Creationism and Pomo

Jeffrey Fisher jfisher at igc.org
Tue Apr 16 09:47:11 PDT 2002


why is it that rants like this always quote the reactionary attackers of the straw men they seek to bring down, themselves, rather than a few people who actually espouse these positions that we are to believe are so widespread in academia (only bill bennett, alan sokal, and richard kimball are missing from his pantheon of right-wing betes-noirs of academia)?

maybe it's because the whole thing is a red herring.

talk about a hodgepodge--west here brings together "leftist" anti-evolutionary rhetoric with opposition to gm crops as if they're somehow part of a coherent leftist (dare we say communist?) ideology. talk about conspiracy theories. you'd think the muticulties were actually behind the porto alegre summit.

what, i wonder, would mr. west do with a zizek or a haraway? how many leftists actually see richard dawkins as a torquemada?

j

On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 11:33 AM, michael pugliese wrote:


>
> http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006D867.htm
> And then there was postmodernism...
> by Patrick West
>
> If creationism is on the rise in the UK, blame the academic left
> as much as
> the religious right.
>
> For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a
> war against
> science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is
> an inherently
> Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most
> of all, after
> Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed
>
> 'discourse'.
>
> The general public's distrust of science and scientists in general,
> whether
> it be over genetically modified (GM) crops or cloning, is not
> merely a fad,
> whipped up by the media. The public's flight into homeopathy,
> healing
> crystals and alternative medicine represents a deeper distrust
> of science, a
> flight that has been fuelled from the top down by thousands of
> undergraduate
> professors who claim that 'science' (inverted commas are mandatory)
> is but
> another Western, logocentric discourse that tells us more about
> who is doing
> the observing than what is observed.
>
> Creationism may now be given the legitimacy it needs not because
>
> fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise, but because postmodernism
>
> reigns.
>
> Although some today are prone to dismiss postmodernism as a craze
> of the
> early-1990s, there is little evidence that we do not still live
> in a
> relativist age, despite Blair and Bush's attempt to force the
> language of
> 'good' and 'evil' into the international sphere. From the heights
> of
> academia, where textuality, relativism and cultural perspectivism
> rule, to
> the lowly language of social policy, where difference and diversity
> have
> become modern-day mantras, we do indeed appear to live in times
> of inverted
> commas.
>
> 'Feminist scientists' concluded that science was an intrinsically
> masculine
> enterprise
> Add a dose of demotic populism to this relativist posturing,
> and there can
> be no defence of science in the face of creationism. To attempt
> such a
> defence is to risk accusations of 'intolerance' and 'elitism':
> it is an
> affront to pluralism and a proverbial kick in the face of diversity.
> 'But
> science is just another form of religion', I remember two undergraduates
>
> chiding me at university. In the words of the headmaster of Emmanuel
> City
> Technology College in Gateshead, the school at the centre of
> the recent
> creationism-teaching row in the UK: 'both creation and evolution
> are faith
> positions.'
>
> The postmodern movement of the past quarter century has promoted
> the idea
> that there is no such thing as truth; there is only interpretation.
> And
> curiously enough, to begin with, many postmodernists actually
> took
> inspiration from scientific developments. Initially influential
> was
> Heisenberg's principle, which stated that the more precisely
> one located the
> position of a particle, the less you could ascertain about its
> momentum (and
> vice versa). In addition was Albert Einstein's theory of relativity,
> which -
> it seemed - suggested that how one saw the cosmos depended upon
> the point
> from which one was looking.
>
> While Einstein seemed to give a nod to what anthropologists had
> long been
> arguing - that what is observed is fatally influenced by who
> is doing the
> observing - Heisenberg's principal was taken to mean that science
> itself was
> an imperfect discipline. Relativity suited the agenda of the
> relativists.
> Chaos theory (butterflies flapping their wings in Kansas, etc)
> and Benoit
> Mandelbrot's fractals became totems of a movement that sought
> to question
> the notion of a knowable universe. As Mandelbrot shows, the closer
> you go in
> on a map of Britain, the longer and more intricate becomes the
