William Dembski is having dinner with his student fans and the leaders of an apologetics ministry here in 48 hours.
Rick is a friend who wants to work for the Discovery Institute. He is over 70, got his PhD at 68, in history, working on William Jennings Bryan. He is a zealot for YEC and his pastor allows him to give talks on YEC and the flood as the source of sedimentary rock.
That’s why I asked that question. Thanks for the replies.
Anyway before Dembski comes I was thinking about Discovery’s Richard Weikart and his Darwin and Hitler book from 2004. Linking the two.
Now recently he has published Darwinian Racism going one step further, by linking modern white nationalism to Darwinian ideas. He published with the Discovery Institute Press.
Dembski lives here in the Dallas area now. In 48 hours he will be admired by students possibly in awe of him as he speaks to 300 or more. He is 63. The ID thing has been going on for 30 years.
Well, I am thinking more about my friendship with Rick given I am a historian of science and religion who is an EC.
I really want to ask Dembski about Weikart’s claims. If you have any thoughts on that, you have 48 hours to tell me!
A corruption of an original idea/philosophy/religion indicates the creative wickedness of the human, not an evil in the original idea/philosophy/religion.
If it did, how should one judge Christianity, for example? And its links to white supremacy and white nationalist ideas?
I wouldn’t ask him about anything Weikart has written unless he brings it up himself. What is Bill supposed to be speaking about? Given his recent articles it could be about AI.
That’s got to be one of the most ridiculous ideas ever argued: white supremacy was alive and well long before Darwin and white nationalism just grew out of it.
It is true that evolution has been invoked in support of racism, and not only by fringe groups. Eugenics was often proclaimed to be one’s scientific duty in biology textbooks of the 20’s and 30’s, at least in the the US and Britain. In reality, such claims, along with social Darwinism, Marxism, “weeding out the weak and sick”, etc. misrepresent evolution by natural selection as a goal-oriented way of Progress rather than the reality of “whatever works well enough to survive and reproduce”. However, as evolution doesn’t tell us “ought”, it is true that I could invoke evolution as a justification for trying to fool people into thinking that they should advance my evolutionary self-interest. Dawkins was dismayed to learn that one of his big fans was an architect of the Enron financial fraud, but doesn’t have any good reason why his own ethical preferences ought to be followed by others. Eugenics continues to be prominent in pro-abortion arguments and laws (e.g., Iceland largely exterminating Downs syndrome), and many of the arguments made in support of using embryonic stem cells are similarly problematic in dismissing rights of the embryo.
As already pointed out, however, evolution is neither the original source nor the only thing invoked in support of racism. One can honestly argue that the track record of science on the subject is not good; one cannot honestly argue that this proves that evolution itself is inherently evil.