They have to be in the business of marketing because people fundamentally do not want their policies to be implemented. If there were an honest debate in this country about what direction to take with both sides laying out the consequences of their beliefs, the Republicans would never win another election.

I watched Nova also last night and agree with you that it was an excellent portrayal of the Dover court case.

Agree also that the right wing agenda continues on funded by wealth and well-meaning. but ignorant people. These are not stupid people, but they are driven by belief instead of rational thought. We, on the left, have our sacred cows, too, make no mistake, but on the right there is a different mentality. I'm thinking of John Dean's book "Conservatives Without Conscience" in which he makes the case that right wingers simply have an authoritarian brain that makes them susceptible to irrational belief in authority. Left wingers ask more questions. The issue for the left is how to effectively and powerfully refute the right wing agenda as the Dover case did. It took money and expertise. The right wing has just got the money, but not the expertise. If we can match the think tank money we'll win every time because right wing arguments, when exposed to sunlight, evaporate.

Yes, if you buy only one book this year, buy this one too.

"The right wing has just got the money"
Not according to wingnuts who think George Soros is funding everything they don't like.

Just as an aside, it's interesting that people like Pat Robertson always think their god sends disasters to punish people - it never occurs to them that their god might send those disasters to teach them pity and compassion for others.

Ideas and I-Deists...

A scientist endeavors to know how things happen.

An I-Deist is sure they know why things happen - they happen because (insert dogmatic explanation here).

Ironically, the I-Deists are living proof that evolution creates the branches described in the Nova documentary - they belong to the branch of humans that didn't acquire the gene necessary to separate fact from fiction.

Where on earth do you get the idea that the right wing agenda is funded by well-meaning people? Would that have something to do with the burning of the poster, the death threats the judge has had thrown at him, the vitriol hurled at anyone that doesn't toe their line? Sure the uber-rich, the extremely privileged, the wealthy funders probably haven't got their hands dirty directly with any of those activities, but if they are the least bit well-meaning shouldn't they actively work to counter such activities their financial support has precipitated?

What is sadly lacking in this discussion is any reference to nature of the right wing agenda. This effort to nurture ignorance and superstition is part of a broad attack on any perceived threat to their positions of privilege and status. Hardly well-meaning.

snicker...

Of course the red flag immediately went up when the 'creationists' pushed to have their belief included in the science curriculum. Afterall, they could have simply pushed an elective, 'World Religions' to be included in the high-school curriculum - raising no red flag but also not accomplishing their mission. And that's the give-away.

The liberal offers to validate your identity. The conservative insists that you adopt his identity.

Nice of Pat Robertson to uphold the judge's verdict so succinctly.

Do yourself a favor; watch Nova's Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.

The truth just might set you free.

Agreed...outstanding documentary.  I had a feeling of dred:  I remembered reading a book years ago that was old enough to have been one of the books Abe Lincoln read by firelight in his log cabin.  Preadamites - the idea was that all the races except the white race was the results of God's earlier failed experiments in cloning his image.  I just thought that Intelligent Design could lead-up to that kind of belief (again). 

I am surprised that NOVA missed out the fact that Haughton Publishing Company, Mesquite, Tx, a printer which normally publishes agricultural material, was hired to print the Panda book.  Haughton is also known as Horticultural Printers, Inc.  The book's copyrite is owned by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), of Richardson, Tx. FTE's articles of incorporation describe its purpose as:

"The purposes for which the corporation is formed are, 1) the primary purpose is both religious and educational, which includes, but is not limited to, proclaiming, publishing, preaching, teaching, promoting, broadcasting, disseminating, and otherwise making known the Christian gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of our day."

Obviously, the issue of think-tank vanity press is outside the scope of NOVA's documentary on Dover.  Or is it?  This process, which I believe began in the sanctum santorium of Reagan's New Right, should get a lot of press so that people generally can learn to distinguish between legitimate academic publishing and political propaganda.  FTE paid Houghton Publishing to print Pandas, and I wonder if it paid more to have Houghton to use its name to assist in the subtrefuge.  It's The Bell Curve all over again.  

We need to keep an eye on the lawsuit against Regnery/Eagle filed by some of its authors.  Eagle gives the propaganda away, or markets it at deep discounts via subsideries like the Conservative Book Club and so on, thus denying substantial royalties to its authors.  (Conservative Book Club was selling an Anthrax Coulter missive for $0.00 recently.)  So maybe "Greed is Good" after all; greedy authors may not bring Regnery to his knees, but we will undoubted learn more about propaganda marketing.

Neoboho

This is an excellent illustration as to why progressives have been losing many of these battles in the last few decades, the most important being the battle over the size and scope of government and the level of taxation needed to fund it.  Simply put, liberals are more interested in being right, while conservatives are more interested in winning.  That is to say, in general liberals behave like high school debaters, marshalling facts and evidence to put forth a coherent position.  Conservatives behave like marketing professionals, searching for a branding strategy, a communication strategy and a positioning strategy that is designed to hit emotional buttons and get people to react viscerally.  If it doesn't make any sense upon closer inspection, they don't worry about it.  In almost all policy debates, the party that reach the public on an emotional, visceral level is the one that has the advantage.

Science, by its very nature, does not lend itself well to a marketing-oriented political strategy.  Answers are often not clear-cut, there are often multiple "camps" with competing theories and many of the arguments are technical and complicated and over the heads of most of the public.

Until liberals figure out how to think like marketers and less like debaters, they will always be at a disadvantage.  Doing so need not sacrifice integrity or principle.  It just means figuring out what to emphasize and what language to use.  It's time liberals got over their reflexive distaste for this kind of thinking.

Three questions for the Evangelicals and Intelligent Design crowd:

If I walked the earth on a journey of discovery, stopping to examine rocks, plants, animals, people, fossils, would my discoveries prove what I read in Origin of Species or The Bible?

Where is your tangible proof of anything written in the Bible?

If Evolution is just a "theory", what is the Bible?

What would you call President Cheney?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Mgmax,

Perhaps if you could elucidate your argument in plain English, we could engage in an interesting discussion.

But since you seem to want to talk about the voucher idea generally, it is indeed another example in which the right has pushed something for years even in the absence of empirical evidence demonstrating that it improves student performance. Milton Friedman argued for vouchers from 1955 until his death by saying that marketizing schools would lead to innovation and improved outcomes -- without ever using any actual real-world evidence to support those claims. "Researchers" funded by the right's think tanks issued reports that seemed to show improved test scores where vouchers have been tried, only to have those findings discredited by other scholars. The analogy between the marketing of intelligent design and vouchers holds just as strongly as it does for Social Security privatization.

--Greg

I think it's called double talk.

> Could you define "naturalism"
> and "ideology"?

I'm sure Webster's does so just fine. I am using the words in the normal way.

> Which ideologies do or do not have
> experimental evidence supporting them, or
> is that necessary?

All ideologies have compelling evidence --- to the believer in that ideology. They don't usually have sufficient evidence to sway someone who doesn't already believe in that ideology.

What would you call President Cheney?

Unfortunately the TPM Cafe ratings system doesn't have a category for "bust my gut laughing" so I had to settle for giving this a "5".

-Dave Adams-

Notice I gave "5" ratings to both of the above (diametrically opposed) postings. Not only are they both excellent, but oddly, I agree with both. This, I believe, is the central problem facing progressives today: do we continue to lose ground to conservative platforms that are sold to the marketplace of voters by deceptive and disingenuous means, simply because we value truth? Or do we employ our own deceptive and disingenuous means to advance our own (truly better) social platforms?

Conservatives continue to naively hold to their theory that supply-side economics is a panacea for all social ills, despite clear evidence to the contrary. And Liberals continue to naively hold to our theory that in the marketplace of ideas, the truth will win out--despite clear evidence to the contrary. But at the end of the day, are we more committed to that ideal, or to our social platforms?

I don't have answers.

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." -A. Lincoln

-Dave Adams-

I don't believe the TV has any magical ability to compel you to do anything.

If your beliefs can only survive through ignorance of conflicting beliefs, then your beliefs are likely not valid.

Naturalism is an ideology.

Very clever, pal! Yes, I suppose in the last great analysis, putting our faith in cause-and-effect, and that we can discern both causes and effects and that by using these causes and effects and our conclusions from them, we can better our lot, is, in a sort of a way, a venture of faith. After all, we could end up blowing ourselves up! Or what if we only made God mad by doing all this stuff? What if we were finding out stuff that He didn't want us to?
Gosh, now I think about it, just getting up in the morning and thinking you won't be hit by a giant uncharted meteorite crashing into your house requires an ideology, too.
Reality is not an ideology, pal. Well, maybe for the insane.