> coastline,
> until, at sub-atomic level, it becomes impossible. Ergo, the
> more science
> looks, the less it will find. Postmodernists take innocent scientific
>
> metaphors such as chaos, uncertainty and relativity at face value,
> as if to
> suggest that science is literally chaotic, uncertain, and subjective.
>
>
> Instrumental was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
>
> (1962), which forwarded the notion that science changes or advances
> not
> merely because of new discoveries, but when society itself changes.
>
> 'Feminist scientists' reached the conclusion that not only was
> science
> controlled by men - it was an intrinsically masculine enterprise.
> Quoting
> Francis Bacon's call to 'place Nature on the rack in order to
> force her to
> yield her secrets', they suggested that 'science' reflected a
> patriarchal
> need to dominate, categorise and penetrate. After Michel Foucault,
> it was
> declared that science was but a phallogocentric power game -
>
> 'phallogocentric' being postmodernism's way of saying that logic
> itself is a
> masculinist conspiracy.
>
> Of course, it was not proper scientists advocating as much, but
> academics
> and educationalists. A 1992 draft of the new National Science
> Standards in
> the USA announced that these standards would be 'based on the
> postmodernist
> view [that] questions the objectivity of observation and the
> truth of
> scientific knowledge'. Although these actual words were eventually
> dropped
> from the final 1996 draft, its ethos has been maintained in the
> form of
> 'standpoint epistemologies'.
>
> Multicultural scientists are championing creationism in the name
> of
> 'diversity'
> 'What makes a belief true', says a leading standpoint epistemologist,
> Trevor
> Pinch of Cornell University, 'is not its correspondence with
> an element of
> reality, but its adoption and authentications by the relevant
> community'
> (1). After all, 'many pictures can be painted, and...the sociologist
> of
> science cannot say that any picture is a better representation
> of Nature
> than any other'. In short, it does not matter what a scientist
> says, it
> matters what colour he is, or if he is a she.
>
> In the words of one 1999 journal article published in the USA
> for
> mathematics teachers, the reason why some Navajo schoolchildren
> were failing
> at the subject was that 'the Western world developed the notion
> of fractions
> and decimals out of need to divide or segment a whole. The Navajo
> world view
> consistently appears not to segment the whole of an entity'.
> Teachers of Nav
> ajo children were encouraged to deal with concepts more 'naturally
>
> compatible with Navajo spatial knowledge', such as 'non-Euclidean
> geometry,
> motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus' (2). Poor kids:
> calculus
> before fractions.
>
> In 1996, the 'International Study Group on Ethnomathematics'
> released a
> paper calling for the teaching of 'multicultural mathematics'
> in schools. It
> was nonsense, the paper suggested, to talk of some being 'good
> at maths' or
> some not. It ridiculed the 'so-called Pythagorean theorem' and
> called for a
> 'culturally responsive pedagogy'. By 1997, more than three quarters
> of
> teachers in the USA had implemented 'Ethnomathematic' guidelines.
>
>
> According to Meera Nanda, writing in Noretta Koertge's book A
> House Built on
> Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths About Science, Hindu nationalists
> in India
> have been appropriating multicultural science to proclaim 'local
> ways of
> knowing' - which means downgrading algebra (which is too Islamic
> or Western)
> and putting in its place 'Vedic mathematics': rule-of-thumb
> computational
>
> formulas derived from Sanskrit verses.
>
> Koertge had documented particularly how the quest for 'female-friendly
>
> science' has brought us down some peculiar avenues. In a 1996
> conference of
> the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she
> noted how one
> feminist explained why research into the mechanics of solids
> was undertaken
> at a far earlier stage than that of fluid dynamics. Men were
> more
> comfortable working with rigid environments which reflected their
> 'sex
> organs that protrude and become rigid', and were uneasy with
> fluidity
> itself, which reminded them too much of menstrual blood and vaginal
>
> secretions. 'In the same way that women are erased within masculinist
>
> theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids had
> been erased
> from science, existing only as not-solids', she explained.
>
> The academic left and the religious right are suspicious of reason
>
> Yet in America, home of both the 'multicultural scientists' and
>
> creationists, it is the latter which solicit the greatest outrage.
>
