Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world. According to a recent poll, 48 percent of the people in the United States today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution. Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught. Should evolution be taught in the schools? Should arithmetic be taught? Should history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense.
A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. ... It's nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully co-exist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. The Hutterite memes are "clever" not to include any memes about the virtue of destroying outsiders. If they did, we would have to combat them. We tolerate the Hutterites because they harm only themselves–though we may well insist that we have the right to impose some further openness on their schooling of their own children. Other religious memes are not so benign. The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for.
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 516, Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Those naturalists are real sweet guys.
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69 comments:
As usual with these guys, it's hard to tell exactly what he means. Is he saying that teaching your children that the Bible is true and Darwinism false is a jailable ofense?
Cagey, isn't he? (Pun intended.)
I'd say he's saying that you get to keep your children and stay out of jail if you let the state override your authority to the extent of indoctrinating them in anything he thinks it would be a "terrible offense" to "misinform" them about, including Darwinism.
Meaning, presumably, that if you persist in keeping your children out of such state-run indoctrination, stronger measures can be taken.
His comments about the Hutterites are pretty explicit.
No doubt he'd be really happy about the German government's crackdown on home schoolers. It's pretty much a textbook application of his policy recommendations.
Some of the surrounding passages clarify things a lot:
"We see in every Christian subspecies the battle of memes--should women be ordained? should we go back to the Latin liturgy? -- and the same can also be observed in the variety of Judaism and Islam. We must have a similar mixture of respect and self-protective caution about memes. This is already accepted practice, but we tend to avert our attention from its implications. We preach freedom of religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie's head because he insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It endangers us all."
"Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or rewards for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder."
...
"If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods ... then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being--the well-being of all of us on the planet--depends on the education of our descendants."
I'm well aware of the surrounding passages. Frankly, I thought the Hutterite comments were even more "clarifying." Dennett is explicit that even pacifist, non-threatening religious people must be deprived of the right to educate their own children, because in his opinion it is wrong and dangerous for them to be allowed *even to teach their children that Darwinism is false*. Not to teach their children to be suicide bombers, mind you. Merely to refrain from teaching them that Darwinism is true.
And Dennett is quite clear that such forcible teaching of whatever the elites insist is necessary for children must happen, that it is an "offense" to prevent and resist it.
This is arrogant totalitarianism, plain and simple.
Nydia McGrew, do you think the state should intervene if a religion refused to let children learn to read and write, and do arithmetic? If so, then we agree on the principle, and disagree only about which cases of deliberately imposed ignorance should not be tolerated. I would say that teaching children that the earth is flat, that there are no such things as germs, that electric wires are safe and fun to play with--that would be evil sowing of misinformation. Your children's lives will depend on whether we all recognize the EVOLUTION of anti-bioptic-resistant disease vectors.
You don't own your children, and you don't have the right to do whatever you choose with them.
Or do you disagree with that?
Daniel Dennett
If you are really Daniel Dennett, I suppose I should be honored that your vanity search bots turned up my highly obscure little personal blog in a nanosecond and brought so (in)famous a philosopher here to comment.
There is a gigantic difference, as should be evident to any sane man, between teaching children that playing with electric wires is safe and teaching them that neo-Darwinism is false.
As for more general ignorance (e.g., not seeing that they learn to read), reasonable people can differ on what degree of libertarianism should be allowed. I am inclined somewhat more to the libertarian side on this and hence to think that the degree of state interference to *require* the passing of knowledge to children should be kept to a strict minimum. If one agrees with some extremely minimal requirement of education for children, that is a *far cry* (pace your comments) with "agreeing with the principle" that the state should be able to impose all sorts of what is considered general knowledge upon minor children against their parents' wishes.
Your example of antibiotic resistance is utterly ludicrous. The most committed young earth creationist (which I am not, in case you are wondering) believes in the sort of microevolution involved in the development of antibiotic resistance. Nor is there, in fact, something for children to "recognize," as though children are going to go around "playing" with antibiotic resistant bacteria. The relevant decisions concerning antibiotic resistance are matters of policy and medical practice, not remotely akin to playing with turned-on electric wires. If a person grows up and happens not to know about antibiotic resistance and is applying to enter one of the fields where that knowledge is relevant, the field itself should screen him out.