"The liberal offers to validate your identity. The conservative insists that you adopt his identity."

That's what I'm saying! Well said, sister. And their insistence on the validity of only their divisions and definitions is experienced as negation by us.

This was all dealt with in Wayne's World I, by the way: "You label me, you negate me." Was that Schopenhauer, or Dick Van Patten?

Like this blog, right? I agree with you, but only to an extent.

I went to college back when we rented IBM Selectrics in the basement of the library to type our papers. As you can see from this very post, I'm taking your advice to heart already.

But why should we give over to the market those things we hold most dear? I don't think the market is the model we want for everything under the sun.

Effective communication, yes! Selling the stuff of which our humanity is made, HELL NO!

Would you agree? Have I construed you correctly?

Turns out, there's another option Lincoln didn't consider:

"You can fool most of the people most of the time."

The right is very good at this. It means, most of the time they'll win.

I don't like those odds.

I hate to say it, but Ahmanson is a good excuse for a hefty estate tax. His wealth is inherited, and it is fairly clear from his history that he's a flake.

What's your definition of an ideology?

What's the Oxford Dictionary definition of nature? If you look, you'll see that nature is defined as excluding humans and our activity.

If separating man from nature, if defining us right out of the natural world, doesn't betray an ideology to you, nothing will.

Science sneaks in, under the cloak of logical positivism and rationalism (which only means 'one thing compared to another'), the philosophy of absolute dualism and Newton's (strike that, I meant Descartes--all these dead white men look the same to me) Descartes's assumption, that we can think of the cosmos as a machine.

Are you a machine? Are you apart from nature? Then why do we think of nature as a machine? Naturalism separates humanity from nature and studies us both as if we were machines. It is indeed a belief system, often espoused with all the fervor of any other ideology.

The notion of the absolutely impartial and objective observer has been shown to be fallacious. If there is a line or region absolutely separating the observer from the observed, presumably it has physical properties. So where is this line, of what is it made, how does it function?

There is no such line. We've gone from treating the universe AS IF it were a machine to believing it to be so. If that isn't an ideology, my friend, what is?

LOL John.

Apparently niether does this administration. Nothing regardarding our troops in Iraq can even remotely be called Intelligent or Designed.

Not an engineer, but a lawyer. And as a lawyer, I've learned (to my chagrin) that having science and truth on your side does not equate to winning your case. Flashiness and emotion take you a lot farther.

Perhaps you are right that this is a false choice. But I'm becoming convinced that Steven Colbert is right: people prefer "truthiness" to "truth." They prefer to make decisions from their guts. They don't care about facts, and as long as democrats continue to rely on facts, democrats will lose. On the other hand, I think that democrats can advance great social platforms if they throw truth out the window and give 'em the old razzle dazzle.

I disagree. But I think we are confusing our terms.

Science is a field of human endeavor, like Art, Politics, and the Clergy. Obviously, we have a hard time telling them apart. Science is ideological.

Science, in general, does indeed have underpinning philosophical assumptions, most notably Descartes's assumption, that we may study the universe as a machine, and study other organisms as automata.

The Scientific Method, on the other hand, is used to test hypotheses. In its application, we seek the simplest obtainable and verifiable explanation of events.

It's interesting to see that the role that Science plays on the Left is similar to the role God plays on the Right. We on the Left claim for our Science perfect impartiality.

Both Science and Religion have a common source: the human mind. I find it impossible to understand where we on the Left think Science comes from. Do we have a bunch of Vulcans hidden somewhere that come up with perfectly unbiased observations, theories, etc?

Besides the obvious fact, that Science is a fallible product of human minds, there's an even bigger criticism of it: Science doesn't know everything. How beautiful was the sunrise this morning! How dear to us our Beloved! These are not questions, they are unqualified affirmations, whereas the language of science is the declarative sentence.

First thing a scientist does is, deny his or her continuity with the observed. That's an unfounded assumption right there, and we haven't even opened our eyes.

The moment we disconnect our emotions from our intellects, all atrocities become possible. After we neglect our common humanity, the Other is just a thing. How can engineers in government labs make weapons no human in his right mind would use? They worship too fervently at the altar of Science.

Science fulfills for the Left the role of Bigger Brother, the one who can kick your ass for disagreeing with me, that God fulfills for my friends on the Right.

Will we ever get beyond our primate inheritance? Just because we ARE apes doesn't mean we have to argue like the rest of them.

Both Left and Right claim non-human authorship for their books, you know. We on the Left call ours 'textbooks.'

doesn't it happen on both sides? religions had their crusades and scientists designed the mother of all bombs.

scientists, these days, claim that "we'll go to hell" if global warming isn't fixed yet scientists, themselves, don't have a very clear idea of how the earth can sustain the current populations and human behaviors.

because of the stupidty of science, I've actually become more religous because one has to have faith that the world will hold together.

science gave us coal fired power plants, the internal combustion engine, nuclear waste, etc...

and, when people gripe, we're told: "have faith, science is self correcting..."

To boldly go...

Republicans know the general public is a mile wide and an inch deep, and this is what they successfully use to get their way.

Democrats see the general public as theoretical physicists and they address them as such, ergo, Kerry loses to Bush.

Why do you consider "naturalism" a current and relevant term?

If you're asking me, I don't. It's a topic of discussion on this thread, so I discuss. Scientific naturalism is as up-to-date as penny-farthing bicycles. See my other comments on this thread.

I'm taking the definition from a talk given by Swiss anthropologist Jeremy Narby. You can find it at http www bioneers org
_____________
Intelligence In Nature: Coming Full Circle

What do octopuses, bees, plants and slime molds have in common with human beings? For one thing, they exhibit the ability to solve problems and make decisions. Radio Series VII, part 13 with anthropologist Jeremy Narby
_____________

And you can listen to it at the best radio station in the world, KEXP ORG. Look for the public affairs program, Mind Over Matters, Sunday 11 Nov 07 6AM, in the streaming archive.

Then let's discuss, shall we? Or do you just want to dismiss all my terms and arguments out of hand?

Here's a good question for you: Are you and I 2 things? Are we 1 thing? Both? Or neither?

I agree with this post absolutely. Thank you for saying what I was thinking as soon as I read this, but in more cogent terms than I was thinking.

knowbuddhau,

Scientists aren't infallible, and using the scientific method doesn't guarantee truth. We on the Left violate our own principles when we try to use big-S science in the same way the Right uses god.

If you had watched the Nova special on this issue, you would realize that nobody -- including scientists -- are claiming infallibility or that the scientific method guarantees truth. Quite the opposite.

And I would never say, and don't believe that conservatives are wrong about everything. On some economic issues, I agree with them.

What I object to, is their insistence that they CANNOT be wrong regardless of the facts and the twisting of any evidence that comes up to fit their pre-existing ideas.

And I admit that I, and I would agree, all liberals are quite capable of being just as stubborn. We are after all human. But we don't hold an unwillingness to consider the possibility that we're wrong up as a virtue.

They do.

They don't care about facts, and as long as democrats continue to rely on facts, democrats will lose. On the other hand, I think that democrats can advance great social platforms if they throw truth out the window and give 'em the old razzle dazzle.

I don't agree with this.  People care about facts.  And it is the height of arrogance to assume that Democrats have a monopoly on the facts.  A more realistic way of looking at political debate is to say that both liberalism and conservatism contain both truth and myth.  Both creeds are the product of human beings and their philosophies.  Conservatism would not have got as far as it did if it were not able to marshall facts to bolster its case. 

Furthermore, I believe it is also incorrect to say that people prefer to make decisions from their gut.  Actually, people make decisions in all sorts of ways and different people approach decisions differently.  But everyone, like it or not, uses their gut to make decisions to some degree.  My point is simply that Democrats generally don't pay enough attention to that in their communication and positioning strategy.  Saying this should not imply that the way to win is to throw out facts and just do a lot of glitzy spin.

I dispute your claim that science and religion are incommensurable, unless (as in the example you provide) the realm of religion is relegated to mythology. I'll grant you that mythology has great psychological importance for human beings, but the "truths" of mythology are not properly understood as truths of the physical world.

My problem--and I think, all our problems--stem from those who misapprehend that religious/mythological truths are truths about the physical world. Literalists, if you will. Literalists are driving the conflict between science and religion, because the "physical truths" that stem from their religious beliefs simply are not compatible with other observations of the physical world. It's not that literalists' beliefs can't be disproved; it's that their beliefs are constantly disproved, yet they refuse to jettison them. Literalists find themselves perpetually in a position of having to believe mutually incompatible things.

Scientists aren't infallible, it's true. But the defining hallmark between scientists and literalists is that scientists realize this about themselves. Scientists (and by this, I include most people, except for literalists) recognize that when their observations of the world conflict with their beliefs, their beliefs must change. Literalists have somehow managed to become comfortable holding beliefs that are continually contradicted by their own observations.

I sympathize with your revulsion to the concept. But if it is true, we may have a moral obligation to play dirty. We may get farther with "The book of Leviticus commands us to keep the earth cool" than with "All available scientific evidence confirms that industrialized human behaviors will render the planet too hot to inhabit in just 100 years."

Any belief is just as valid as any other; that is, invalid.

I'm sorry, I disagree with respect to scientists' attitudes towards their subjects. I think that what you say used to be true: that scientists failed to understand the ways in which they played a role in the very experiments they were conducting. But scientists have "scientifically discovered" that very role, and no where more importantly than in the world of physics. The twentieth century development of both quantum mechanics and the Theory of Relativity were a watershed moment in breaking down the illusion that the scientist is an impartial and disinterested observer. The science of ecology has also revealed the way in which our actions impact whole ecosystems.

This is one of the great qualities of science: the ability to break down people's preconceptions. It is because of science that people no longer think that the earth is at the center of the universe. It is because of science that people no longer think that the earth revolves around the sun. It is because of science that people now realize that our planet is only one of billions in this universe. And it is because of science that we now know (and will one day internalize) that we are an inseparable and interconnected part of a universal whole.

Whoa, that's a bunch of really heavy questions, dude. I'm going to think real hard about those as soon as I take another hit.

Where the approaches to the all these subjects are like religion is that in all cases, the right starts by saying that such and such is true, now how do we use the evidence to prove it.

How, precisely, does this apply to the Social Security debate in which Democrats insist that the projections of every government agency involved aren't true, and nothing needs to be done?

Don't bogart that joint, my friend.

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins

BradTD, Sit down!  I am agreeing with every word you say, and I want to jump in here because I think what is turning some people off is the idea that in order to get truth out about Progressive, or even plain old truthful ideas, your message is to manipulate and use simplistic terms that the far right uses to win their sheep  base over.

If I understand you, you are just making the point that we could package our message more effectively without compromising our ideals.  I agree with that.  It would require an entirely new thought process, which is never easy or fast, but it is necessary.  I see a little bit of it in some ads that tout -- "Progressive and Proud of It" in which  progressive programs which are popular and accepted (ie Social Security, State Parks, etc) are mentioned along with the point that conservatives fought against them tooth and nail.

The problem is fundamental, though: 

Democrats in Congress voted to condemn Move-On.ORG for saying something they had every right to say, and I was sickened. 

Republicans said "Get over it," in response to Rush Limbaugh's outright lies about the family that went to bat for SCHIP.  Democrats INSISTED on at least an apology.   Instead they got the finger. 

Who won?  Not the Democrats; they condemned one of their own and looked like saps and the spineless poll-driven pawns they were.  The republicans were heros to their base.

Yes, Brad, there is much work to do, and packaging has much to do with it, but worrying about what everyone else will think didn't work in high school and it won't work in politics.  We need to grow up and act like professionals.

Jan

Just so there is no ambiguity through thread drift, would you mind stating, explicitly, the subject about which everyone is so totally ignorant? It appears that there are people on all sides, so that appears a bit paradoxical.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Republicans gave up on direct confrontation after the 1964 Goldwater debacle.

The Social Security gambit that Greg describes is an apt parallel to the ID scam.

Conservatives, the more extreme among them (hard to find anything but these days), object ideologically to the existence of public schools. It would be catstrophic to run for office on a platform that promises to abolish public schools -so the scam is to introduce school vouchers, draining funding from public schools until they're gone.

Likewise supply side economics that cuts taxes on the wealthy, starves the treasury of funds and therefore defunds and eliminates various regulatory agencies and social programs that conservatives also oppose ideologically. They can't get elected to public office if the platform honestly states the real purpose.

There are many other examples but another twist is the privatization schemes. Moving traditional government services that conservatives oppose out of the public sphere and into contractural arrangements with priivate firms. This subjects the service provided to decline and (the real goal) public dissatisfaction and elimination. An insiduous part of privatization is directing taxpayer money into the pockets of political supporters.

Dishonesty and corruption are hallmarks of the 'Conservative Movement' in this country.

The whole Conservative Movement is based on fantasy and wishful thinking, inherently dishonest and corrupt.

I just purchased "The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing" and am looking forward to reading it.

Wait a minute there Mgmax, Democrats use government agency projections in their assessments. It's the Republicans who ignore the projections.

Democrats aren't saying that nothing needs to be done. They're saying (or not saying, depending on how you look at it) that nothing needs to be done NOW.

If you knew anything about the state of Social Security's fiscal position you would absolutely agree that nothing should be done NOW. In fact it's imperative that nothing be done NOW.

The operative phrase here is NOW.

You really got to wonder just who Robertson's God is. Nasty sounding fellow.

Philosophy has never been a lucrative, career, ditto religion (unless you found a new one). Science is also not the route to riches, as long as one wants to do research or theory.

A similar amount of truth stretching? Cosmology stretches, but that's about it. Reliigion has nothing but "revealed"truth, as opposed to data. So there is no symmetry.

It's like saying communism is the alternative to economics. There are beliefs, and there are fields of study. Those who study can have beliefs, and all of us do, but the belief is not the study.

randyb,

your post has no substance, its completely vacuous.

That's a straw man argument. And it is one of the reasons so many liberals have lost in so many venues. If one describes the extreme it does not mean that one views the world as binary.

I often wonder why people tend to bring up this whole "us versus them" canard whenever they address a response that describes an extreme. It's similar to the "conspiracy" buggaboo. There are plenty of conspiracies about, unfortunately few people can distinguish between a realization of common interests and a real conspiracy.

You said:

The nemesis of rational thought is the infamous Us Good\Them Bad false dichotomy. Look at our history. Look at your own habits of speech.

Yes, the Repubs are our opponents, but let's not demonize them overmuch. If we make of them our mortal enemies, how are we supposed to live with them as neighbors after we win?

What habits of speech of mine are you referring to? How have I demonized them? I don't think I've referred to any demons, supernatural capabilities, evil versus good or anything like that. What have I said the makes them anyone's mortal enemies? Was it when I referred to their extremely privileged position? Maybe you are concerned about my call for them to reign in some of the more virulent actors they have encouraged. Perhaps you have gotten so excited by my mentioning their tendency to nurture ignorance and superstition. 

Oh, and what have I said that in any way is hateful? By simply describing a group as not well meaning am I hateful? That's quite the straw man you've concocted in your rebuttal, but he's your straw man, and it's a wonder to me where he came from. 

Not passing it on after a puff.

Derivation not known to me.

Reece,

If there were an honest debate in this country about what direction to take with both sides laying out the consequences of their beliefs, the Republicans would never win another election.

Absolutely.  And this is precisely why our punditocracy pounces so passionately on any idea of rolling back media deregulation, from reinstituting the equal time provision of the Fairness Doctrine to limiting corporate media conglomeration -- on the rare occasions when the issue is even raised and discussed at all.  I submit that it will remain futile for liberal arguments to get any fair hearing in our public discourse when the communications industry remains more responsible to the shareholders of its parent companies than to the broader public interest. 

Forget terrorism, immigration, drugs, etc.  The war that conservatives are most deeply passionate about fighting is the war on the public sphere; and they have won some pivotal battles toward privatizing public lands, public health, public education, public airwaves -- even our military is increasingly dependent upon private security contractors like CACI International, Custer Battles LLC, and Blackwater USA.

But we don't hold an unwillingness to consider the possibility that we're wrong up as a virtue.

This may be the most frightening thing I see with Bush, his seeming confidence that he can't be wrong.

Tom Wright,

thanks.

One thing from the NOVA program that struck me: the idea of "irreducible complexity", the concept that an organ or organism is so complex that it couldn't have arisen except through a higher intelligence creating it. This reminds me of people in the early 20th century saying that it was impossible for a man to reach the moon; the fact that they couldn't imagine HOW it could be done means that it therefore COULDN'T be done. This is exactly the same thing with irreducible complexity, the ID folks see something they can't figure out, so they get intellectually lazy and just say "God did it."