> Presumably, being Christian and mainly white, creationists represent
> in the
> multicultural mind two power groups that have held hegemony over
> the world.
> This view, however, fails to recognise that many Muslims are
> similarly
> creationists. During the recent Emmanuel College debate, A Majid
> Katme of
> Islamic Concern added his voice, to the effect that: 'There are
> clearly huge
> holes in the fossil records, and missing links in the theory.
> Only true
> sciences do fit with the divine teachings, no false ones or theories
> like
> Darwin theory.'
>
> The disturbing corollary of the antipathy directed only at white
> Christians
> is that the Left - both rational and multicultural - only seems
> to make
> noises when white children are being taught damaging falsehoods.
> When black
> or Asian children are taught palpable nonsense, are we meant
> to raise our
> hands and say, 'It's their culture'?
>
> Yet according to Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition:
> The
> Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science (1994), multicultural
> scientists
> are going so far as actually to champion creationism, all in
> the name of
> 'diversity'. One prominent advocate of multicultural science
> teaching in the
> USA has endorsed teaching creation myths in American classrooms,
> not merely
> Jewish and Christian versions, but 'many traditional Native American,
>
> African, and Eastern religions'.
>
> Perhaps this unholy alliance is not so surprising. The academic
> left and the
> religious right share many facets. They are suspicious of reason,
> hold to
> the notion that truth is dependent on the individual or group,
> and that
> culture-specific answers are equally if not more valid than universal
> ones
> based on evidence. They are both anti-modernists, distinguished
> only by
> their prefixes: one being 'pre-', the other 'post-'. Both groups
> deride
> those who 'believe' in evolution as intolerant, expressing a
> kind of liberal
> rationalist fundamentalism - that zoologist Richard Dawkins is
> a kind of
> modern-day Torquemada. Rationalism, they say, is not the anti-ideology
> it
> professes to be, but a doctrine of its own.
>
> This is unsupportable rhetoric. You show me an anti-logocentric
> philosopher
> or a bible-belt anti-scientist who has travelled by plane or
> been treated in
> hospital and I will show you a hypocrite. I can show you Christians
> who
> believe in evolution. Can creationists show me an atheist who
> believes in
> creationism?
>
> There is a tiny minority of non-religious creationists
> Well, in truth, there is a tiny minority of non-religious creationists.
> A
> group of ultra-sceptics call themselves adherents to 'Intelligent
> Design',
> while even a section of the neoconservative, libertarian right
> in America
> have questioned evolution, such as was seen in Robert Bork's
> Slouching
> Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Design, or Michael
> Behe's
> Darwin's Black Box.
>
> Neoconservatives, the multicultural left and the religious right
> all want to
> downgrade evolution because they have their own political agendas
> to
> pursue - respectively, because it is the cause of moral decline;
> it is
> Western and hegemonic; and it disagrees with a Protestant literal-minded
>
> interpretation of the Bible. They will say evolution, being a
> non-empirical
> branch of science, is mere 'theory'.
>
> Such sophistry would have great implications for geology, biology,
>
> archaeology, astrophysics and physics. We have never witnessed
> the shifting
> of continents, the birth of stars or the movements of subatomic
> particles.
> Does this mean these things have not happened? Anti-modernists
> don't so much
> say 'if a tree falls down in a forest and there's nobody there
> to hear it,
> does it make a noise?'. They pronounce: 'if a tree falls down
> in a forest
> and nobody sees it, then it has not fallen down.'
>
> Ultimately, postmodern scientists rest their ideas upon metaphors,
> not upon
> what actually happens in science. They assume that just because
> there is
> chaos theory, uncertainty and irrational numbers, that science
> is
> incomplete, chaotic, relativistic and irrational. As any practising
>
> scientist will tell you, this is simply not true.
>
> In one respect, after Kuhn, they do have a point. If science
> reflects the
> society from which it emanates, then 'postmodern science' reflects
> a wider
> cultural malaise: our desperate disenchantment with the values
> of the
> Enlightenment and the West's worrying descent into irrationalism
> and
> superstition.
>
> Anyhow, happy Easter. Here's to one man who is on record saying
> he believes
> in evolution: the Pope. How strange that many of those in charge
> of so many
> children's education do not.
>
>



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