The Daily Cultist has grown up, my friends. Tonight we say goodbye to this, our wordpress.com entity of TDC and hello to the new, sexier, meatier version at The Daily Cultist!
UPDATE: This post was written a looong time ago and since then the above link has been shut down. If you want to keep up with Redefine God, just visit Redefine God!
Congratulations are in order for everyone at Redefine God, the worlds Religion 2.0 hub. Tonight we claim 4,000 hits of traffic per month. It was only about a month ago I was becoming proud of our 3,000 marker. The next 1,000 seemed to explode in no time.
So congrats to everyone at RG for a year of growth, focus, and meaningful content. Special thanks are in order to those contributing thoughtful blogs and discussions, which not only provide the fiery, involved dialogue, but which the God of search engines, Google, smiles happily upon (improves our site ranking).
At this point I’d like to invite everyone to join the RG group Quest for RG! It’s basically a directory of things you can do to help improve and sky-rocket your favorite social network into the public eye. Please give feedback there as well.
Lastly I’ll mention, as I have before, great things are in store for our network. Fun social stuff, cool trailers and (hopefully) videos, and tools for spiritual development. More power to us.
A post from Evolving Thoughts.
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar’s review of Steve Fuller’s Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven’t yet read the book (I’ll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller’s post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the “spirit” is right
2. This explains why he’s allied himself with ID.
Intelligent design is (as the link above showed) very cavalier with details and facts. The “impression” of design is reason enough to ride roughsod over the details. In fact, as the flagellum indicates, mostly their argument is argument ab cartoon – if you squint hard, then it looks like a machine. Imagine a physicist doing that and coming up with a cartoon physics!
Fuller derides Sarkar for caring about factual claims in detail, when the point is that… what? That you can make history say anything you like if you ignore historical data? Here is his defence of a few claims:
Let me take the following two criticisms together:
“Logical positivists, and not just Popper, are supposed to have labeled Darwinism a “metaphysical research program” (p. 133). I am not aware of a single logical positivist (or logical empiricist) text that supports this claim. Given that for the logical positivists (in contrast to Popper) “metaphysical” was a term of opprobrium, it is unlikely that any of them would have embraced this formulation. The logical positivists may well have believed physics to be of more fundamental importance than biology, but the latter science nevertheless belonged to the pantheon. The foundations of biology were intended to be part of their Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
“Around the same time, Lamarck is supposed to have held that “lower organisms literally strove to become higher organisms, specifically humans, who at some point in the future would be Earth’s sole denizens” (p. 146), a view to be found nowhere in the Lamarckian corpus.”
These criticisms illustrate what I have called the ‘New Yorker magazine view of the world’ that afflicts some analytic philosophers. (I originally made this claim against a philosopher who actually began his career as an editor. Oops!) It basically reduces the history and philosophy of science to checking for facts and grammar, respectively. However, as so often is the case when dealing with editors, the fact-checker goes astray when he decides to venture opinions of his own. So even if it is strictly true that only Popper called Darwinism a ‘metaphysical research programme’ and the official logical positivist line was anti-metaphysical, it is equally true that the positivists themselves did metaphysics in everything but name (e.g. Carnap’s Aufbau), not least in the IEUS volume on biology that attempted to lay down the discipline’s axiomatic foundations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Popper wrote the obituary for its author, Joseph Woodger, in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1981.
On the point concerning the ‘Lamarckian corpus’, again I am happy to concede that the man himself never explicitly stated the thesis I attributed to him. As it turns out, the passage Sarkar quotes refers to Lamarck and Comte together as representatives of a pro-human line of evolutionary progress that was opposed to the more ecocentric line taken by Darwinists attempting to influence British sociology in its early years. Whatever Lamarck’s actual views on the ultimate fate of humanity (which are up for debate), it is clear that the Lamarckian tradition has been generally committed to what the historian Charles Gillispie called an ‘escalator of being’ on which all creatures were moving, with humans currently on the top floor. A clear expression of the view I attributed to Lamarck can be found in his most visionary 20th century follower, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who envisaged the Earth as someday becoming one ‘hominised substance’.
Now anyone who has studied logical positivism and Popper knows well that Popper resiled from the LPs’ claims to be metaphysics free. They held that metaphysics was something one ought not to do, in favour of positive knowledge. They held the famous Verification Principle, which Popper among others used as a reductio of the LP program. To say that they “were” doing metaphysics is to fundamentally mischaracterise what was going on. They claimed not to be. It was the critics, including Popper, who said they were. And so when Popper called Darwinian evolution a metaphysical research program, he clearly did not intend that as a criticism, even before his retraction. The positivists thought that was a criticism, but they didn’t make it. Post hoc assertions that they were one and the same is to completely mischaracterise what was going on then.
Fuller is well read. He should and probably does know this, so only two other interpretations are possible: carelessness, which undercuts the veracity of the argument, or mendacity, which also does. I like to think that Fuller is being careless rather than trying to deliberately mislead. But if that is his approach to the history of ideas, then I think there is a problem, Houston. Of course Popper wrote Woodger’s obit – that’s what victors do if they can. It doesn’t mean they get amalgamated with their former opponents. To say otherwise is to completely misunderstand the nature of dialectic.