Your hysterical false dilemmas and silly equivalencies are duly noted and logged. And instructive. Totalitarians need very little excuse, it appears.
Compare the following similar bad argument: "The state should be able to prevent or punish parents who want to lock their children in their rooms and starve them to death. If you grant this, you agree with the principle, and everything else is mere detail. It is therefore a mere difference of degree or detail to say that the state should be able to micromanage the daily diet of all children and should be able to punish parents who put their toddlers in 'time out' for ten minutes instead of two minutes."
The fact is that we can't just make stuff up, declare that it all somehow "lies on a continuum," and then argue for highly controversial and invasive state policies while claiming that a person who supports evidently reasonable policies has "already granted the principle." This poor argument is the mirror image of the anarcho-libertarian's argument that there should be no government at all, because to allow any government at all is to allow tyrannies of all sorts. These are immature positions in public policy.
Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale...
Slavery and child abuse have never been tenets of the Christian religion (are in fact condemned by it) but were quite popular with the militarized atheistic regimes of the 20th century. One can only guess what he means by "discrimination," but I think I can.
...do you think the state should intervene if a religion refused to let children learn to read and write, and do arithmetic?...I would say that teaching children that the earth is flat, that there are no such things as germs, that electric wires are safe and fun to play with--that would be evil sowing of misinformation.
And of course no Christian parents I know of, even of the most reclusive and fundamentalist sort, teach their children these things. His technique in argument is really a sort of intellectual scatology.
If I had said something extreme like, "Parents should be able to tell children anything they want, and the state has no business caring what that is under any circumstances," reductios might be relevant. As in the case of extreme libertarian statements like, "There should be no laws except against force and fraud." But of course I never made such an extreme statement.
Even the mish-mash of alleged counterexamples contains harmless absurdities. Frankly, I can't imagine bringing in Child Protective Services and taking children away from their parents because their parents teach them that the world is flat, stupid and misleading as that is. It's not as though they aren't going to figure it out eventually. These totalitarian types also seem remarkably casual about the sheer trauma to the child of the widespread involvement of the state in overseeing and punishing the parents. I was reading recently about a woman who left her 4-year-old son in the car for five minutes while buying a gallon of milk. It was not the sort of thing I would do, and was unwise, but the little boy was much more traumatized by fear of the police after his mother got in huge trouble (because some faux Good Samaritan filmed the awful sight of the kid playing video games peacefully in the car and then called the police) than by the five-minute milk run. Nobody has a sense of perspective about these things anymore, and the Dennett types (whether our current commentator is the real DD or a pretender) seem to think the Almighty State can do nothing but good to children by barging into a family like a bull in a China shop.
William Luse: "And of course no Christian parents I know of, even of the most reclusive and fundamentalist sort, teach their children these things."
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/26/snake-handling-puts-religious-freedom-public-safety-in-spotlight-after-kentucky/
From that story:
Coots, whose son Cody will now replace him at the church and has vowed to continues the practice, appeared on the National Geographic reality show "Snake Salvation," which was not renewed for a second season after it finished airing in the fall. In a statement to FoxNews.com, National Geographic officials said they were "constantly struck" by Coots' devout convictions despite the health and legal peril he faced.
"Those risks were always worth it to him and his congregants as a means to demonstrate their unwavering faith," the statement read.
I don't think this is terribly relevant here, but neither are most of the rhetorical examples that have been thrown about. If there is a point it is that there are hazards to irrational beliefs and they are passed along via indoctrination (not only religion).
Lydia, you haven't said where you would draw the line. I'm sure everyone agrees that the state cannot abide children being indoctrinated to become suicide bombers, so there is a limit. And perhaps more important than the point where the state must necessarily (or reasonably) intervene there is an ethical question: what right does the child have to be raised in a manner than enables them to be independent, rational thinkers? Society has a stake in the matter too because widespread ignorance carries real risks, consider the anti-vaccination movement, or climate change denialism. Anything that sequesters children from access to knowledge, or fosters a disdain for it, is problematic. I'm less interested in the legality than what you think is right, as a moral parent. You have your beliefs, arrived at by whatever process, what right do you have to impose those on a child? Is it not more ethical to present them with as many tools and as broad a purview as possible from which to form their own?