Also, if the Judge had instead ruled in favor of intelligent design, would he still have received death threats? I don't know, but I suspect not. So. . . who are the REAL Christians here? The ones making death threats?

Easy Rider features the Fraternity of Man's "Don't Bogart Me," but the songwriter likely picked it up from somewhere.  It's the stuff of folklore.

You remind me of [Arthur C.]Clarke's Second Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." One of my interests is alternate-history science fiction, judged from a technology standpoint: at what point could a society build the tools to build the tools to build the tools to build the advanced technology?

Visiting Colonial Williamsburg, I had a chance to chat with a coppersmith, who was willing to get enough out of character that we were able to discuss if he, for example, could make the wire for generators and radio equipment. He showed that it would be fairly straightforward; the biggest challenge would be insulation. Nevertheless, we agreed that a modest radio communications system, using some early designs and some modern twists, could have been built in the 17th century -- if someone knew how. No computers. Limited electrical lighting, probably arc rather than filament. No vacuum tubes at first, although trial and error could get there -- but a little historical accident shows that a crystal radio receiver could be improved into something with a large-sized version of a point-contact transistor.

In some respects, time travel makes as much sense as intelligent design. Your example is a good one.

If the Black Death was indeed plague (i.e., caused by Yersinia pestis), one of the first things would be to stop blaming cats and even executing them as demonic, when they were one of the safeguards against the rats that carried the flea that carried the bacterium. Again, knowledge is power.

One of the reasons I like the theology of Teilhard du Chardin is that he sees evolution as necessary to a divine plan; he argues that the idea of man being made in the image of God means that the plan is for man to become Godlike. Coming back to Clarke's Second Law, think about how relatively few years one would have to go before current technology seems Godlike.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Howard,

hahhahahaha :-)

I've thought more than once that an interesting project would be to assemble all that old knowledge that is not dependent on an existing industrial economy. Like how would you make glass from scratch? Add the knowledge of how to find natural abrasives, and you can make a serious telescope, or a microscope, and the route to precision manufacture is open, as well as microbiology. The ancient Greeks could have looked for their atoms. They wouldn't have found them, but they could have made Newtonian scopes and learned what planets are, with the automatically precise Foucault test. (If someone had told them how.)

Techniques for food preservation, like making cheese and yogurt, or drying meat, as well as tanning leather and spinning thread, would be good to include. Any truly distant colony would have to include some primitive but effective settlement skills. 

Robert Forward had some fun with Clarke's 2nd, in a book named "Indistinguishable from Magic".

actually, the "the Earth can't sustain its current number of inhabitants" argument is not at all scientific, and was in fact debunked scientifically. quite a while ago.

Folklore?  More like pop culture (maybe there's no longer a difference.)  But Bogart's early film trademark was the constant cigarette hang on his lip.  But originally, on the steets, "Bogart" refered to his tough-guy personna.  "heavy handed" might be a good translation.  But don't forget that Fraternity of Man was a spin-off of the Mother's of Invention, and Zappa produced FoM.  That brings us full circle back to the topic of this blog: by definition, the Mothers of Invention were creationists, no?

Neoboho

I note early civilizations polished gems, and therefore had a source of rouge or similar.

The technique for making mirrors yields a sphere easily and a paraboloid with tweaking to a known target. In order to cast one would need the precision shape first. Earliest reflecting scopes were metal, and the silvering is another chemistry that wasn't considered at first with metal, but was necessary for a front-surface glass mirror.

Tint would not matter for reflecting scopes.

No. Our dreams are interpretations of all sorts of stimuli that jump and run in our brains when we sleep. The way to remember a dream is to sit up in your bed when you wake up and it will come to you (much of the time.) But you have to ask yourself what is happening during this exercise. "Remembering" is rationalizing all that stimuli into a dream narrative - and the enormous popularity of mythology in culture just happens to provide a model for this rationalization. All that stimuli is rendered into language, the tool of thought.

By what measure can we assume that a child before the acquisition of language dreams myths? Do our kids tell us about it, even though they have not learned to speak? Womb with a view indeed. The king of pretention, Salvador Dali, claimed to have intrautirine memories. But they turned out to be fried eggs (which he used in his alphabet of imagery often). He even "scienced it out", and wrote what he remembered was the product of "phosphene phenomena." Press your thumbs on you eyes, viola! You have your eggs, sunny side up.

Carl Jung believed that so-called "primitive man" existed in a "twilight state of conciousness" in some sort of a dream-world empowered by myth. Both Levi-Bruhl and Levi-Strauss challenged this notion convinciningly, demonstrating that "primitive" people think no differently that civilized. In "The Savage Mind" by Levi-Strauss, the first two chapters are titled "The Science of the Concrete," and show with numerous examples of clear and fully conscious thinking skills - many of which see to out do our own, as a matter of fact. For example, the Igorot in the street has a vocabulary that includes at least 125 terms representing parts of plants. How many do you have? I think I tried it out once and came up with around 35 - leaf, stem, branch, root, cotyledon, pistil, stamen, meristem, flower, seed and so on.

Myth is always a lie. It tells us things that we already know while hiding the fact from us that we already know the message. Advertising, probably the most profound manifestation of myth today, has only one simple message: this product is good. The advertising industry discovered this maybe 30 years ago. They no longer needed to say it, as anyone who was participating in advertising, without think at all, understood the embedded message that the product was good. The focus of advertising shifted then, to augment the message with desiring structures. You don't have to say that a bottle of Corona beer is good, you only need to show it in association with a vacation in Cancun.

The big problem I see with Campbell's work is that it focuses on the similarities between forms while ignoring the differences. This gets you into the "like begets like" fallacy, which only points out that something resembles something else regardless of any historical or cultural connection. Take the mythology of the twins, for example. It crops up all over the world, and suggests some sort of universal idea. But, as Claude Levi-Strauss discovered, the Twins myth in the Americas is profoundly different that other twins myths: in the Western hemisplhere the twins are always cooperative, while in the Eastern hemisphere they are always competitive. I think that's very profound, and the difference changes any possible meaning of each radically.

Neoboho

This probably should be a not especially political blog article. Hmmmm...now you have me trying to remember the technique of silvering a front-surface mirror, without looking it up. My vague recollection is that there was a danger of the solution exploding, so my guess is that it potentially could go to silver fulminate (silver salt, nitric acid, ethanol). I'm also vaguely remembering doing something with ammonium hydroxide.

I'd be much better at the pharmacology, medicine, and perhaps chemical engineering, as well as weapons systems--including command & control.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

A friend has polished and silvered his own mirrors, and fulminate sounds right as the risk. But it was common until high-temp ovens allowed vapor depositing aluminum.

But consider the explosive (sorry) knowledge advance that would have resulted from combining practical math from Egypt, theoretical from Greece, and precision measurement of terrestrial and astronomical phenomena.

Instead we had the stolid engineers and politicians of Rome.

if one were in a spaceship traveling at light speed and away from earth and one wished to send a message back to Earth and expecting an answer, the first thing one would have to do is either stop the ship...
If I understand my Einstein correctly, this is not the case.

I will ignore the impossibility of travel at the speed of light.
There seems to be some dispute about whether it may be possible to travel faster than light, but all the experts seem to agree that travel at lightspeed is theoretically impossible.

The speed of light -- and thus radio waves -- is a constant relative to an object or person regardless of speed. So the signal coming back at you would be overtaking your craft at the speed of light regardless of your speed.

I'm a dilettante in this field. Real physicists, please remark.

God struck down those Operation Blessing planes of Pat Robertson flying that diamond mining equipment into Africa, He has His vengeance on sinners!

Most Republicans and TV Preachers are in it purely for personal gain. Their mission is to shake down their clueless 'base' for every dime they are worth.  George Dubya has done as much in spades, draining the US Treasury and sending many of his supporters to their deaths in botched wars based on his own lies.

"This is exactly the same thing with irreducible complexity, the ID folks see something they can't figure out, so they get intellectually lazy and just say "God did it.""

If not G_d, Bill Clinton.

I do think that's actually the most sensible answer, in a figurative way. Like the way one can't pin down the first member of a new species, or the dividing line between self-aware consciousness (us, theoretically) and lower animals, there might be a lot of existential real estate between the Void and Reality.

Tom Wright said:

The really fun question is Who Made God?

Nah, the really fun question is; What did God do with his time before he created the Universe?

I wonder if Hawking believes in an entity that can, by will alone, change the shape of the planet from a globe to a cube.

To paraphrase someone;

We're all atheists to the gods of the past; Zeus, Ra, Odin, Jupiter, etc., some of us have simply taken the myth one god further.

