Inconvenient Stuff

Creationists love to wrestle quotes out of context to support their contention that evolution is debunked. They take a scientist, someone competent to assess evolutionary biology, and try to "argue" by putting quote marks around something he/she's said which looks devastatingly affirmative that somehow, someway, these creationists are correct. Time for "tit for tat". A good quote for these dishonest creationists, and some good writing for both them and anti-scientific persons of all sorts, whether climate change deniers or stem cell research critics:

It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.
Abraham Lincoln, chiding the editor of a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper, quoted from Antony Flew, How to Think Straight, p. 17

Along those same lines, I was reading a review of Al Gore's new movie, (HT: PZ) and also a post which sets the historical record straight about George Washington's lack of Christian faith, (HT: Ed Brayton) contrary to what D. James Kennedy wants you to think, and says from behind his pulpit. I found some of the Whiskey Bar's comments particularly relevant to all of these topics in dealing with people who want to have irrational notions reinforced:

...there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world...

...to me it only highlighted the long odds against what Gore is trying to do, which is to speak the language of reason to an increasingly irrational, post-Enlightenment world...

...There’s always been a powerful current of anti-intellectualism in American politics, just as there is in American life. It’s the dark side of democracy: The pressure to accept what the majority, or the most vocal minority, thinks is true as truth – even when the evidence is entirely on the other side. When Henry Ford said history was bunk, he wasn’t taking about the past but about the present, and his ire wasn’t directed at historians per se but at the revisionist historians of the Progressive Era, who were telling him and his fellow know nothings inconvenient facts they didn’t want to hear. Pump Henry full of Hillbilly Heroin and put him on the radio, and you’ve got Rush Limbaugh, still making the same point.

The difference between Ford’s time and Limbaugh’s is that the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It’s curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the “best” schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain’t what it used to be. Like academia, it’s fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it...

...In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

These aren't my darker moments. These are my more common moments. Is America being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Age of Reason? I'm afraid to answer in the affirmative, no matter how hopeful I am that it's true.
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Technorati tags: anti-intellectualism, Enlightenment, Creationism, historical revision, D. James Kennedy