Ben Stein Expelled: WTF?

Cafe Society
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Protesting the epistemological value of scientific method is philosophical masturbation. Scientific method is about discovering what is empirically real. Pin headed, solopsistic objections about its absolute (and empirically irelevant) epistemological “truth” are not even rooted in any genuine epistemological or philosphical purity of heart. The epistemological objection, from what I’ve seen, either represents a straw clutching, obfuscatory attempt to cast doubt on the empirical value of scientific information which undermine religious beliefs about the physical world (religionist assertions about the physical world can’t compete on a level playing field with science so the religionsists deny that the field exists at all) or it stems from pure contrarian pedantry.

Neither case is particularly useful and the former can be culturally damaging when it seeks to redefine what kind of empirical inquiry should be considered “valid” academically.

What do you mean by “standing?” it certainly deserves to be unhindered by the state, as theocrats like Stein would like to do.

Yes, and the freedom to teach science in science classes is very much a political concern.

Not necessarily. “Integrity” comes from the Latin word integer, which means “whole, intact, unbroken, uncorrupted.” One may use the term in relation to moral or ethical fidelity, of course, but one may also speak of the structural “integrity” of a bridge with no reference at all to ethics or morality. I used the term in reference to scientific method, and I meant it to refer to the soundness of the method, not the morality of it.

Science is a method, not an epistemology.

Well, morons oppose it too.

Why not?

Doomed to what? Cite?

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Personally, I don’t think that Ben Stein believes much of the crap he’s spouting. He just realized what Ann Coulter figured out first - there are a lot of angry white men out there who need to be continually fed things to keep their outrage up, and they’ll pay for it. Why bother writing scholarly books that tax your mind and don’t sell when you can just write/make a movie with a lot of red meat for conservatives and get rich?

Dinesh D’Souza is another smart conservative who got tired of writing thoughtful articles and books and came up with The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Cha-ching!

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To hijack the hijack, I wouldn’t bet Kirk knows anything about lighting. On professional sets, the actors sit in their dressing rooms while the set is prepared, and unless you are curious about such things you look at your script or snooze until you get a call. (We know how curious Kirk must be.) My daughter learned a lot more about these things while acting in NYU student films than she ever did on professional sets.

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So like Moveon.org except that they figured out how to make money off of it?

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:rolleyes: Left, right, whatever.

Disingenuousness is disingenuousness.

Ben wants to believe in creationism, fine.

He wants to talk about having it taught in schools, fine.

To suggest that HS science teacher’s rights are being squelched because they can’t teach mythology – or that his rights are being squelched because the courts or school boards won’t let him force science teachers to include mythology in their curriculum, not fine.

Not fine not because of his opinions or beliefs, but because he’s being intellectually dishonest, and he has the capacity to know that he is. That, to me, is immoral. That moveon does so too, or that Bush or Clinton or Coulter or anyone else does, doesn’t change the morality of Stein’s actions.

Again, there are all sorts of levels of disgust. This—to me—is one of the inner circles of, for lack of a better term, intellectual disgust. Put the ridiculous Dahmer comparisons aside for a moment. How do you feel about people who make explicitly racist comments? Not arguably ok/well meaning comments, but something directly vile. So what if that person isn’t in a position to hire anyone or otherwise affect race relations. Is disgust too strong of a word? What about someone who clearly denounces homosexuality, yet is discovered to be in a homosexual relationship? Care about whether they’re gay? Didn’t think so. But what word would you use to describe your view of their character now that the hypocrisy is showing?

I’m certainly not suggesting Ben made racist or homophobic comments anywhere. I’m just stating that there are all sorts of places where someone’s character is called into question based on purely intellectual shenanigans. To me, Ben’s bullshit with regard to teaching mythology in science classes, his general disingenuousness, rises to similar levels of vulgarity.

IMHO, I think society would be a bit better off if we treated such dishonesty with the same moral approbation as we do racism.

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Good point. I guess it’s not the money that damns your soul. It’s the easy money.

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I like this quote!

Here’s the part where I can’t agree. It’s become de rigueur in certain circles to refer to science, and especially any science perceived as being in conflict with closely-held non-scientific beliefs such a Young Earth Creationism, as a religion. The problem is that saying it doesn’t make it so -

Does evolutionary biology dictate a system of ethics? No.
Does evolutionary biology espouse sacred rituals? No.
Does evolutionary biology perpetuate a dogma of sacred stories? No.

I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is about science that these critics think is religious, and the best I can think of is this:

They believe that science’s rejection of questions like those raised by ‘Intelligent Design’ is an unthinking dogmatic response. What they don’t realize is that for Intelligent Design to be a more scientific than other beliefs, they’ll have to back it up with the currency of science, something empirically testable. Unfortunately, most concepts of Intelligent Design are not empirically testable and without some sort of data to back it up, the concepts of Intelligent Design aren’t a serious challenge to the empirical work of evolutionary biologists. They deserve a kind of “Oh, that’s a nice belief” and nothing more. In science, the onus is on the person espousing the new idea to do the groundwork of building an empirical foundation for their idea.

In the case of Intelligent Design, many of the adherents to this idea demand the serious consideration that can only come when they present empirical tests of their ideas. They are without such tests, and even the most “scientific” of the adherents of ID, Michael Behe for example, doesn’t seem to be moving any closer to actually conducting tests. What they have done instead is lie, for example in Edge of Evolution, Behe claims that there aren’t any new biochemical functions in HIV despite its high rate of mutation and therefore high rate of evolutionary change. Instead, as it turns out, the Vpu gene in HIV-1 is new, and even functions differently biochemically from SIV Vpu. This sort of simple misrepresentation or lying not only shows that adherents of ID aren’t ready to perform tests of their own ideas, but also that they’re willing to misrepresent the work of others.

Science isn’t some goddess on a pedestal that needs to be defended by monkeys flinging poo - it’s more like a contract by which practitioners agree to use a methodology to refine ideas into those that can be empirically validated and demonstrated to be useful. Proponents of ID violate that contract, and they should be denigrated for that, just as scam artists who violate a contract in commerce should be. The voices of people objecting to ID aren’t shouting down heretics, they’re exposing charlatans so that others aren’t taking in by assuming goodwill and trust.
… but I digress from Cafe Society territory - please return to your regularly scheduled programming. :o

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Forgot about this story; another film I need to see along with Bella.

Would make a good cartoon, Ben holding that giant eye from the cleareyes commercial and making some sort of comment about intelligent design.