Religion versus Science: Round MXIV?This intriguing little snippet turned up on Kwoff the other day. It is sourced from the New Scientist.
How to spot a hidden religious agenda
This article was temporarily taken down on legal advice after New Scientist's editor, Roger Highfield, received a letter from a law firm on behalf of James Le Fanu, the GP and author of the book Why Us? Following discussions, New Scientist has now reinstated the article accompanied by a comment from Dr Le Fanu.
Apparently Dr. Le Fanu sees himself as a firm believer in science and, objects to having both his motives questioned and to being lumped in with creationists.
The published article in question is pay for view, however Wikileaks obligingly has a copy of the original up on its whistle blower site.
The following are its closing paragraphs:
Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid - "There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self" (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) - to the silly - "Yer granny was an ape!" (creationist blogger Denyse O'Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need science in the first place.
Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the "documentary" film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin's On the Origin of Species "articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for 'A Designer'", his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.
It is crucial to the public's intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.
From the San Francisco Examiner: New Scientist mystery solved: it's James Le Fanu.
James Le Fanu's hype site.
Picture from Google Images
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