Postmodernism, Science and Creationism
"For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a war against science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is an inherently Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most of all, after Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed 'discourse'." ... Patrick West's argument is that the postmodernist insistance that "there is no such thing as truth; there is only interpretation", and their readiness to interpret the (sexy) metaphors of uncertainty, chaos and relativity as the reality, while disregarding the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of all of those, have led to an erosion of understanding of the absolutes of science. Add to that the various political movements - of varying degrees of self-servingness and idealism - trying to qualify or undermine the actual or perceived supremacy of science in our culture, and there are a number of converging philosophies and fields of thought arguing that science is just another belief-system. Add to that the fact that, although technology may be privileged, science actually isn't - or there would not be such wisespread innumeracy and scientific illiteracy as there is - and, to paraphrase the very famous line, we've got a problem.

This is the one you mentioned to me on the phone which called to mind "Prove we don't live in a beer bottle" debates I had with fellow students in the Raven Wing cafeteria at UVic as an undergrad. It usually started with something like an assertion that we didn't know there wasn't a 5th dimension through which telepathy was conducted or some such thing, and reduced to the logical equivalent of asserting we lived in a giant beer bottle. That could not be disproved either. Maybe the maxim should be: "Complete lack of reproducible evidence for a conclusion does not make it true." Strange world.

posted by Anonymous at 22:34   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments