Daily Dolt: Teh Stupid—IT BURNS!
This is equivalent to arguing because Fran is a moron who doesn’t understand logic or the scientific theory of evolution, believing in Christ makes you a moron.
The most basic problem with her argument is that she cannot distinguish between a positive and a normative argument. She seems to believe what one believes about the natural world should be based upon what one wants the world to be like.
Science is about making positive statements about the world–or describing the world as it is.
Normative statements are statements about how something should be based on certain principles.
Nothing Watson said on intelligence is demonstrated by the scientific literature. And, in fact, his statements are refuted by the literature just as Charles Murray’s claims are.
And history in the United States demonstrates the problem. His assumption of distinct populations that do not interbreed is simply false. African-Americans in the United States frequently, if not usually, have white ancestors. Even in the case of isolated tribes in Africa, there is significant genetic evidence that the populations of humans interbreed frequently and such genetic isolation does not exist in reality.
IOW, he’s a senile old man who is offensive.
That said, Eaton does not grasp the difference between science being a process of discovering the natural world and wanting the natural world to be the way someone would like it to be. Science is not in the business of creating a utopian society, it’s in the business of identifying the most parsimonious answer to why natural phenomenon occur.
The Intelligent Design canard feeds off just such ignorance. There is no testable theory of Intelligent Design and it isn’t science–it’s an attempt by ignorant people to insist the God of the Bible is really Zeus who routinely manipulates the natural world. Indeed, just this sort of claim led the Pope to recently compare creationists to pagans.
FInally, one doesn’t believe in evolution, one accepts the evidence for evolution. Again, there is this basic confusion over what science is and evolution only addresses how life on Earth has changed over time, not everything that might be called a ‘beginning.”
October 22nd, 2007 at
Because if there’s one thing that two thousand years of Christianity in Western Civilization have proved, it’s that accepting Jesus as your Savior means you can’t be racist.
I’m actually surprised that she’s not arguing that winning a Nobel prize is what leads to racism. Then she should start accusing Gore of being a racist.
October 22nd, 2007 at
Well, another “therefore, Socrates was a cat” argument from the Illinois Review crowd. Shock.
October 22nd, 2007 at
Narc,
Fran thinks only black churches are racist… or was it supremacists… or maybe it was just that they’re “ooky”… Remember?
October 23rd, 2007 at
[...] Again, turning to Arch, even the Pope — conservative as his German self is — claims that such creationist, evolution-denying folks are pagans. My own pastor growing up (I’m one of the frozen chosen, so Lutheran it’s pronounced Lute’rhin) always put the ars scientifica in laymen’s terms like this: God is omnipotent, yet He laid out knowledge for mankind to discover, each bit of understanding coming in its own time. [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at
Arch – this has been a right wing narrative for some time. I remember seeing, a coupla years ago, a series of “christian” comic books, defending the faith from the evils of Harry Potter and Evolution, and other things.
The books were very stylized, and looked (on the surface) like high end stuff (the had entire comics on the internet for reviewing), but the writing was awful.
Anyway, the evolution edition painted that very idea, that evolution = racism. The book makes the assertion that since evolution says that humans started in Africa, and then moved out of Africa, that by turning various other shades of brown and ultimately white (depending on what part of the world you were in), that blacks were less evolved. And that was racist. The comic was asserting that was the viewpoint of evolutionists, and that the “christian” who wrote the garbage wasn’t the racist.
Never you mind facts, when convoluted truthiness will do. (and calling it truthiness is even a stretch)