Likewise the point about Lamarck. Lamarck, in what I have read (hey, the Zoological Philosophy is online in French and English; check for yourself) held that there was an impetus driving evolution “upwards” (a physical impetus, by the way – since Vance Alpheus Packard’s 1901 work, we have known that Lamarck did not mean “will” by “besoin”) but that individual lineages could not enter a filled “rung” on that ladder. And so far as I know, he never said anythign even remotely like that view that only humans would remain. Appealing to what others might have thought after Lamarck is in no way a justification of that very bad claim. And even Teilhard did not think there would be nothing but the Omega Point, merely that humanity would become one at that point in a kind of cosmic salvation.
This disregard for facts, so far from being a corrective to the “New Yorker” approach, is merely a Marvel Comics form of philosophy and history, and it’s the only kind that can support ID. I think the less of Fuller just for this one claim. I can only imagine what the full work will lead me to think of him.
Packard, Alpheus. 1901. Lamarck, the founder of evolution: His life and work. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
A new The Daily Cultist is underway. It will be sleeker, more exciting, run on it’s own domain, and 40% more bitchin’!
Look lively!
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By Brendan O’Neill
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In the 21st Century, the term “flat-earther” is used to describe someone who is spectacularly – and seemingly wilfully – ignorant. But there is a group of people who claim they believe the planet really is flat. Are they really out there or is it all an elaborate prank?
Nasa is celebrating its 50th birthday with much fanfare and pictures of past glories. But in half a century of extraordinary images of space, one stands out.
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WORLD VIEW
330 BC Aristotle provides evidence of spherical earth
240 BC Eratosthenes of Cyrene accurately calculates circumference of globe
8th Century AD work by Bede shows acceptance of sphere idea
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On 24 December 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission took a photo now known as Earthrise. To many, this beautiful blue sphere viewed from the moon’s orbit is a perfect visual summary of why it is right to strive to go into space.
Not to everybody though. There are people who say they think this image is fake – part of a worldwide conspiracy by space agencies, governments and scientists.
Welcome to the world of the flat-earther.
Our attitude towards those who once upon a time believed in the flatness of the earth is apparent in a new Microsoft advert.
Photos such as this one are deemed fakes by flat-earthers
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Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the “edge of the world”, the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.
Satellite era
But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration – where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars – no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?
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  Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth  James McIntyre
Flat-earther |
Wrong.
Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the “conspiracy” that the Earth is round.
“People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers,” says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.
“Many use the term ‘flat-earther’ as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism.”
Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after “coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago”.
“I came to realise how much we take at face value,” he says. “We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses.”
Mr Davis now believes “the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite – it stretches horizontally forever”.
“And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep”, he adds.
James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website, has a slightly different take. “The Earth is, more or less, a disc,” he states. “Obviously it isn’t perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter.”
Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been “raised a globularist in the British state school system”, says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from “sheer incredulity to the conviction that it’s all just an elaborate joke”.
So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.
Disappearing ships
Mr McIntyre estimates “there are thousands”, but “without a platform for communication, a head-count is almost impossible”, he says. Mr Davis says he is currently creating an “online information repository” to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a “global community”.
“If you will forgive my use of the term ‘global’”, he says.
Aristotle knew the earth was not flat
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And for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some bizarre 21st Century jape. After all, most schoolchildren know that ships can disappear over the horizon, that satellites orbit the earth and that if you head along the equator you will eventually come back on yourself.
What about all the photos from space that show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Earth is round? “The space agencies of the world are involved in an international conspiracy to dupe the public for vast profit,” says Mr McIntyre.
John Davis also says “these photos are fake”.
And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world?
Mr McIntyre laughs. “This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions,” he says. “A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason – the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth.”
Ultimate conspiracy
Mr Davis says that being a flat-earther doesn’t have an impact on how one lives every day. “As a rule of thumb, we don’t have any fears of aircraft or other modes of transportation,” he says.
Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, is not surprised that flat-earthers simply write off the evidence that our planet is globular.
“Flat earth theory is one of the ultimate conspiracy theories,” she says.
“Naturally, flat earth believers think that the moon landings were faked, as were the photographs of earth from space.”
When Columbus sailed, it was known the world was not flat
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Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood’s book is her revelation that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.
Ms Garwood says it is an “historic fallacy” that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this “mad idea” once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without “falling off the edge of the world”.
In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn’t emerge until Victorian times.
Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an attack on established science.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of “Parallax” and founded a new school of “Zetetic astronomy”. He toured England arguing that the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.
In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as “in liquor or insane”.
And the spirit of these attacks lives on to the present day. The flat-earth myth remains the outlandish king in the realm of the conspiracy theorist.
And while we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, says Ms Garwood, the flat-earthers show things can go too far.
“It is always good to question ‘how we know what we know’, but it is also good to have the ability to accept compelling evidence – such as the photographs of Earth from space.”
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