-A
I actually don't agree with phrases like "there is a line," though I understand that they are easy to slip into rhetorically. I think we need to be careful about false sorites arguments or creations. Teaching your child to be a suicide bomber doesn't fall on any sort of continuum with teaching your child even something weird (and, in fact, false) such as that the sun goes around the earth. It's apples and oranges, so the language of line-drawing is, even in the bizarre case (which I just made up) of a parent that teaches the child heliocentrism, misleading language. Suicide bombing has nothing to do with heliocentrism, however stupid the latter is.
I also think that you are not clearly setting aside the question of when the state may intervene, because of your reference to the interests of society, which comes later in your second paragraph. That language, of course, *is* an allusion to a justification for state intervention.
To bring in ethics or morality alone as an appeal to the parents is rather odd in any event, because presumably you are envisaging parents who _believe_ whatever you consider to be pernicious nonsense. Hence, the parent would presumably say that his moral duty _is_ to teach the child such-and-such (whatever it might be), because to teach the opposite would be to teach falsehood and hence to lie. Dennett's example is not of remaining _silent_ on neo-Darwinism. Rather, he is saying that the child must be taught that it is true. If you put it to a parent who believes that it is false that he actually has an ethical duty to teach that it is true, it's obvious what his answer would be, right?
Nor is Dennett merely talking about giving tools. He's talking about substantive content.
And education is, as any sensible person knows, impossible without substantive content. Nobody who is responsibly raising a child _just_ teaches the child to read (say) and doesn't teach him anything more contentful than that about life and the world around him, just letting him "find out for himself." Indeed, it would be irresponsible to do so.
The language of "not imposing one's belief" is always a bait and switch in any event. Children will _always_ be raised in some preferred view of the world or other. The secularists pushing Dennett's position are _not_ proposing to raise a child _without_ a world view, which he will only "choose for himself" when much older. That whole idea is a fiction, literally impossible. I suppose it is in a sense to Dennett's credit that he makes no pretense of that kind. He declares open war, rather, and declares openly that the set of views which _he_ considers not only true but extremely important must be taught to all children in a civilized society, with or without their parents' permission.
At least he admits his religious commitments, as it were.
Re-reading that I realize there might be a hint that I'm suggest you *don't* do that as a parent, which I am not. I just want to see if we are on the same page regarding the general ethical principle.
-A
I don't think there _is_ a single general ethical principle here. Child-raising is a matter of prudence, wisdom, and love. There is no single principle that is going to answer a question such as, "At what age, if ever, do I introduce ______ proposition, which I think is false, to my child's mind?" There are a _vast_ number of variables concerning what x is, how you would introduce it, how you would teach about it, what it would even mean for the child to "decide for himself," etc., etc., etc.
I suspect that on a huge number of specifics, Mr. A., you and I would _not_ agree. But that's life. Indeed, in 2014, Western society is more polarized than it has ever been on a great many issues.
I'm quite sure that we could easily find some proposition P for which _you_ would think it horribly irresponsible and harmful to teach a child P or even to treat P (in raising a child) as an open question and a respectable position, but I would think _precisely_ the same about teaching the child not-P.
The person styling himself "Daniel Dennett" above gave the example of teaching children that it is safe to play with live electrical wires. Obviously, we would consider a parent to be causing endangerment to his child if he taught that, or even if he taught that it's an open question (a live option, as it were!) whether that is safe.
There are a surprising number of issues, especially when we contrast the skeptic community (or the Brights, or whatever they call themselves) with, say, conservative religious people, where *each side* thinks that the other wants to do something equivalent (in terms of harmfulness) of raising kids to believe it's safe to play with electrical wires. When social rifts that deep appear, a meta-principle about "giving children tools" and "not imposing beliefs" or what-not just isn't going to settle the disagreement.
Heh. I hadn't thought of snake-handling cults, probably because they're extreme outliers to a Christian of my stripe. Even so, there's a big difference between voluntarily handling snakes at your own peril and outfitting women and children with suicide vests. The snake handlers don't allow children to participate.
I don't think this is terribly relevant here...
Then why point to it?
