An Excerpt From Correspondence
Hello Jameson (and anyone else who is reading this),
As you know I value our conversations very much, so I’m glad you decided to post this. Let me set the record straight before I begin, I am not an atheist, I am more of a non-theist, or as long as we’re throwing labels around I’d prefer to be called a “Truth Seeker”. I do not necessarily believe or disbelieve that a God, or even the Christian God exists. I simply don’t see any need for organized faith in my life, and in fact it would hinder me in my philosophical pursuits. Make no mistake, religion offers answers, the problem for me is that to be a religious person I would have to accept those answers as truth, and since faith is in of itself a non-experiential concept, and very little truth can be arrived at a-priori, I just don’t seem to have been born with the concept of “faith” imbedded in my psyche. For the record, if there is a God, I think he’ll sleep just fine knowing that I didn’t take it all for granted, and sought to understand his great mystery without taking it for what my ancestors believed and leaving it at that. At the same time, people with faith may as well be free to do what they want, I believe first and foremost in the concept of liberty, and no one has any business mandating faith or the lack of faith on anyone else.
With all of that I’ll respond in point form to a few of Orson Scott Card’s assumptions. First off, he’s a great sci-fi author, Ender’s Game is way up there on my list of favorite books. But when it comes to politics and faith Card and I rarely see eye to eye.
[“But Expelled is not trying to preach or even defend ID. The technical arguments are far too complicated to explain in a movie. What Ben Stein is trying to do is expose the way anyone who dissents from Darwinist orthodoxy is punished and silenced.”]
This is precisely the point though. The arguments against the so called “Darwinism Orthodoxy” are not accepted by the scientific community because they are unscientific in nature. Darwinism is a scientific theory based on provable scientific methodology (ie; observations, fossil records, etc etc) while intelligent design has nothing to back it up except a different interpretation of the same available data that is skewed by faith. I mean the ID people will go “but, but, but we don’t have a direct fossil record to trace every level of human evolution” - fair enough - “so the bible must be correct” - huh? Just because Darwinism does not explain EVERYTHING does not mean it is necessarily wrong. Basing a theory solely on what another theory fails to explain is not science. Newtonian physics does not begin to explain quantum physics, does that mean Newton was wrong and we should throw out Newtonian Physics? Now that’s not to say that the scientific community isn’t a tough nut to crack, and new theories often see a lot of resistance before they are accepted into mainstream science. But this is precisely why and how science works, if you want to throw out a theory that is backed up by observable phenomenon you'd better have some astounding evidence in your pocket if you expect to succeed. And I’m afraid that Ben Stein, although he helped write some great speeches for Nixon, and was awesome in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has not laid the scientific community bare in pointing this out.
[“Most scientific discoveries through history have been made by people who believed in God. Period. That's a historical fact.”]
Lest they suffer the fate of Galileo.
[“Darwin, working in an era before we understood the workings of the cell, simply had no way of knowing just how complicated things could get. Clearly "random variation plus natural selection" is not a sufficient explanation.”]
What? Why? Says who? What is their evidence? Just because Darwinism fails to explain a concept (and I’m not sure that in this case that it doesn’t) does not mean it is incorrect! This is yet another case where Orson tries to say “I’m not one of those crazy ID’s” when he clearly is. Orson, you can’t have it both ways!
[“But that is one of the most important -- and valid -- points in the movie. First, Hitler was a Darwinist.”]
Well it looks like we’ve taken our first step into horseshit territory. This is the kind of argument I hear from idiot college students and random people on the internet. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER OR NOT HITLER WAS A DARWINIST EVEN THOUGH HISTORY CLEARLY SHOWS THAT HE WASN’T. Charles Darwin did not invent the concept of eugenics, nor did Victorians like Francis Galton. Sure, they gave it a fancy name to try and make it sound scientific, but people have been killing each other on the pretense of ethnic or religious purity since we learned how to make stone clubs and spears. Hitler based his idiot theories on occultism and even sought to marry them directly to his “Positive Christianity” which would have been the state religion in his glorious “Thousand Year Reich”. Anti-atheists love to bring up Hitler because his fucked up theories remind them of “survival of the fittest” and they love to throw around words like “social Darwinism” when talking about Hitler even though the two have about as much in common as Apples and Grenade Launchers. But what these guys never acknowledge is that Hitler was first and foremost an Anti-Semite, a position that in of itself requires religion both on the part of the victim and perpetrator. If Hitler was a Darwinist, or a true Eugenicist in the tradition of the Victorians; “Jew”, “Gypsy” or “Catholic” wouldn’t have been an issue, people would have been selected for extermination purely based on physical deficiencies. Hitler’s final solution not only REQUIRED religion, but was intrinsically based on it!
