Well it looks like the fundies bereft of any cohernt debate, have
brought us this bugbear:
LB
extract
Intelligent design theory + postmodernism = pure science fiction
When the religious Right adopts the epistemology of the multicultural
Left -- that truth is relative -- there goes the Enlightenment, writes
Noam Scheiber
August 29, 2005
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16414974%255E28737,00.html
IN 1993, journalist Jonathan Rauch published a book called Kindly
Inquisitors, in which he catalogued contemporary threats to the
Enlightenment tradition of seeking truth through logical or empirical
discourse.
One of Rauch's points was that, while this (classical) liberal system
for amassing knowledge appeared to be under attack from both the
religious Right and the multicultural Left, in fact the two groups were
making a version of the same argument: mainstream science didn't accord
their beliefs the respect they deserved, whether it was creation
science on the one hand or feminist or Afro-centric science on the
other.
Rauch's book has held up remarkably well in the 12 years since it was
published.
This is particularly so in light of the debate in the US over
intelligent design (ID) -- the idea, popular on the Right, that life is
too complex to have resulted from random variation. Even US President
George W. Bush has suggested, as the creation scientists (and
multiculturalists) of the 1980s and 1990s did before him, that both
sides of the supposed debate be treated as legitimate in public school
curricula.
But there was one thing Rauch didn't anticipate. At the time, he
suggested that even though creationists had adopted the tactics of the
academic Left -- the demand for equal time -- they still believed in
objective truths. They just didn't think all of these truths were
discoverable by science.
By contrast, today's IDers have gone further and adopted the
epistemology of the Left -- the idea that ostensibly scientific truths
may be relative.
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