If there is a line to be drawn, it would probably have to be at the point of severe physical or emotional abuse. But the state already has legal grounds to intervene in these cases. As to the content of what one teaches ones's own children, that line is very hard to draw. There are Nazis who call themselves Christians and systematically pass along the hate to their kids. As far as I know, the state does nothing to stop it.
Getting back to what Dennett's implying: if parents can be coerced by the state for teaching their kids stupid stuff, such as the falsehood of Darwinism, then what's to stop me from advocating the same for parents who teach their children that there is no God? It's useful to remember that Dennett is cut from the same cloth as Dawkins, who thinks raising your kids Catholic is a form of child abuse.
If home or private schooling is happening with the purpose of keeping a child from being exposed to knowledge that is objectionable. The insistence on an absolute disavowal of any possibility of state intervention seems a bit bullying. If there was rampant abuse of children's rights to be free thinkers (and society's needs for them to be that) then maybe a policy of compulsory public education might be preferable. I personally find the idea distasteful because it conflicts with other principles, but those aren't absolute principles and they must be weighed against one another.
Raising epistemological ethics wasn't meant as an appeal to the zealot who believes with absolute certainty that they know the truth and that it requires them to indoctrinate their children into it. That's a lost cause. It was meant for rational people who accept that knowledge is fallible and who believe that knowledge should be justified. Indoctrination is the imposition of content without rationale or justification: here is the truth rather than here is why we believe this to be the truth. I'm scared to venture into specifics if "Darwinism" might be contentious here, but you ought to be able to get a long way down evolutionary theory without much controversy. If you want to stop short of complete common descent, or want to believe that some extra-Darwinian processes could have been in play (supernatural or not), whatever, but the basic facts of evolution -- anything that would be part of a high school curriculum -- can't seriously be in question.
While a certain amount of "substantive content" is inevitable I think it is entirely possible to minimize the ideological bias in that content, focus heavily on critical thinking, and provide a wide range of perspectives -- particularly where there are areas on contention -- real contention, not fringe, agenda-driven contention (I am well aware of how easy it to muddy the waters here and confuse the issue, particular when it comes down to arguing about scientific evidence for policy makers who are ill-equipped to judge it.) It is fine to start out with "don't put the fork in the electrical socket" and defer Maxwell's equations for a bit, but I think it is repugnant to lay eschatology on a child. Any method or content that is psychologically manipulative should be avoided. If they are necessary in any way for the beliefs to come out "the right way" then something fishy is going on...
Of course there isn't _a single_ ethical principle at play here, but I am proposing that among others this is one: allow the formation of beliefs to be as free as possible. I'm sure you feel your beliefs were freely formed and are justifiable, and would recoil from any suggestion to the contrary. You _want_ them to be that. When it comes to teaching children it should not be a case of the ends justify the means -- that it is all good if they wind up believing the right things -- that undermines their (eventual) autonomy.
If those who do decline to place their children in public education were vociferous followers of that principle I'm sure nobody would have any inclination to talk about state intervention in the matter.
-A
I'm sorry, I just think there's a lot of rhetoric and bias going into your comment that is going unrecognized. You seem to have absolutely *no idea* how ideological and indoctrinating the people are who, I would be willing to bet a good deal, are on (in some sense) "your side" of various issues--political, empirical, moral, etc. In that sense I think there's a *gigantic* lack of self-awareness involved when you think of banning home schooling as a way of encouraging critical thought and open-mindedness. On the contrary. I think the home schooled kids I know are among the more flexible and the public schooled among the more indoctrinated.
You also seem not to see the vast amounts of space between a narrow-minded zealot and a person who truly thinks (wrongly) that he can give his children a neutral up-bringing that is "as free as possible." Both are misguided, and indeed the latter very often is a narrow-minded zealot without in the least realizing it. That you would think "zealot" the moment I spoke about truth and about thinking that you would be lying to your child to hold this or that to be an open question says a good deal. What's funny is that you evidently don't think that it is narrow-minded zealotry to hold that in some sense the majority of neo-Darwinian theory is established as fact beyond the reach of question. And the same, it appears, with anthropogenic global warming. But I wouldn't be surprised if you think it is zealotry and not giving one's child a sufficiently "free" upbringing if one does not present one's 14-year-old with a run-down of how to use five different methods of contraception.