[“The historical fact is that the normative religions -- religions that offer codes of conduct that promote altruism and tolerance, like Buddhism and Christianity -- have acted as a brake on the natural tendency of human beings to be bestial to each other when fear or power-lust makes it seem necessary or desirable.”]
Religion has also served as rallying cry for the worst atrocities of recorded history. From the early wars between tribes, to the blood sacrifices made to the Moche pantheons; religion has been the architect of violence. Oh what’s that? “But I’m only talking about our Modern altruistic Western religions!” Oh yeah? Tell that Guy Fawkes or to Michael Collins or their British Enemies, tell that to the Bosnians and the Serbians, tell that to the penultimate Christian Crusaders like Richard the Lionheart who slaughtered women and children in the name of God. Hell, the most venerated dead horse that anti-atheists love to flog - the king of douchebags himself: Joseph Stalin, went to fucking seminary school and was deeply connected to the Russian Orthodox church, especially when he used it as a rallying force to fight off the Protestant Aryan Christian Nazis.
[“When there is no moral restraint, no sense of transcendent responsibility, then why shouldn't powerful people do whatever they think is right? On what basis would a committed atheist like Richard Dawkins prove to us that Hitler was wrong? Science is simply mute on issues of values. Dawkins has no scientific basis for opposing or even criticizing Hitler or Stalin in any way. I'm sure that he would condemn them -- but he could not tell us why in terms that were even slightly more rational than any religion.”]
And there goes the other shoe. So what, freedom and liberty are entirely Christian concepts? Really? Because I can find plenty of quotes dealing directly with genocide and slavery right in the good book. Hell, I can even find instructions on the best way to trade livestock, but morality? Christianity is actually strangely silent in this conversation, what it does ask for loudly though is obedience. Where simple logic tells me that to live in a society (or allow to exist a violent expansionist society) where one despotic ruler metes out life and death based on his own insane whims and occult theology is an inherently dangerous and unfulfilling way of life, I find Christ telling me to “Render unto Caeser”. In fact if I looked purely at the Bible, I couldn’t find any reason at all for Hitler to have been wrong, or confronted and overcome.
As you know I value our conversations very much, so I’m glad you decided to post this. Let me set the record straight before I begin, I am not an atheist, I am more of a non-theist, or as long as we’re throwing labels around I’d prefer to be called a “Truth Seeker”. I do not necessarily believe or disbelieve that a God, or even the Christian God exists. I simply don’t see any need for organized faith in my life, and in fact it would hinder me in my philosophical pursuits. Make no mistake, religion offers answers, the problem for me is that to be a religious person I would have to accept those answers as truth, and since faith is in of itself a non-experiential concept, and very little truth can be arrived at a-priori, I just don’t seem to have been born with the concept of “faith” imbedded in my psyche. For the record, if there is a God, I think he’ll sleep just fine knowing that I didn’t take it all for granted, and sought to understand his great mystery without taking it for what my ancestors believed and leaving it at that. At the same time, people with faith may as well be free to do what they want, I believe first and foremost in the concept of liberty, and no one has any business mandating faith or the lack of faith on anyone else.
With all of that I’ll respond in point form to a few of Orson Scott Card’s assumptions. First off, he’s a great sci-fi author, Ender’s Game is way up there on my list of favorite books. But when it comes to politics and faith Card and I rarely see eye to eye.
[“But Expelled is not trying to preach or even defend ID. The technical arguments are far too complicated to explain in a movie. What Ben Stein is trying to do is expose the way anyone who dissents from Darwinist orthodoxy is punished and silenced.”]
This is precisely the point though. The arguments against the so called “Darwinism Orthodoxy” are not accepted by the scientific community because they are unscientific in nature. Darwinism is a scientific theory based on provable scientific methodology (ie; observations, fossil records, etc etc) while intelligent design has nothing to back it up except a different interpretation of the same available data that is skewed by faith. I mean the ID people will go “but, but, but we don’t have a direct fossil record to trace every level of human evolution” - fair enough - “so the bible must be correct” - huh? Just because Darwinism does not explain EVERYTHING does not mean it is necessarily wrong. Basing a theory solely on what another theory fails to explain is not science. Newtonian physics does not begin to explain quantum physics, does that mean Newton was wrong and we should throw out Newtonian Physics? Now that’s not to say that the scientific community isn’t a tough nut to crack, and new theories often see a lot of resistance before they are accepted into mainstream science. But this is precisely why and how science works, if you want to throw out a theory that is backed up by observable phenomenon you'd better have some astounding evidence in your pocket if you expect to succeed. And I’m afraid that Ben Stein, although he helped write some great speeches for Nixon, and was awesome in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has not laid the scientific community bare in pointing this out.
