Expelled and More

John Derbyshire is taking flak over calling anti-evolutionism in general, and "Expelled" in particular, "A blood libel against civilization".

No, David. "The world is truly revealed as upside-down and backward" when intelligent young Jews sign up to the anti-science crusade.

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Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don't the two of you know, don't Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don't, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). You new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

I am sure you know the fine speech that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, but "people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed":

More … What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on Roper) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Bolt's More understood a thing you and Stein don't understand, the thing that Waugh credited Kipling with understanding in that quote I posted earlier in the week, and that Adolf Hitler (hey, you started the reductio ad Hitlerum), in his own way, and of course from the other side of the Wall, also understood.

You and Stein are playing a dangerous game, a game that Jews should be the very last to play. The ADL, for all its faults, at least understands that.

The heart and soul of my objection to the Creationists, and to the Intelligent Design / Intelligent Origin Theorists (ID/IOTs) is that bad theories kill people.

And these groups promote the bad theory that science is the enemy of civilization. (Nowhere spelled out more clearly than in Ben Stein's recent interview where he declares scientists guilty of gassing his relatives in Nazi germany.)

Well, one of the first things "a scientist" told me to do was drink a vial of sugar water -- mixed with polio vaccine. For every scientist involved in the Final Solution against Jews, there are thousands, at least, involved in a Final Solution against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Those who wish to call science their enemy are free to reject any solutions it comes up with. They are not free to reject them on my behalf.