Why do so many writers who insist on emphasizing the consequences of radical Muslim belief tend to ignore the social consequences of other belief systems -- for example, Darwinism?
My question is prompted by reflections that are being published about the Fort Hood massacre. Darwinist blogger PZ Myers is among many voices to be raised in protest that shooter Nidal Hasan's Islamic beliefs are getting too little attention: "Unfortunately, there's [a] factor that seems to be getting minimized in the press accounts: [Hasan] was also a member of an Abrahamic death cult" (i.e., Islam).
PZ quotes Ibn Warraq's comment on Hasan's crime, "To leave Islam out of the equation means to forever misinterpret events," before broadening the scope of the discussion with a concluding line about religion as a whole. "Too often," notes PZ, "[religion] has a complex causal relationship to evil."
My own view is that when you are taking the measure of an idea -- let's say Islam, or Darwinism -- it's a good rule of thumb at least to consider the relationship between it and its consequences, judged by the behavior of people who espouse the idea and publicly proclaim themselves as acting upon it. Sure, an idea could be ugly or dangerous, yet true. But I like David Berlinski's point, citing Keats, that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." At the very least, you might think, an idea that has a record of persistently inspiring evil is worth a second, skeptical look, rather than your simply swallowing it because the prestige authorities around you say you should.
Or perhaps when someone claims to be acting on the basis of an idea and then does something monstrous, would you say we should assume that it was really some other factor, personal and psychological, that drove him to the wicked deed? That's our culture's general approach when considering the motivations of mass killers in other contexts. When there's a slaughter at a shopping mall, a university, a church, a post office, or some other workplace -- alas, in our country, none of these is an infrequent occurrence -- nobody much asks about what motivated the murderer.
I've expressed frustration about this in the past, as when the Darwinian musings of Columbine killer Eric Harris, or Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn, were studiously ignored.
There's a whole community of professional Islam-bashers out there, writing online and in books that sell pretty well, who have been riding the Hasan story full time since it broke, hammering home their habitual point that Islam is an evil religion and always has been, going back to the days when it original source texts were composed.
Islam doesn't particularly interest me -- any religion can be made to look inherently wicked by a selective quoting of sources -- but this angle does. PZ Myers is among those who can be relied on to dismiss every attempt to point out the social consequences of Darwin's famous idea. So too biologist and blogger Jerry Coyne, who mocks what is actually a pretty interesting article in the London Sunday Times by Dennis Sewell on the theme. Sewell writes:
In America, where Darwin's writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin's theories and a rash of school shootings.
The piece is worth reading, even though Sewell singles me out for criticism:
The connection between Darwin's ideas and the Holocaust remains hugely controversial, not least because many creationists try to reduce it to a crude blame game. The writer David Klinghoffer, an advocate of intelligent design, which many regard as creationism in disguise, claims: "The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin's writing."
"Crude"? I don't see what's crude about what I wrote. On the contrary, it seems transparently, obviously true. Anyway, the simple point bears repeating. Either ideas have consequences or they don't. If they do, then ideas you happen to feel favorably disposed to shouldn't get a free pass.
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Had Gould and Lewontin only "cautioned," I would be more inclined to pay attention to you.
Listen Philip, Steve said that it is untrue that evolutionists engage in storytelling. I called him on that. All this other stuff about "the validity of the theory overall" is a red herring.
Mark2 wrote: "Listen Philip, Steve said that it is untrue that evolutionists engage in storytelling."
No, I didn't. Here is what I wrote: "Some biologists have offered some hypotheses that are no more plausible than not about some biological events. However, that this has occurred is not sufficient for no person to know that any claim about biological events is true. Many claims about biology are known to be true. For instance, I'm quite sure that the proximate cause of my existence was sexual reproduction. Thus, that some biologists have offered some hypotheses that are no more plausible than not is not sufficient for any given person not to know that some of my ancestors are fish."
"Kernest wrote: "Evolutionists love telling 'just so' stories, but never get down to exacting science in support of evolution."
Steve replied: "That's not true."
I thought you meant "that's not true" to the first half of Kernest's statement, (besides the second half). Obviously, Kernest's second half isn't true.
No, what I meant is that "evolutionists" don't only offer claims that are no more plausible than not. For instance, the claim that some of my ancestors are fish is known to be true. And it is claim that is known to be true partly because of a vast amount data that has been collected since 1859. For some of the relevant data, I recommend Ernst Mayr's book What Evolution Is. In some of my other posts, I've included links that present important data to support common descent. For instance, Jennifer Clack’s paper on the fossil sequence that has helped some people know that some of the ancestors of all tetrapods (to live on earth) are fish.
However, some "evolutionists" have offered some claims that are, at least currently, no more plausible than not. One candidate would be that all T-Rexes were solely scavengers. However, I haven't researched the issue in ten years, so the probabilities may be different now than they were 10 years ago.
I'd expect to see the following from a typical ID site, not from Science magazine.
Peter J. Bowler published an article in Science (Jan. 9, 2009) http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/323/5911/223 titled “Darwin’s Originality.” Toward the end of his essay Bowler distances Darwinism from the racial hygiene of the Nazis but then writes the following: “But by proposing that evolution worked primarily through the elimination of useless variants, Darwin created an image that could all too easily be exploited by those who wanted the human race to conform to their own pre-existing ideals. In the same way, his popularization of the struggle metaphor focused attention onto the individualistic aspects of Spencer’s philosophy.” Lauding “modern science” for recognizing “Darwin’s key insights,” Bowler admits that some of them are “profoundly disturbing” and that “the theory, in turn, played into the way those implications were developed by later generations. This is not,” he adds, “a simple matter of science being ‘misused’ by social commentators, because Darwin ’s theorizing would almost certainly have been different had he not drawn inspiration from social, as well as scientific, influences. We may well feel uncomfortable with those aspects of his theory today, especially in light of their subsequent applications to human affairs. But if we accept science’s power to upset the traditional foundations of how we think about the world, we should also accept its potential to interact with moral values."
Heh, I learned of the Science article /through/ a typical ID site.
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