As for justifying one's beliefs, you're talking to an epistemologist, so you're going to get no argument from me about the greatness of evidence and reasons where these are appropriate, which is in a great many cases. Not for 1 + 1 = 2, however, which is foundational. And not for "It is wrong to torture babies to death" either, which is also knowable a priori. There are some such things.
To repeat, however, I find it a real head-shaker that you evidently think that those who think as you do are in a position to decide whether home schooled children are getting a sufficiently "free" and "open-minded" education, to decide if they aren't, and to put them in public school (of all things) as a corrective if you consider it necessary.
Any method or content that is psychologically manipulative should be avoided. If they are necessary in any way for the beliefs to come out "the right way" then something fishy is going on...
Sounds like a description of the public schools.
"My side" doesn't require me to believe that there are wide spread conspiracies among experts from ranging ideological backgrounds, including Christian. I'm curious what you think our agenda is? Or are we all just deluded and the matters more properly understood by a minority with (overall) lesser credentials in the relevant domains and a distinct set of ideological predispositions that coincidentally explain their alternate vantage?
But let's slow down here. You said:
"Hence, the parent would presumably say that his moral duty _is_ to teach the child such-and-such (whatever it might be), because to teach the opposite would be to teach falsehood and hence to lie."
If that parent believed such-and-such to such a degree then they must believe it with justification, and that justification should be compelling enough that their (sufficiently intellectually matured) student could be convinced by it as well. There's a pragmatic bootstrapping process that has to happen, we aren't going to justify the alphabet, or not sticking forks in electrical outlets, or even (initially) why you can't hit your little brother, but for philosophical/ideological issues it can -- and I will argue *should* -- wait. If that isn't the process then it is also fair to look backwards as well and ask whether those beliefs were actually formed in the parent with reason or whether they too were indoctrinated and a (thankfully leaky) cycle of false knowledge propagated (perhaps, for the sophisticated, under the auspices of foundational or a priori knowledge?)
I'm arguing that the moral duty is to create an independent thinker (a complex, messy process); that there is an epistemological imperative that should trump whatever ideology you have because you must believe that ideology is properly founded, and if it is it can only be properly founded in the student if they have that justification as well. The parent/teacher's moral duty to teach some specific content cannot supercede this, except where it is a necessary expedient in the bootstrapping process.
The word 'zealot' was a poor choice on my part because it isn't precise and was inadvertently incendiary. My carelessness was a result of failing to imagine that you might identify with the hypothesized parent. I'd given you more credit than that.
While it really isn't my preference to discuss this in terms of public policy, your insistence on the priority of the liberties as a parent over those of their children and non-intervention of government are grossly hypocritical in light of the views on abortion rights that I see in other blog posts here. I'm sure you'll have another dismissive, head-shaking explanation for how the cases are different, but those are as ideologically bound, and thus your personal views being imposed on others, as any. It seems you'd like to have it both ways.
-A
If I understand your implications in the last portion correctly, you are implying that it is hypocritical to restrict a parent's (specifically, a mother's) right to have her child torn limb from limb (quite literally) while upholding a public policy that gives her freedom to teach her child something contrary to the present scientific mainstream consensus?
I don't think such a bizarre attempt at moral equivalence even requires comment, beyond spelling it out in plain words.
I'm very happy to create an independent thinker. As you say, a complex, messy process. One of its most important parts is to avoid a blind deference to credentials and to sweeping statements about what all the credentialed experts believe. It's rather amusing that you should simultaneously sneer at lesser-credentialed hoi polloi who dissent from the credentialed experts while *in the same comment* extolling the virtues of independent thinking.
The content to be conveyed in education is vast in any event, by anybody's reckoning. In a field like history, it would obviously cause the conveying of mere facts to grind to a halt if one had to give one's background justification for "Caesar was killed in the forum" and "Joan of Arc died in 1430." Yes, yes, I know, that isn't what you meant, but you might be surprised at how often decisions about how much controversy to teach come up. Which is why it's important for parents to choose teachers and curriculum wisely. Consider even a statement like, "Richard III had his nephews killed in the tower." *I* would say that it is merely fringey people who think that is false, but obviously they would beg to differ. That doesn't mean a history textbook is a poor textbook because it doesn't give a range of perspectives including those of the Richard III Society. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Even deciding what dissent is fringe or beneath noticing can be a contentious matter, as some of your own examples above illustrate quite well.
