Turtles All The Way Down

THE SUMMER of ’05 seems to be turning into a good old-fashioned sophomore bull session, arguing across the political divide about intelligent design vs. evolution. Paul Campos, for my money, has the best entry yet. He argues that it’s turtles all the way down, as in

The student asks the great sage, "O Master, upon what does the Earth rest?" The sage replies, "O seeker of knowledge, the Earth rests on the back of an enormous turtle." The student then asks, "Tell me, Wise One, upon what does this turtle rest?" The sage answers with annoyance, "Well obviously it’s turtles all the way down!"

As usual, the two sides are arguing past each other.

First, the secular liberal is mistaken in his belief that there are special people called "scientists" (or more broadly, "rational thinkers," "members of the reality-based community" etc.) whose beliefs are based solely on something called "the facts" or "evidence" or what have you, and who therefore don’t rely on faith-based reasoning.

Because it all comes down to faith. But the conservatives are arguing the opposite, and just as foolishly:

Second, the cultural conservative is mistaken in his belief - a belief held by many proponents of intelligent design theory - that a more tolerant attitude on the part of natural scientists toward supernatural explanations would confirm that the divine origins of life are empirically verifiable. Science can tell us nothing about God for the same reason that a comprehensive physical description of the Mona Lisa, down to the level of subatomic particles, would tell us nothing worth knowing about the Mona Lisa.

The British radio astronomer Bernard Lovell recently told Mary Wakefield that he wasn’t too sure about the Big Bang. This is the guy who helped invent the radio telescope that was used to detect the background radiation from the Big Bang.

"The Big Bang? Well it is of course conventional wisdom that there was one, but I’m not so sure," said Sir Bernard. "There is a tendency to talk about it as if it happened, but we really do not know."
He looked, as I remember, a little impatient. What about black holes, surely they exist?
"Everyone now believes in black holes, but they forget that the evidence is just circumstantial," he said. "One infers a black hole from plotting in detail the structure of a distant galaxy but no one really knows."
I felt confused. Why does everybody talk about these things as if they’ve been proved? I asked. "Young people get enthusiastic. And I suppose they just think it makes a better story."

Of course, Sir Bernard Lovell is 90. He could just be confused. Or maybe he is a postmodernist, and he believes in “narratives.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

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