Thanks for the great discussion, gang. Nice to hang out with people who don't take typos personally.

My last thought is, while you are reading these words, what are you hearing? Are you focusing only on the line, on the spurious divisions that arise whenever we impose organization in order to discuss the essentially ineffable?

Do you see only the words, and not the unifying field in which we stand, united in our sovereignty, just exactly as these words right here are standing in this field right now?

Beware your own mind's most intimate nemesis: the "Us Good/Them Bad false dichotomy imposed by binary thinking.

out of the intimate
post-partum We stand; divided, We fall back
into the infinite

dp

Haven't you heard? Science is a magic method, it produces Truth, with a capital T. Listen to the qualities attributed to scientific information by we on the left, and you'd hear us talking as if humans had nothing to do with denying subjectivity to animals (Francis Bacon, 16th century); turning animals into machines, mere automatons, on which we experiment to this day, their obvious torment notwithstanding (Descartes); conceiving of atoms as billiard balls in absolutely empty space (Newton). Conflating atoms and egos has been our worst mistake.

Robert Oppenheimer, in a 1955 APA address, warned psychologists not to base our concept of the ego on an outdated physics (Newtonian mechanics has been replaced, have you heard?), but we did it anyway.

Who comes up with what ideas? The power of myth is that it shapes the cosmos in which we act. What mythological cosmos do they believe in? For that matter, can you answer Jung's most important question: by what myth do you live?

We're f*ed up in the head. On the Hubble site, you can read captions that talk about the universe in mechanical terms, and also in organic terms in the same paragraph. A "conveyor belt" assembles ingredients in a "star factory," and yet stars are "born," stars have "lifespans," etc.

So which are we? WE are organic beings who mistake themselves for machines.

Science removes humans from nature, turns nature into a machine by assumption, then confirms its own assumption.

I love science, I'm a research psychologist, but I am not a machine.

We're arguing about a false choice. And damn few people understand the difference between religion, the socio-political operationalization of a myth, with the myth itself.

Science has a creation myth: the Big Bang. In what environament did it occur? What preceded it?

Beware the nemesis of the "Us Good/Them Bad" false dichotomy.

Perhaps slightly related, St. Augustine of Hippo is said to have asked what God was doing before creating the heavens and the earth.

"Creating a Hell for those with the impudence to ask such questions."

While Augustine made many legitimate contributions, he never struck me as the social type. Thomas Aquinas, however, would probably be a great coffeehouse conversationalist, and Francis of Assisi would probably share a beer in the barn.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Howard,

I thought God's answer was;

"Playing Solitaire for eons, and eons, and eons, and eons......"

You didn't answer my question, which is: "which textbooks claim non-human authorship?". Your homily on false dichotomies looks like an attempt to change the subject.

-Dave Adams-

It was politicians that started the world wars.

that's an unprovable statement. if scientists didn't enable politicians, there wouldn't be wars.

the "viking culture continues" and, collectively, we find ways to rape and plunder.

of course we say "we're not proud of our coutry" (the majority now says that) but we continue to be part of the downfall.

we're like crack addicts that are having a withdrawl.... we need to the oil yet we're aware that slaudering people abroad isn't a very ethical way to get it.

To boldly go...

[it] was in fact debunked scientifically.

I'd love to see that proof...

To boldly go...

Hunter S. Thompson, my role model in many ways, had a similar saying: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

whoa, can't get my pot post to post right, this doesn't look good :-)

They tacked one verse from the song on the end of "Willin'" on the live album Waiting for Columbus.  I was particularly bummed and infuriated when the label omitted it when it was released on CD (at least initially; not sure about subsequent releases).

I agree. Advertising doesn't have to make sense, it just has to move product. Political ads are no different.

Even if a child catches a parent in the act, belief in Santa Claus will persist. Lots of us see BushCo for the criminals they are. The 24%ers still believe, and their core beliefs aren't vulnerable to data.

Neither are ours. We are humans, not androids. Science has its ideals, ideals I admire, but we're not machines. The history of science shows clearly that Science, the realm of knowledge, is to scientific societies, as mythology is to religion.

Myth and Science deal with different realms of truth. Myths hold truths of inestimable value; relgions are country clubs that operationalize the myth in the sociopolitical realm. Religions are for the benefit of an in-group, at the expense of an out-group, by definition. They don't have to make sense, they just need to perpetuate the status quo.

Must you be so literal?

Here's my argument in a nutshell:

Science is to scientific societies is to the Left is to textbooks as Mythology is to religions is to the Right is to the bible.

We on the Left seem to think the contents of our textbooks reveal a superior truth in the same way they on the Right seem to think their bible does.

Neither of us gets to claim big-t Truth for our side by definition.

If you are still checking in, I say, touche.

I agree with a lot of what you say. I disagree with even more of what you say. My purpose, in the above passage, was to refine rather than refute. When religion is conceived of in a certain way, you are right that science and religion are incommensurable. But the problem is that many (not all) people who practice religion mistake it for science. They think that their religion makes truth claims about the physical world. They make a category mistake, thinking that mythological truths about the human psyche are factual truths about the physical world. These people are not immune from science's attacks. In fact, perhaps science will persuade them to rethink the status of their beliefs, and they will understand the true value and position of their religious beliefs.

Religion (or philosophy, or literature, or mythology, or the study of mythology) can play the same role for science, causing scientists to look beyond empirical facts to ascertain "deeper" psychological truths. Oddly, I think that psychology can also fill this role. (Psychologists may rail against me, but I feel it is less a science and more a procedural mythology.)

Good luck to you, buddha!

I said "world wars."

the same still holds. look at IBM and the Holocaust. Scientists are as practical as politicians are. For example, the University of Chicago worked on the Manhattan project; MIT worked on StarWars; and the more I look, the more interconnected people are.

declarations of war are public acts, by public officals

IMO, public officials are straw men who realize the subconcious desires of the people who elect them. the "viking culture," for example, kept bringing home the booty so they achieved cultural (interconected) dominence.

Does any philosopher theororize that vocation changes someones moral values, i.e. their human nature?

To boldly go...

Thank you, Zionista.  And the same to you.  I really miss the old fart.  Had he survived prostate cancer, I believe he would still be making delightful rips in the cultural fabric today.  

Neoboho

well, you believe those shows, yes. but is it right to tell someone else that their ignorant because they don't? are you god?

for example, I think the evidence shows beyond doubt that 9/11 was an inside job and that videos like "loose change, final cut" prove it but not everyone agrees and I remain agnostic.

creationism, I think, is important to teach because we do in fact, I believe, create our own realities.

we might all have different "garden of eden's" but each of us creates one.

I like creationism as long as it's metaphorical and mystical.

Thus, to me, the real question is: "how do you teach creationism?"

to claim that we know what the "material world is" is a BIG claim! I tend to prefer creationism because it simply suggests that the world started at some point in time and scientists of all types are trying to fill in the details.

i.e. I don't buy the science that the flexibility of DNA proves that evolution is the right creation myth but others do.

To boldly go...

Bev,

And they do not have to confront the fact that nature is capricious, which argues against their whole faith.

…god might send those disasters to teach them pity and compassion for others.

I believe many do take these things as signs or lessons in that manner. But I’ve never been able to understand that reasoning, whether God is punishing them or teaching them compassion. He is going to kill innocent people, wound or paralyze them, destroy everything they have, kill their children or some other catastrophe- to teach them a lesson? That must truly be some macabre irony on a cosmic level that I can’t fathom. Likewise, the whole “It’s a miracle!” thing when someone survives a disaster that has destroyed everything else is beyond me. It seems God is always absolved of His destruction but praised for what He (or His thunderbolts) missed.

I consider it an excellent idea to separate emotion from intellect

this is an ideology since it's not known if emotion and intellect can be seperated although Spock did a great job on StarTrek selling the possibility.

the older I get, the more I believe in emotional intellience since love drives me to study the things that I love each and every day.

i.e. I fully buy into the wisdom: "follow your heart."

To boldly go...

That's an excellent point, I agree. Do you not agree that science has often been used as if it were absolutely exclusive of religious truth?

My argument is this. Our brains make ratios. We are therefore rational beings. But that's not all we are.

Science reduces humans to mechanisms. It does. I think it's quite human to reject being thought of as a machine. Are you a machine? Aren't WE alive, and THINGS are, if not dead, at least lifeless?

The American religious right has a very specific history. That history goes all the way back to ancient Sumer. That mythological family believes in life as holy war between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Truth and Lie .