Imagine Daniel Dennett's furious reaction to suggestions that we "teach the controversy" in K-12 concerning neo-Darwinism. One doesn't really have to imagine. Numerous lawsuits tell us what the Daniel Dennetts of the world think about that proposal.
"I'm arguing that the moral duty is to create an independent thinker"
Anonymous does not actually arguing that there is a moral duty to create an "independent thinker." I have failed to recognize an argument for said proposition. It seems rather he says it, and then attempts to attach a meaning to it that is impracticable. In fact, it is a Trojan Horse for secularist indoctrination. It sounds wonderful, but since the definition of independent thinking is impracticable, it will quickly be replaced with an anti-Christian agenda. Or, more correctly, an even more anti-Christian one than the present public school system.
By you definition, the Christian would have to give up on the religion because Jesus explicitly tells us to not forbid children from coming to Him, so Jesus was against creating free thinkers, which is, of course, the ultimate evil. Problem is there never has been and never will be a free thinker by your standards, so it is difficult for me to condemn people for not doing the literally impossible.
You can create a thinking individual while exposing them to religious beliefs from a very young age. Eventually teaching the kid logic, if Christianity is irrational as many claim, then shouldn't they be convinced they were taught wrongly by some rational proof? Maybe they might experience social pressure to stay in the Church at that point, but does that really matter? How harmful would it be if they don't actually believe the things taught there? Even should they succumb to the social pressure, they still could be free-thinking scientists in their occupation.
I find it more than a little bizarre that A. finds eschatology especially repugnant to teach a child. What? So for a parent to teach that Jesus is coming back again and will take believers to heaven is repugnant? Totally weird. Perhaps "eschatology" is a euphemism for "the doctrine of hell." That is what Richard Dawkins says is "child abuse" to teach a child. What then? If one believes in both heaven and hell, does one refuse to answer questions about what happens to people when they die? This whole attempt to declare particular religious truths off-limits to teach to children is utterly impracticable for anyone who actually _believes_ the propositions. Children are naturally curious and are going to ask about a lot of deep things: Who made the world? Where do we go when we die? Is the world ever going to end? And so forth. It's laughable to declare an entire region of theology (such as eschatology) to be "repugnant" to teach a child about.
In fact, what's funny about it is the narrow-minded secular perspective. Secularists need to have more imagination or to get out more. From the perspective of a thinking Christian, it makes as little sense to refuse to teach a child about eschatology as it would for a scientifically-minded secularist to refuse to teach an inquisitive child about further scientific theory. If one believes the things are true, important, and interesting, it is perfectly natural even to take joy in expanding the child's horizons and knowledge of the system as a whole.
"If I understand your implications in the last portion correctly, you are implying that it is hypocritical to restrict a parent's (specifically, a mother's) right to have her child torn limb from limb (quite literally) while upholding a public policy that gives her freedom to teach her child something contrary to the present scientific mainstream consensus?"
Given that I anticipated and addressed this response in my post I can only assume it is rhetoric for the benefit of the others in your echo chamber. You know that my views are not represented by your characterization and that the equivalence I was making is that of imposing your beliefs on those who don't share them.
-A
The "anticipation and address," presumably, is to say that it is "ideologically bound" to hold that abortion involves tearing unborn children limb from limb. Perhaps you need to do a little research, because that is a physiologically accurate description of a couple of widely used abortion methods.
Not that I intend this to be a debate about abortion, but let me put it this way: You do not appear to be an epistemological relativist. For example, you think it possible to know whether neo-Darwinism is true or whether man is responsible for global warming. I am also not an epistemological relativist. I think it is possible to know that abortion is killing an unborn young human being. That being the case, it should be evident that preventing a parent from killing their unborn child is *not even remotely comparable* to preventing a parent from teaching a child something contrary to the scientific consensus concerning, e.g., human origins. If you even had a modicum of *prudence* you would recognize the incongruity of the attempted comparison.
