Notes from Evil Bender

Commenter Sirius Knot apparently has his own blog, where he’s made (in comments) my favorite version of a common Creationist argument. The basic version of this argument is this: if you don’t believe in God, then you can’t believe that people have any real value, because the only value they can have must be given to them by God. Now, they don’t usually say the last part, because it makes clear how foolish the argument is. But the argument runs roughly as I’ve outlined 9 times out of 10.

But Sirius has taken the argument to a fun new conclusion, and one that is unintentionally telling. He writes

If you believe that individual men have no individual worth then I must point out the hypocrisy of your post: if the individual has no intrinsic worth then neither does his opinions, counting yours.

Who has ever seriously argued that ideas have intrinsic worth?  The value of ideas isn’t in that they’re ideas, but that good ideas are ideas which illuminate and correspond to reality, or ideas that provide us with productive means of acting. They don’t have intrinsic worth: rather, the worth of an idea is based on its demonstrable merits. Evolution through natural selection is an incredibly powerful idea, because it explains so much about the world. Communism was a powerful idea that now has much less power, because it has repeatedly given rise not to a workers’ paradise, but to totalitarian governments antithetical to the expressed aim of communism.

Science is a wonderful tool for helping us discover, test, and affirm or disprove a wide range of ideas. Those ideas are said to have merit if the prove helpful in describing reality and making useful predictions.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone reading this. But apparently Sirius thinks differently, since he’s worried that without god, ideas would lose their intrinsic worth. Wow. How oddly postmodern from a self-described fundamentalist.

Note: the post the comment is from is a defense of Creationism, and good for a laugh. My favorite part is when he insists that the burden of proof is on those who don’t see clear evidence of design in the universe. That’s right: he wants us to prove a negative, while he gets to assume that toast that looks like the Blessed Virgin any feature of the universe that seems designed absolutely must be. Naturally, he ignores–as he did in his comment on my blog–all that we do know about how “design” features like irreducible complexity can be formed by completely natural processes, despite the fact that the whole IC argument depends upon the perceived necessity of design.

But naturally arising complexity discredits his whole line of argument, so we’re not likely to see him admit to any of this.

Over at Uncommon Descent, BarryA thinks Thomas Jefferson was an ID supporter. I won’t link to the post, since I can’t be certain it won’t be mysteriously changed, but here’s the what BarryA had to say:

Jefferson to John Adams on April 11, 1823:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripedal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.

HT Steven Waldman

Now, this is of course gibberish. Jefferson couldn’t, as BarryA implies, have been an ID proponent. There are two reasons I know this: first, ID isn’t really a theory at all, but a creationist attack on evolutionary theory. Since Jefferson predated Darwin, he couldn’t possibly have been opposed to Darwin’s theories, making BarryA’s (and Waldman’s) claims ridiculous on their face. Second, merely believing, as Jefferson did, in a deist god hardly makes one an ID supporter. There are plenty of deists and theists who reject the BS that is Intelligent Design Creationism.

The obvious points aside, I can demonstrate that Jefferson would have had no use for ID for one simple reason: Jefferson rejected the Christianity that underpins ID, and he does so in the very letter from which BarryA is quoting, which I quote in its entirety below the fold:

(more…)