American science, having grown up in this same mythological context, features the assumptions of those who create it.

Western science and the Abrahamic religions aren't all that different. Western science began as an effort to "prove" their God "true." It took a long time before a scientist could leave God out of a paper without censure.

Now science fulfills for many of us the same functions that religion fulfills for the religious right.

In political arguments, we all know that the Left is identified with Science, and the Right with Religion. As the silliness on this thread shows, if people see something they construe as criticizing Science, right away they tag you as a Religionist. The opposite holds true, too.

Us Good and Scientific/ Them Bad and Religionistic.

The assertion, by both sides, that 'Our truth is the only true truth," is the crux of the Science/Religion dynamic. We on the Left do indeed use Science as a religion.

People here are using the Cartesian mechanistic assumption, and Bacon's denial of subjectivity and intelligence to non-humans upon which it's based, among others, without even knowing it. Worse, spurious diatribes are made defending unexamined assumptions.

What do we expect? We're being dumbed down on purpose. Imagine if we had spent a trillion dollars on rebuilding every school and library in the country instead of sowing seeds of death.

I remember that (Lowell George was great). Wasn't there a Grateful Dead version or is my memory playing tricks (too much bogarting)?

an opportunist.

To boldly go...

"Quite endeared of Science"? I would think you're endeard of hyperbole. Don't get carried away by shakey metaphors, my friend. A Kangaroo's pouch is not a womb.

Why don't you give Edgar Winds little book, Art and Ararchy, a test drive. It's a short book and not dense, but the footnotes are the best part of the collection. I actually disagreed with Wind's premise: I think Jackson Pollack is a great painter, but not for the reason Pollock imagined he was painting for. Wind dissed Pollack and most of modernism because the principles actually believed that they were dipping into the treasures at the well-springs of the unconciousness and tapping into some sort of human immortality. And he argued against that forcefully and oustanding points and authorities. But Wind did bother to consider that Pollock, Motherwell or de Kooning also learned and mastered painting itself, even if they were on a fool's errand to tap into an imaginery psychic treasure trove.

<>Jung too. I respect the man and his work greatly. I've actually read all his professional work - the whole Bollingen series (something that most "Jungians" I have known have not done) and his work on Medieval alchemy in breathtaking. Less so his interpretation of same and his translation of same into psychoanalytic theory.

To tell you the truth I hadn't noticed that you may have been attacking science. It wasn't even in my mind. My response was to challenge your view of mythology, which I think is silly. Just to underscore this fluff, it is well known today that Homo sapiens sapiens arrived on the earth already fully socialized - there never was a time when that creature we call "Human" was not socialized. And it is pretty brazen to claim that creatures who had not acquired language produced mythology. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Consider Sisyphus. What crime did he commit to warrant an eternal punishment of pushing a stone up the hill with it constantly rolling back? It turns out, in the course of the myth, that Sisyphus was hiding in the bushes while Zeus came and ravished some maiden. But the Gods did not punish him for voyeurism, they punished him because he attempted to tell others about what he had witnessed. So what's the lesson here? Isn't it that it is futile to attempt to rationalize mystical experiences? That's what I think, and I don't think it is an especially profound message. But on the other hand it is a hell of a good story, and I think it was popular and sustained in Greek culture and beyond because of that - a great story.

Neoboho

Most of those here that defend science are well aware of the limits of knowledge. We know we're not reliably rational, and I usually argue that it makes no sense to imagine a rational animal. Not because we're dumb, but because of the particular way we are smart.

I think you are assuming we don't notice any nuance in the ways of being or knowing. Don't feel so superior. And don't force us into a convenient but false symmetyry.

We on the Left do indeed use Science as a religion.
What you mean "we," paleface?

The sinister al-Gebra may need protection. Even though he and his fellows make protractors, calculators, and software, the mere fact that they have a Weapons of Math Destruction capability does not make them terrorists.

More a matter of concern might be the potential in cyberattacks from Osama bin Ary.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Huh?  Philosophy has never been a lucrative, career, ditto religion...

Shhhhh!  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and their (too many) ilk don't realize that their multi-millions are not extremely lucrative.

Have you seen the Crystal Palace church?   

Jan

I guess I consider those guys show biz, not religion.

Conservatives certainly don't want a class, elective or otherwise, in which "World Religions" are objectively taught.

it's impossible to objectively teach something Jan.

John Dewey notes, for example, that you can look at a sphere and see a disk or even an elongated ellipse based on how you look at it.

to believe that teachers only know and communicate canonical, absolute facts seems far feteched.

the study of reglion is a lifelong pursuit and not something that can be coined by "a teacher" in 100 words or less.

To boldly go...

Hey, I was going to say that!

Naturalism in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way.

Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable. There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd. Man's endless search for concrete proofs of his beliefs is seen as a confirmation of naturalistic methodology. Naturalists point out that even when one scientific theory is abandoned in favour of another, man does not despair of knowing nature, nor does he repudiate the “natural method” in his search for truth. Theories change; methodology does not.

While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a wide variety of views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism.

"naturalism." Encyclopædia Britannica from Standard Edition. (2007).
______________________

LEVELING INSTEAD OF DIFFERENTIATING

The historical-ideological context of a given timespan always being confusing, the early psychologists may have had little awareness of and less inclination toward alternatives to what
Thines calls the "natural-versus- nonnatural antinomy" (in the 16th-18th century sense of "natural," i. e., amenable to sense observation) and the "natural-versus-mythical antinomy" (Freud's dilemma) with which they were faced.

Academic psychologists opted for the former position with the result that, as their work developed, consciousness became increasingly reduced to underlying physiology--which amounts to a leveling of phenomena that clearly belong to different cognitive strata. This homologizing was easily accomplished because the operation has all the earmarks of being legitimate.

Indeed, one can always restrict one's conceptualization of a phenomenon to selected
aspects--in preference to dealing with its totality. In other words one can always state less about a phenomenon than is actually
there without violating its nature--so long as one makes clear that one is abstracting from the phenomena. Without suitable clarification, such a reduction amounts to engaging in a long
discredited Cartesian dualism in which, for example, animals could be reduced to machines pure and simple. It also amounts to ignoring the "more" of the phenomenon (not to be confused with the "more" posited by vitalism)--a "more" which is admittedly hard to capture systematically but is precisely what constitutes the specificity or identity of the phenomenon (it should be noted that even physics, psychology's celebrated methodological model, respects phenomenal differences, e. g., different approaches are devised for dealing with mechanics, fluids, electricity).

Instead of leveling the phenomena, psychology ought to have differentiated them, emphasizing their specificity rather than their commonality with physical reality. Aiming for factual and rigorous knowledge is praiseworthy, but this aim cannot be meaningfully achieved if it requires disregarding the phenomena as they present themselves, empirically. What the researcher owes allegiance to, first and foremost, is the integrity of the phenomena--not his necessarily tentative and possibly erroneous methodology.

Kinget, G. M. (1979). Objective psychology: a case of epistemological sleight-of-hand. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 11(1), 83-96.
___________________

I come down on the side of allegiance to the phenomena, not the methodology.

Naturalism is the assumption that the methods of the natural sciences are all we need; if it can't be studied by the natural method, it is presumed not to be real.

I agree with the view that Self-correction, as an astute commenter pointed out, is the cardinal virtue for modern science, in direct contrast to upholding unwillingness to change as a virtue, as our opponents do.

In that spirit, I hope we can see that the overtly mechanistic character of our modern science, the same one that led to the industrial and computer and space age revolutions, played a crucial role in Western Europe's conquest of the world between mid-1400s to the turn of the 20th century. The machines with which we did it, now that we've reproduced them exponentially for generations, and the way we use them (how many jet engines are burning fuel right now? ships, whose bus-sized engines burn 24/7/365? trains? SUVs?) are responsible for global warming.

The Right is using Intelligent Design as its stalking horse for getting its theology into the classroom more overtly than it's already present (as the background of the cultural at large; no school district will let you out on Buddha's birthday). Naturalism used to be all about proving god's exitence, then it demoted god to a blind watchmaker before finally hiding him in the basement.

We still talk about the universe as if it were a manufactured device. I ask you, what is a tree made of? A table, yes, a table is made of wood. But a tree IS wood, it grows from within, it isn't made.

We have a god hiding in our science.

The Spanish held a trial, can't remember much off-hand, and concluded that enslaving the Indians was otay as long as you were doing it for their benefit as defined by "Christianizing the heathen." Columbus was after gold and slaves, not on some Sunday school charity drive.

