state remains neutral on issues of conscience. Politically correct people want to ensure that the state does not remain neutral, and insist at every turn that it should enforce their views on race, gender, the economy, and whatever.
There is all the difference in the world, Mr Ring should know, between a liberal state that tries to remain neutral with respect to different ideological and metaphysical views, and an illiberal state that tries to inflict its views on its citizens. In part, Rawls writes in defence of liberal democracy. The claim, therefore, that his “book is an attempt to justify the restrictions that a socialist government must place upon its citizens” is just about as accurate as the claim that the Bible is a novel about a rugby match.
Mr Ring writes in order to defend and advance a particular political point of view that would require the State to enforce particular economic views. Well and good. But he should notice that his view is much closer to the socialism he fears so greatly than anything Rawls has ever written.
David Novitz
Knocking Homeopathy
John Riddell’s demolition of homeopathy (NZ Skeptic No 45) went so far, but he left out the keystone of his argument: succussion. Homeopaths (homeopathologists?) maintain that the power of their ingredients persists through the multiple dilutions because they bang the mixtures between dilutions.
This apparently knocks the vital force of the ingredients into the water molecules, which continue to knock it into each other after the ingredient is all gone, rather as gramophone records used to be pressed through several generations from a mould of the original cut recording, or as type is cast and used to print many copies.
Now when someone bangs a bottle of fluid, they can only bang it so hard without breaking it. It’s a long time since I did chemistry, but I’m sure that at room temperature the water molecules hit each other already with accelerations that are many, many orders of magnitude greater than that.
Perhaps someone would work it out for us, but I’m reasonably sure that banging the bottle would make an appropriately infinitesimal difference to the banging the water molecules get all the time.
Hugh Young
Divining Recalled
I have just been reading Great Aunt Molly and Her Magic Hazel Rods [NZ Skeptic 46]. In the mid-thirties, when I was about 15, my French mother and I used to spend part of the summer holidays in her villa just out of Boulogne.
The local parish priest claimed to be a water and precious metal diviner. Not only that, he also claimed to be able to divine diseases. He would stand the patient between himself and vials of different illnesses; when the rod shot up, that would be the complaint. In my mother’s case it was colitis, fashionable in those days amongst neurotic women.
The thing that interested me most was that my aunt’s chauffeur, a very strong man, claimed he could not keep the rod from rising. Treatment was by various herbs, and no charges imposed, just a donation.
Need I say that mum was cured.
Jan Fleming, Rangiora
Interesting to see the similarities between this diviner and modern day kinesiologists or “muscle testers” – ed.