Declaring all of this to be "ideologically bound" and "imposing one's personal views on others" is a mere retreat into relativism when convenient to avoid admitting the weirdness of the comparison.
After all, one could just as easily say that it is merely one's "personal views" and "ideologically bound" that enslaving Africans is mistreating human beings. Then one could have a fun time accusing an abolitionist of hypocrisy because, I dunno, he has policy objections to raising the minimum wage.
Is it even worth talking with someone who takes this type of thing seriously? I rather doubt it.
"I find it more than a little bizarre that A. finds eschatology especially repugnant to teach a child."
To be honest, I find most secular arguments a little bizarre and in many cases utterly detached from reality, which I guess one would suspect if there is a God and Christianity is true.
Quite a few philosophers think killing newborns is fine, too. Giubilini and Minerva think it should be able to be done because the baby would be a burden on the family. They call this "after-birth abortion." Perhaps what is next is calling pro-life home schoolers hypocrites because they oppose "after-birth abortion rights" while upholding parental latitude in children's science classes.
It would make a good deal more sense to turn the accusation of hypocrisy around:
When it comes to a phony "child's right" to be taught according to the free-thinker-preferred science curriculum, A. is very solicitous.
But when it comes to that _same individual child's_ very right to life, even a few years ago? Not so much. Then his right not to be killed must be at his parents' whim.
This shows up the hollowness of all the talk of children's rights. It's all about what my old blog acquaintance Zippy used to call the "free and equal supermen." The untermenschen can go to hell, I guess, if they get in the way of the desires of the free and equal supermen.
No, by "ideologically bound" I meant that I don't share your belief that a first trimester fetus has a _soul_ or anything else that puts its rights ahead of its mother's. The graphic details are unpleasant, and I don't think it is anything to be treated lightly, but the point was that you have no qualms about imposing your personal beliefs politically.
-A
"It would make a good deal more sense to turn the accusation of hypocrisy around"
But isn't that the liberal/secularist way? So much seems inverted to reality. They'll claim I'm a hypocrite when I support the death penalty for murderers when I'm pro-life, but then turn around and act like human life is so precious we can't take it from a murderer even though we can take it from a baby. So, wait, I'm the hypocrite? It's just confusing.
I base my opposition to abortion on the fact that the unborn child is an unborn child. No references to souls are necessary.
Nice attempt to pretend that the abortion debate is all and only about the child's first trimester. I await with bated breath your word, A., that you have joined your local right to life organization so that you can fight for the abolition of second and third trimester abortions. But of course I do oppose deliberately killing innocent human beings even when they are very young. You, on the other hand, wait to fret about their rights until you can use that as an excuse for imposing a school curriculum on the whole family.
I don't share your belief that a first trimester fetus has a _soul_ or anything else that puts its rights ahead of its mother's. The graphic details are unpleasant, and I don't think it is anything to be treated lightly...
Why not? If it has no soul it's not as though you're killing a human being. I don't see why I should treat it with particular seriousness.
...you have no qualms about imposing your personal beliefs politically.
From the echo chamber:
Isn't this what a branch of government did to every unborn child in America from 1973 onward? I guess the accusation against Lydia might stand as long as we beg the question of the unborn's humanity.
Sorry to rat-a-tat-tat your comment box, Lydia, but if it will make A feel any better:
My parents indoctrinated me in Christianity. It wasn't the most enthusiastic and disciplined indoctrination, but it was there, eschcatology included. They even told me (that most invidious lie) that there was a Santa Claus. When I grew up I left Christianity to become an independent, free-thinking atheist. Liberated, I wondered resentfully why they hadn't taught me this when I was a child. So much time wasted.
But there's a sad end to the story. The problem with truly independent free thinking is that its appetite for ever more independence is insatiable. I couldn't just rest comfortably in the theology of a Darwin or a Spinoza. There had to be more. And so, after looking real hard at a lot of evidence I ended up free-thinking my way back to Christianity and admitting my dependence on God. I know it's awful, but things often don't turn out the way they're supposed to.
If the morality of slavery was genuinely in question, rather than a universally settled question (at least in our culture) your analogy would some make sense. It isn't, so it doesn't. And even if it was, which sides pair in the analogy would be in dispute. NEWS FLASH!!! __We don't agree on the moral status of a fetus__. Your indignation doesn't contribute to the discussion, and amounts to nothing more than hectoring me and pandering to a like-minded audience.