The railroad and the rifled barrel were used to slaughter the buffalo explicitly in order to deprive the tribes of the Plains of not just food, but their mythical partners in a dance older than science.

Religion in the schools is already there, in the anachronistic, mechanistic, Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian science we assert as the antidote to religion in the schools, the same science that has brought us the ability to kill everyone on earth several times over, in more than one way, all by remote control.

The science I think we all hold dear, speaking as a guy who watched Star Trek on NBC back in the day, Apollo mission launches on TVs rolled into classrooms, and Neil Armstrong descend the ladder and not sink out of site in the lunar dust, I have high hopes for that science, even though I'm not so sure it can even exist.

The one we're under the spell of now is killing us.

(PS Howard: Debates often begin with definitions ;-) )

I don't see much of a difference in the two, personally, but their many contributers certainly seem to think they are paving their way to heaven with the donations that keep these people living the good life here on earth!

Jan

those who believe that the bible is literallly true would never agree to have chrisitanity lumped together with other faiths in a class designed to teach about religions in general.

I would say that's false. Although I'm sort of out of religion these days, I used to really enjoy listening to a retired priest, at a local episcople church, talk about the history of religion and, most recently, about religous art.

I find the bible to be "literally true" but I also find the kuran to be "literally true." of course I did refuse to go to a missouri lutheran church because I had to sign a paper tht the bible was literally true and I wouldn't sign that piece of paper because I didn't believe in their interpretation of the bible and interpretation, seemingly, is what people fight over-- my opinion.

the problem of a religious group, like any other group-- from the NRA to Greenpeace, seems-- to me, that intolerent cultures can form.

For example, I tend to find TV evangelists to be amusing-- I've never made a single donation though, but my sister's husband hates them so we can't watch TV together-- he'd rather watch "world poker."

To boldly go...

This is one of the great qualities of science: the ability to break down people's preconceptions.

I don't think it takes science to show that our actions impact whole ecosystems, any moron can understand that.

a catholic priest at a presentation on global warming suggested that: "awareness is not enough to solve this problem" since "different habits are required."

while I am not a catholic, I was touched by the priest's desire to link the "pro-life cause" to a required response to the global warming problem.

one of my favorite movies is "Titanic" and I loved the scene where the guy who designed the titantic looks at his model as the titatic sinks-- at least, that's what I remember the scene to be and I was moved since I do engineering myself.

my advisor once told me: "don't fall in love with your models!"

thus, it seems, science has it's creeds just like religions do and new churches form just like new scientific thought forms.

hopefully our earth, a possible titanic due to the borg effect, doesn't sink and we resurrect the garden of eden!

To boldly go where...

rewards are only AFTER you die

I had a religous "out of body, near death experience" and I was rewarded before death.

while you try to suggest that science is so great for its descriptions, mathematical and otherwise, of the physical world, science is limited since that's all it can do.

To boldly go...

"We require a decade or two before we can survive without intense support."

so I should stop helping my 90 year old grandmother? independence is an illusion because we're always interconnected.

To boldly go...

I'm not clear on the difference between literally true and "literally true". Those who believe the Bible literally true, without quotes, were the population in question.

Perhaps only the correct interpretation is literally true, although that is a contradiction in terms, since literal means exactly as written.

As much as I like your signature, I must say, HEY STAR FLEET! You're badly misconstruing me. We are born as utterly dependent infants, are nurtured, and require intense support before we can live on our own. As you point out, life is indeed a cycle.

This is a good example of a limitation of this medium. The same type of thinking we use to see these words and read them also is used to dissect and analyze. So we tear each other to shreds over misperceived divisions.

I'm a certified nursing assistant. I've seen things the Boy Scouts never prepared me for. And that's on a daily basis, even before going to breakfast.

If you would read what I have written without shredding it as you read, STAR FLEET, you might find that I've been preaching the gospel of Zen here all week. Evidently to little effect.

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
COSMOS!
(cosmos who?)
KNOW! COSMOS YOU!

So there, STAR FLEET ;-)

An excerpt from my main guru, Joseph Campbell.
___________________________________

METAPHORS, THE LANGUAGE OF MYTH

The life of a mythology springs from and depends on the metaphoric vigor of its symbols. These deliver more than just an intellectual concept, for such is their inner character that they provide a sense of actual participa­tion in a realization of transcendence. The symbol, energized by metaphor, conveys, not just an idea of the infinite but some realization of the infinite. We must remember, however, that the metaphors of one historically con­ditioned period, and the symbols they innervate, may not speak to the per­sons who are living long after that historical moment and whose consciousness has been formed through altogether different experiences.

While times and conditions change drastically, the subject of historical conditioning throughout the centuries, that is the complex psychosomatic unity we call the human person, remains a constant. What Adolph Bastian described as "elementary ideas," and Jung referred to as "archetypes of the collective unconscious" are the biologically rooted motivating powers and connoted references for the mythologies that, cast in the metaphors of changing historical and cultural periods, remain themselves constant. [I'm not so sure about that; wouldn't we still be Neanderthal, or Cro-Magnon, or Homo Habilis?]

The metaphors perform their function of speaking to these deep levels of human beings when they arise freshly from the contemporary context of experience. And a new mythology is rapidly becoming a necessity both so­cially and spiritually as the metaphors of the past, such as the Virgin Birth and the Promised Land, misread consequently as facts, lose their vitality and become concretized. But that new mythology is already implicit among us, native to the mind waiting as the sleeping prince does for the kiss of his beloved, to be awakened by new metaphoric symbolization. These will be derived necessarily from contemporary life, thought, and experience and, as the special language that can of its own power touch the innermost layers of consciousness, provide a reinvigorated mythology to us.

Artists share the calling, according to their disciplines and crafts, to cast the new images of mythology. That is, they provide the contemporary metaphors that allow us to realize the transcendent, infinite, and abundant nature of being as it is. Their metaphors are the essential elements of the symbols that make manifest the radiance of the world just as it is, rather than arguing that it should be one way or the other. They reveal it as it is.

A mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that lo­cation or historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical lan­guages of both mythology and metaphysics are not denotative of actual worlds or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

The problem, as we have noted many times, is that these metaphors, which concern that which cannot in any other way be told, are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts and historical occurrences. The de­notation -—that is, the reference in time and space: a particular Virgin Birth, the End of the World—is taken as the message, and the connotation, the rich aura of the metaphor in which its spiritual significance may be de­tected, is ignored altogether. The result is that we are left with the particu­lar "ethnic" inflection of the metaphor, the historical vesture, rather than the living spiritual core.
Inevitably, therefore, the popular understanding is focused on the ritu­als and legends of the local system, and the sense of the symbols is reduced to the concrete goals of a particular political system of socialization. When the language of metaphor is misunderstood and its surface structures be­come brittle, it evokes merely the current time-and-place-bound order of things and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter.

It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denota­tive rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that is its active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used this "elementary" or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthly geography to be taken by force. Its connotation—that is, its real meaning—however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.

(Campbell, J. (2001). Thou Art That: Transforming religious metaphor. pp. 6-7, emphasis added. Novato, CA: New World Library.)

Ahh.

I didn't shred. And, especially since you're a nurse, you realize that a broken leg means dependence on a doctor and, likewise, hunger means dependence on a farmer. I just don't see the reality you paint that we're ever indendent, that's a myth and I think Cambell would support me on that claim.

To boldly go...

but certainly not proof tht science and religion are equal in the creed department.

someone once recommended the classic book The Little Prince to me and I loved it; It described how each of us lives in our own little world. When I use the word "creed," I'm simply saying that people live in their own worlds that are built upon their beliefs.

To boldly go...

Your 4 item definition.  No, I don't know specifically where you came up with it, but it's a pretty common view.  If you're refering to J. Campbell, I think his is silly too.  Especially his view that myth is metaphor.  "Metaphor" is a trope, one of the forms of Classical Rhetoric.  A rhetorical analysis of a myth actually produces several tropes.  My suspicion is that myth carries more metonymies than metaphors.  Ironically, Campbell uses the trope synecdoche (the part stands for the whole) to convince us that a myth is metaphor. He might argue: "well, it was just a figure of speech" and we would say: "yes, it is." 

If you got a problem with that, take it up with a zoologist.

OK, I did.  Word on the zoologial street is that the little critturs are born (parturation).   Common practice among zoologists is to call pouch life the lactating period.  Let this be a lesson to you: manage your metaphors.  Campbell's calling the pouch a womb is analogous to calling myth a metaphor.

