Sunday, June 15, 2014

One man's anti-intellect …

… may be another's healthy skeptic: Opinion: Bowdoin College case reflects new campus 'thought police' - CNN.com.

There is, indeed, a bias against conservative Christians on campuses. And there are some reasons for this, as certain strains of conservative religious practice have been fiercely discriminatory over the past couple of centuries in the United States. There has also been an unfortunate anti-intellectual strain in the more fundamentalist groups of Christians, one that pervades American society as a whole, and creates problems for the practice of science, for instance, when it comes to subjects such as evolution and climate change.
The Christians referred to are usually "fundamentalist" only in it's looser and largely useless sense, though it is true that there is a minority who not only object to Neo-Darwinism, but have adopted positions largely at odds with the consensus the rest of us soundly regard as reality. As for the "fiercely discriminatory over the past couple of centuries," well, the whole was more fiercely discriminatory during that period. But to link these things to skepticism regarding "climate change" suggests that one may be more scientifically uninformed than one thinks. First of all, "climate change" is a weasel phrase. The term "climate" refers to a state of being characterized by continuous change. What is being referred to, in fact, is an hypothesis regarding the direction that change is likely to take over, say, the next century. In particular, it refers to those who claim the change is in the direction of higher temperatures. No one questions the scientific credentials of Freeman Dyson or Richard Lindzen, neither of whom subscribes to the warming hypothesis. It is a good idea to make sure your political prejudices are kept at a safe difference, not only from your faith, but also from science.

Of course, I agree with point of the article. But I have grown tired of seeing ignorant talking points creeping into what is supposed to be careful discourse.

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