Turtles All The Way Down

THE SUMMER of ’05 seems to be turning into a good old-fashioned sophomore bull session, arguing across the political divide about intelligent design vs. evolution. Paul Campos, for my money, has the best entry yet. He argues that it’s turtles all the way down, as in

The student asks the great sage, "O Master, upon what does the Earth rest?" The sage replies, "O seeker of knowledge, the Earth rests on the back of an enormous turtle." The student then asks, "Tell me, Wise One, upon what does this turtle rest?" The sage answers with annoyance, "Well obviously it’s turtles all the way down!"

As usual, the two sides are arguing past each other.

First, the secular liberal is mistaken in his belief that there are special people called "scientists" (or more broadly, "rational thinkers," "members of the reality-based community" etc.) whose beliefs are based solely on something called "the facts" or "evidence" or what have you, and who therefore don’t rely on faith-based reasoning.

Because it all comes down to faith. But the conservatives are arguing the opposite, and just as foolishly:

Second, the cultural conservative is mistaken in his belief - a belief held by many proponents of intelligent design theory - that a more tolerant attitude on the part of natural scientists toward supernatural explanations would confirm that the divine origins of life are empirically verifiable. Science can tell us nothing about God for the same reason that a comprehensive physical description of the Mona Lisa, down to the level of subatomic particles, would tell us nothing worth knowing about the Mona Lisa.

The British radio astronomer Bernard Lovell recently told Mary Wakefield that he wasn’t too sure about the Big Bang. This is the guy who helped invent the radio telescope that was used to detect the background radiation from the Big Bang.

"The Big Bang? Well it is of course conventional wisdom that there was one, but I’m not so sure," said Sir Bernard. "There is a tendency to talk about it as if it happened, but we really do not know."
He looked, as I remember, a little impatient. What about black holes, surely they exist?
"Everyone now believes in black holes, but they forget that the evidence is just circumstantial," he said. "One infers a black hole from plotting in detail the structure of a distant galaxy but no one really knows."
I felt confused. Why does everybody talk about these things as if they’ve been proved? I asked. "Young people get enthusiastic. And I suppose they just think it makes a better story."

Of course, Sir Bernard Lovell is 90. He could just be confused. Or maybe he is a postmodernist, and he believes in “narratives.”

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Socialism equals Animism

Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

mysql close 0