[“Most scientific discoveries through history have been made by people who believed in God. Period. That's a historical fact.”]
Lest they suffer the fate of Galileo.
[“Darwin, working in an era before we understood the workings of the cell, simply had no way of knowing just how complicated things could get. Clearly "random variation plus natural selection" is not a sufficient explanation.”]
What? Why? Says who? What is their evidence? Just because Darwinism fails to explain a concept (and I’m not sure that in this case that it doesn’t) does not mean it is incorrect! This is yet another case where Orson tries to say “I’m not one of those crazy ID’s” when he clearly is. Orson, you can’t have it both ways!
[“But that is one of the most important -- and valid -- points in the movie. First, Hitler was a Darwinist.”]
Well it looks like we’ve taken our first step into horseshit territory. This is the kind of argument I hear from idiot college students and random people on the internet. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER OR NOT HITLER WAS A DARWINIST EVEN THOUGH HISTORY CLEARLY SHOWS THAT HE WASN’T. Charles Darwin did not invent the concept of eugenics, nor did Victorians like Francis Galton. Sure, they gave it a fancy name to try and make it sound scientific, but people have been killing each other on the pretense of ethnic or religious purity since we learned how to make stone clubs and spears. Hitler based his idiot theories on occultism and even sought to marry them directly to his “Positive Christianity” which would have been the state religion in his glorious “Thousand Year Reich”. Anti-atheists love to bring up Hitler because his fucked up theories remind them of “survival of the fittest” and they love to throw around words like “social Darwinism” when talking about Hitler even though the two have about as much in common as Apples and Grenade Launchers. But what these guys never acknowledge is that Hitler was first and foremost an Anti-Semite, a position that in of itself requires religion both on the part of the victim and perpetrator. If Hitler was a Darwinist, or a true Eugenicist in the tradition of the Victorians; “Jew”, “Gypsy” or “Catholic” wouldn’t have been an issue, people would have been selected for extermination purely based on physical deficiencies. Hitler’s final solution not only REQUIRED religion, but was intrinsically based on it!
[“The historical fact is that the normative religions -- religions that offer codes of conduct that promote altruism and tolerance, like Buddhism and Christianity -- have acted as a brake on the natural tendency of human beings to be bestial to each other when fear or power-lust makes it seem necessary or desirable.”]
Religion has also served as rallying cry for the worst atrocities of recorded history. From the early wars between tribes, to the blood sacrifices made to the Moche pantheons; religion has been the architect of violence. Oh what’s that? “But I’m only talking about our Modern altruistic Western religions!” Oh yeah? Tell that Guy Fawkes or to Michael Collins or their British Enemies, tell that to the Bosnians and the Serbians, tell that to the penultimate Christian Crusaders like Richard the Lionheart who slaughtered women and children in the name of God. Hell, the most venerated dead horse that anti-atheists love to flog - the king of douchebags himself: Joseph Stalin, went to fucking seminary school and was deeply connected to the Russian Orthodox church, especially when he used it as a rallying force to fight off the Protestant Aryan Christian Nazis.
[“When there is no moral restraint, no sense of transcendent responsibility, then why shouldn't powerful people do whatever they think is right? On what basis would a committed atheist like Richard Dawkins prove to us that Hitler was wrong? Science is simply mute on issues of values. Dawkins has no scientific basis for opposing or even criticizing Hitler or Stalin in any way. I'm sure that he would condemn them -- but he could not tell us why in terms that were even slightly more rational than any religion.”]
And there goes the other shoe. So what, freedom and liberty are entirely Christian concepts? Really? Because I can find plenty of quotes dealing directly with genocide and slavery right in the good book. Hell, I can even find instructions on the best way to trade livestock, but morality? Christianity is actually strangely silent in this conversation, what it does ask for loudly though is obedience. Where simple logic tells me that to live in a society (or allow to exist a violent expansionist society) where one despotic ruler metes out life and death based on his own insane whims and occult theology is an inherently dangerous and unfulfilling way of life, I find Christ telling me to “Render unto Caeser”. In fact if I looked purely at the Bible, I couldn’t find any reason at all for Hitler to have been wrong, or confronted and overcome.