Entry #136: Steve Fuller
Fuller is a sociologist and best known as a post-modernist alibi for intelligent design creationism. He works and lives in the UK (Warwick, but Fuller is still American), where he is actually a celebrated sociologist who has won prizes and awards. Tells you something about the field. He is mostly associated with social epistemology as an interdisciplinary research program. Social epistemology is a normative discipline that addresses philosophical problems of knowledge using the tools of history and the social sciences. It is utter bullshit, in other words (skepticism is a white male European construct).
For the purposes of our encyclopedia, Fuller is most notable for his extensive support of creationism, publishing books and papers and even participating at the Dover trial (for the defense, though his argument may have hurt them more than helped them), claiming that the theory of evolution and intelligent design creationism should be accorded equal status as scientific theories. He also claims that ID needs and should receive “affirmative action” among the sciences. He has also claimed that Darwinism leads to abortion and euthanasia, showing where his ideas really come from. (Steven Poole called his book “Dissent over Descent” “an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name”; Michael Ruse judged it to be “completely wrong and […] backed by no sound scholarship whatsoever”)
He has also argued that science is basically a religion, and that modern science has its basis in an attempt by humanity to transcend itself and reach God - and that science itself “does not make sense without the Abrahamic backdrop”. More muddleheaded POMO idiocy is discussed here, here, and here.)
Norman Levitt responded to Fuller’s bullshittery, in particular his book Science Vs. Religion with eloquence and insight (here, here, here, and here (Sahotra Sarkar also had an eloquent response; also here)). After Levitt passed away, Fuller wrote one of the more bizarre eulogies in history, calling him “"a minor science fascist” and accusing him (rather than Fuller himself and his POMO followers) of being a “pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science”. The “eulogy” is discussed here.
Fuller is currently associated with Dembski’s blog Uncommon Descent (no link provided). Also made an appearance in Expelled.
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Diagnosis: Total idiot; not only impervious to critical thinking, but using POMO to justify not engaging in it. Blathering crackpot. May have some influence, but probably not among the usual fundamentalist creationists. His ilk is a threat to civilization nonetheless, and Fuller should be taken as an example of the ridiculousness of POMO and where it might actually lead.