Tom Firey talks about "feariness", which he defines as: "The quality of being feared, even though logic and/or evidence indicates there is little to fear." As I've informed him, the proper term is in fact threatiness, which was coined by yours truly back in March. I've told the resident lawyer at Telic Thoughts about this, and he promised to look it over as soon as that darned ambulance stops.

I've been reading the book For and Against Method. The first third of the book consists of a number of lectures by Imre Lakatos on scientific method, as well as a short piece written by Paul Feyerabend. The rest of the book consists of personal correspondence between Lakatos and Feyerabend between the years 1968 and 1974. I wanted to share what Feyerabend had to say about creationism. Feyerabend writes to Lakatos:

"In my philosophy of science class I started by defending Max Rafferty who suggested that genesis and evolution should be taught as two alternative theories rather than one a fairy tale and the other a "fact." There was a riot, and next time there will be a biologist professor (a bigshot) defending evolution, and a fundamentalist minister defending genesis. That should really lead to anarchy. By now students as well as professors say that I am immoral and that I should get out of university life, so, you see, I share the fate of every true anarchist."

In a later letter, Feyerabend writes:

This week somebody is going to talk about yoga and in the meantime I am encouraging people to elaborate Genesis in order to make it a useful alternative to Evolution. Thinking about it, our chairman broke a leg and is laid up with it.

And then even later, after talking about some Jehovah's Witnesses that have been coming to his house, he writes:

In my class on the philosophy of science I had a debate on Genesis vs evolution, the guy from evolution was mean, the guy from Genesis was cowardly and it was generally a great bore. Of course, the guy from Genesis said, Genesis was not meant to be taken literally, it is a moral document etc. etc […]. Well, first of all, he is not correct, and secondly, science often made progress by taking parts of silly doctrines seriously and using them for an attack against well-established, scientific, precise etc. views. Thus Copernicus turned to the Pythagoreans, those strange people who had a secret society, thought that women were equal to men, ate no flesh, revered the number ten, revered fire and therefore made the earth move as it obviously was not fire and, as the most dignified element could not be supposed to run around, Copernicus turned to this strange philosophy, picked up one element of it, the motion of the earth, and knocked Ptolemy to the ground with it.

More from Dawkins and his attempt to use science to determine if God exists:

Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘NOMA’ – ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment’s thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science.

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For some time, it has been my opinion that Dawkins' famous talk and poetic writing about the "grandeur of science" is mostly disguised anti-religious propaganda (just doing my own bit of "consciousness raising," mind you). I have noted, for example, that Dawkins' continual obsession with attacking religion and American presidents does not fit well with the idea of man who is so enthralled and mesmerized by Nature. I make these arguments here and here. Whatever. But now Dawkins has strongly supported my opinion:

I wanted to write The God Delusion six years ago. American friends counselled against, and my New York literary agent was horrified. Perhaps in Britain you could sell a book that criticized religion, he said. But in the US, don’t even think about it. He hated to admit it, for he was an atheist like most American intellectuals, but religion was off limits to ridicule. You had to respect religion even if you didn’t subscribe to it. Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall. Concentrate on science, my American friends advised. Hands off religion. Let the grandeur of science speak for itself, and religion will die a natural death by ignominious comparison. I gave way and wrote The Ancestor’s Tale instead.

So as you can see, Dawkins wanted to write The God Delusion and had to settle for the The Ancestor's Tale as a second choice. What's more, it sure looks like the The Ancestor's Tale was intended as something that would attack religion obliquely, where Dawkins would do his best to play up the "grandeur of science" in the naïve hope that "religion will die a natural death by ignominious comparison." It sure looks to me as if he views evolution and science not as an end that inspires him, but as a means to an end - the death of religion. This is a consistent theme that will help us understand his arguments and shallow perspective of evolution.

As I mentioned before, I got lucky Friday night – a significant window of time opened up and Dawkins had recently finished a summary of his book entitled, Richard Dawkins explains his latest book. So I sat down, cracked open a cold drink, and began to play. A couple of hours later and my response/analysis turned out to be much too long for a blog. So I broke up the reply into several smaller bits and initiated the Dawkins Fest.

Unfortunately, a few hours after my first installment was posted, where I point out how Dawkins' views of science undercut the Dover decision, the lengthy Dawkins essay disappeared from its hosting site. How can I have a Dawkins Fest when I am now in the position of responding to an essay that has vanished? Luckily, you can read the cached version of the essay here.

A couple weeks ago Yale held its annual Dwight H. Terry Lectures and the topic was the "The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does it Continue?" You can view the lectures here. Sage gives an overview of each lecture.

Editted to add: Check out Ronald Numbers' answer to the first question (asked by Kenneth Miller) after his lecture. I've pointed out before that Numbers sees ID and creationism coming from two different places ("almost non-overlapping" is what Numbers says in his answer) and thus aren't the same.

It's official. Richard Dawkins, the celebrity scientist from Oxford University, has acknowledged there are indeed two types of ID critics - the Chamberlainites and the Churchillians:

Dawkins writes:

Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain ‘appeasement’ school, as I have called it in my book, focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease ‘moderate’ or ‘sensible’ religion (not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do). Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased.

Cut-and-paste this, people.

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