Well Said

From this post, and from a subsequent comment:

Meanwhile, last and best of all, over at the Post-Darwinist, I received a comment to this post**, to which I replied:

You said, “Opponents of ID complain about the lack of empirical research and evidence to back up ID - and, to be honest, they have a point. There isn’t a lot to show yet.”

With respect, you seem to have missed the point. Gonzalez WAS doing research that furthered ID. His research on galactic habitable zones - an area in which he is considered expert - was turning up inconvenient facts about the favourable position of Earth and its moon for life and exploration.

In other words, when Carl Sagan said that Earth is a pale blue dot lost somewhere in the cosmos, he was simply incorrect. But he represents “science”, right?

Gonzalez is correct - but he represents “religion”, supposedly.

So an incorrect account of Earth’s position is science and a correct account is religion?

Oh, but wait a minute - the next move will be the claim that whatever Gonzalez demonstrated doesn’t prove anything after all, and even talking about it is “religion”, which is not allowed - so bye bye career.

We may reach the point in my own lifetime when one really must turn to religion (”religion?”) in order to get a correct account of basic facts about our planet and to science (”science”?) for propaganda and witch hunts.

...



Stand up, Denyse, and continue standing up in spite of any tendency to despair as you contemplate a worldview in its death-throes.

You may well wonder how it is possible that genial crackpots like Carl Sagan and Paul Davies are welcomed with open arms in academia and given generous access to PBS and the Times while someone who makes an eminently reasonable inference of design from the fine-tuning of the universe is excluded as if he were some sort of freak.

The reason is that Modernism (and its rear-guard movement, Postmodernism) has obtained institutional status and become impervious to reason. If you think you are alone in your despair, consider those on the liberal arts side who must now endure an endless barrage of smug nihilism from hordes of self-absorbed dilettantes who obtained tenure by parroting the party line.

But the hardening of party lines can also be seen as a harbinger of better things to come. The same academics who thought of themselves as radicals and lovers of freedom thirty years ago have now become reactionaries, as the famous emails make clear. And at that point the difference between dogma and reality becomes too obvious to ignore.

The old paradigm is already dead. The intransigence you identified is restricted to a few small and shrinking islands. We may feel frustrated by the dogmatism of the universities and the media, but old bastions of materialism like the Times and PBS are rapidly losing influence for that very reason—because they are unable to change.

They are hardening their lines of defense, but they cannot stop the change that is being wrought through discoveries in basic science. Materialism cannot stand for long when it must manufacture multiple universes in order to account for the orderliness of our own. The same weight that makes its intransigence possible will also cause it to topple over.