But I did say why I thought your views on mythology were silly.  You know, J.R.R. Tolkein insisted to his dying day that his works were not allegories of contemporary European politics. But many still do not believe him, because they believe that things that look similar are necessarily the same.  

I gave you references: Edgar Wind, Claude Levi-Strauss and so on.   I did avoid giving the best reference though - Roland Barthes' Mythologies.  But I'll spare you.

Look, here's one of my favorite myths - let's talk about concrete examples:

The Creation Account of the Uitoto of Columbia, South America

1

In the beginning, the word gave origin to the Father. A phantasm, nothing else existed in the beginning; the Father touched an illusion, he grasped something mysterious. Nothing existed. Through the agency of a dream our Father Naimuena [he who is or has a phantasm] kept the mirage to his body, and he pondered long and thought deeply.

2

Nothing existed, not even a stick to support the vision: our Father attached the illusion to the thread of a dream and kept it by the aid of his breath. He sounded to reach the bottom of the appearance, but there was nothing. Nothing existed indeed.

3

Then the Father again investigated the bottom of the mystery. He tied the empty illusion to the dream thread and pressed the magical substance upon it. Thus by the aid of his dream he held it like a wisp of raw cotton.

4

Then he seized the mirage bottom and stamped upon it repeatedly, sitting down at last on his dreamed earth.

5

The earth-phantasm was now his, and he spat out saliva repeatedly so that the forests might grow. Then he lay down upon his earth and covered it with the roof of heaven. As he was the owner of the earth he placed above it the blue and the white sky.

6

Thereupon, Rafuema, "the man who has the narratives," sitting at the base of the heavens, pondered, and he created this story so that we might listen to it here upon earth.

Isn't that a great myth.  What does it mean?  My reading that the world was created in order to produce a being who could tell the story of the creation of the world.  There's a hermenutic problem there, of course.  Did Konrad Preuss, who collected the myth in the late 19th c. translate it accurately.  As far as the plot goes, however, it is very close to Kurt Vonnegut's Sirenes of Titan.  I submit to you, this myth is irony, not metaphor.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a species, my friend, not a human individual.  Whatever ancestors we sprang from, at some point one of our grandpas did not have language, yet he was a social animal, just as chimps and gorillas are social animals.  Without language you cannot construct metaphors, which by your own account is what mythologies are made of.  Since culture predates language, it is really silly to argue that myth creates culture.

Neoboho

I learned recently that 1) Lowell George joined the Mothers for about a year, and 2) Don Preston suggested the name, Little Feat, because George had small feet.

Science is a field of human endeavor, like Art, Politics, and the Clergy. Obviously, we have a hard time telling them apart. Science is ideological.

Science, in general, does indeed have underpinning philosophical assumptions, most notably Descartes's assumption, that we may study the universe as a machine, and study other organisms as automata.

The Scientific Method, on the other hand, is used to test hypotheses. In its application, we seek the simplest obtainable and verifiable explanation of events.

And what's wrong with that? Let us assume that the objective is to search for the truth, or something resembling truth.

Let us assume further that there are a series of tools or virtues by which we may attempt to define or search for truth - rationality, simplicity, consistency, etc.

It strikes me that the techniques and methods of science incorporate many if not most of these virtues.

Further, it strikes me that science, as a set of tools, or wielder of virtues, has come closer in practical terms to the truth than competing systems such as philosophy or religion.

If we measure by the simple standard of testing the various systems against the real world, you have to admit that science does seem to do quite well. Science has put men on the moon and plumbed the depths of the ocean. Religion and Philosophy have not moved much past the days of the Greeks and Canaanites.

Indeed, I think that science can be distinguished from art, politics and clergy by its success in making sense of the world and its willingness to examine and test itself.

It's interesting to see that the role that Science plays on the Left is similar to the role God plays on the Right. We on the Left claim for our Science perfect impartiality.

Only in a very limited sense. Science does not claim to be a personality, or a personalized entity. It does not offer salvation. It does not pretend to answer every question. It does not listen to prayers or offer divine intercession.

I think that the way 'Science' compares to God the most is that each makes an attempt to explain the world around us. God's explanation is 'cause I said so.'

Science's explanation is to attempt to observe that world carefully, offer theories, and search for more observations to either confirm or disprove the theory.

Both Science and Religion have a common source: the human mind. I find it impossible to understand where we on the Left think Science comes from. Do we have a bunch of Vulcans hidden somewhere that come up with perfectly unbiased observations, theories, etc?

All sorts of things come from the human mind in that sense. I'm not sure what you are getting at with your 'Science comes from the mind.'

Well, it strikes me that science is in one sense a tool which attempts to examine the nature of observed relationships in what we see as reality.

In another sense, science consists of a sort of conceptualization of the aggregate mass of observations and theories in respect of these relationships.

Besides the obvious fact, that Science is a fallible product of human minds, there's an even bigger criticism of it: Science doesn't know everything. How beautiful was the sunrise this morning! How dear to us our Beloved! These are not questions, they are unqualified affirmations, whereas the language of science is the declarative sentence.

First thing a scientist does is, deny his or her continuity with the observed. That's an unfounded assumption right there, and we haven't even opened our eyes.

Do scientists deny continuity with the observed? I don't know that they do.

The moment we disconnect our emotions from our intellects, all atrocities become possible. After we neglect our common humanity, the Other is just a thing. How can engineers in government labs make weapons no human in his right mind would use? They worship too fervently at the altar of Science.

At the same time, all atrocities are possible if we connect our emotions to our intellects. Hatred, lust, pride, greed are all legitimate emotions and part of common humanity. Not to get all Godwin, but the Holocaust was not a rational act but driven by hatred and paranoia.

The making of unthinkable weapons is driven more by fear and hatred, by patriotism, or by other emotions, than the altar of science.

You seem to subscribe to a 1950's monster movie vision of science - something where astophysics and botany overlap and where earnest SCIENTISTS advance SCIENCE by transplanting the brains of labrador retrievers into geraniums because it advances SCIENCE.

The neutron bomb was not an offering on a sterile altar. Rather, it came out of a conception of what was possible, driven by the particular emotional and political circumstances of the Cold War.

Science fulfills for the Left the role of Bigger Brother, the one who can kick your ass for disagreeing with me, that God fulfills for my friends on the Right.

Disagree. I think you have a very misguided idea of science, and the role and perception of science in public life.

Will we ever get beyond our primate inheritance? Just because we ARE apes doesn't mean we have to argue like the rest of them.

Highfalutin' but meaningless? What do Apes argue like? High pitched excited hooting and bouts of excrement flinging?

Is this a good description for an argument based on logic and reason, and marshalling of facts. I suppose it is if you want to squint.

But then, what is the alternative? If we don't have to argue like apes, how do we argue?

Frankly, I'd rather you didn't disparage my primate heritage. On occasion, my knuckles still drag the ground, and I prefer Malt to Milton in justifying god's ways to man.

Both Left and Right claim non-human authorship for their books, you know. We on the Left call ours 'textbooks.'

I gotta call Bullshit on this one. Lydell's Principles of Geology, or Darwin's Origin of Species were not the products of non-human authorship. I know of no 'textbook' which has been attributed to supernatural or non-human invention.

No, I was thinking of Jung's psychoanalitic theory, which includes his theory of archetypes and theory of the collective unconscious.  But Jung was also very interested in supernaturalism and spiritulaism.  Why not, when you look at the time and place he wrote from, such things were in vogue in Europe and quite popular.  Surely you remember from your art studies Johannes Itten wandering the corridors of the Bauhaus in his hair robe, contemplating the latest devine message from Madame Blavatsky.  To some extent Jung incorporated this sort of stuff into his theory.  In the twenties, however, he wrote:  "Every one of my German patients exhibited signs of psychopathological disorders."

How much embryology do you know?

On a scale of one to ten, about two, I would guess.  But I knew about cranial suture closing, and I now about ontology recapitulates phylogeny too. But are you saying that mythology acculturates by entering the squishy spot?  Then why don't we have mythologies from other creatures, like wales or squirrel monkeys?

But my question to you is does cultural material circulate in culture by means other than myth?   

Neoboho

Well, THIS Democrat is saying that two things need to be done now, relative to Social Security:

1.  Stop spending it on other things; keep it separate and let it grow even if only from interest-bearing accounts.

2.  Increase the level of income subject to payroll tax.  There is no more regressive tax than this one.  It should apply to all earned income up to at least $200,000.

Jan

[Raising hand] I know the answers

“Some say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one.” Jim Hightower

Apparently you define a troll as one who points out facts. Good to know. Please troll-rate me.