I view the moral status, and thus right to life, of a person as increasing with others' emotional bonds to them and with their increasing consciousness as they develop, so there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical with feeling that crippling their epistemic foundations is a more problematic act than denying their potential development into a being with moral rights (which is some unfortunate circumstances is a _net_ moral good).
You have an _explicit_ agenda to see your beliefs legislated while challenging Dennett's comparatively _mild_ insinuation. Again, this is hypocrisy plain and simple, the difference in moral valuation doesn't change the fact, since both sides see that in their own favor. I don't know if there's a term for the failure to see that if we don't agree on the premises the argument fails to do any work, perhaps the epistemologist does?
Nate895 called my argument a trojan horse. I think that's an astute analogy, though it is no criticism of its validity. If there are walls around a belief sheltering it from contrary ideas or ensuring that certain foundational premises are given privileged status, then it is a belief with flawed epistemic standing. You don't seem interested in addressing that point, which is strange since I'd expect to be trounced by an epistemologist on epistemology, not browbeaten with circular logic on moral issues.
But I don't really think there's any impact being made either way here. I've invited you to educate me about the agenda of evolutionists and climate scientists and I'm still interested to know what you think it is, or what knowledge you have that makes you value your own opinion on technical matters more than theirs. Or to address the philosophical argument I made rather than veer towards emotional rhetoric that fails to engage because it is based on assumptions _that you know I don't share_. I don't rule out the possibility I could gain some insight from what you would have to say, but so far I'm just getting hammered by blunt assertions. I have the uncomfortable feeling I've intruded on a private party.
-A
William Luse:
"Isn't this what a branch of government did to every unborn child in America from 1973 onward? I guess the accusation against Lydia might stand as long as we beg the question of the unborn's humanity."
Thank you! Yes, I think "begging the question" is the term I was looking for!
I'm not able to draw much from individual anecdotes, and I am _not_ begging the question that a free and unfettered thinker could conclude that theism is a valid belief. There isn't "a way it is supposed to turn out", there are enough variables that people will land in different places, and that's a good thing, a _very_ good thing. Lydia's insinuations to the contrary I'm not looking to see everyone indoctrinated to the same content, I just think that we ought to be able to agree, by force of a logical argument, on a specific ethical principle that prevents the corruption of epistemology. Not here to sell you on materialism, pro-choice, climate science, or even evolution (though I _may_ indulge in a bit of self-righteous head-shaking of my own at what I hear about the last two!)
-A
Given your "newsflash," A., that we disagree on the moral status of the unborn child, I might just as well accuse you of doing something pointless by accusing me of hypocrisy for wanting abortion outlawed. You, after all, are the one who brought up the abortion issue.
As far as what is draconian and what is mild, that obviously depends on the status of the unborn, doesn't it?
But it also depends on people's having sufficient prudence to recognize how traumatic it is *to the child* (whose interests are supposedly at stake) for the state to intervene in families.
That you should consider Dennett's proposals mild is symptomatic of a particular tone-deafness that is the hallmark of the totalitarian in the making. There are families in Germany and Denmark who would vigorously disagree about the mildness of such proposals--families whose children have been seriously victimized and psychologically traumatized, even torn apart entirely from their parents, by the pseudo-benevolent state striving to insure that they grow up "free." Believe me: Neither the parents nor the children are free. Very much to the contrary. The claim that this is making the children free is, to the children themselves, much less to their parents, a kind of sick Orwellian joke.
But the Dennetts of the world do not care. Indoctrination must proceed, even if this means not leaving families in peace to live their peaceful lives. Which makes their alleged concern for the children and for freedom ring hollow indeed.
Sorry, make that Sweden, not Denmark.
A real parallel might arise if I advocated taking any children from their atheist parents if the atheist parents wouldn't allow their children to go to a school that teaches, as true, that God exists.
But despite what I believe to be the great harmfulness of an atheist upbringing, I don't advocate that. This is because I have sufficient imagination and sense of perspective to realize the harm that would do to the children and the injustice to the parents. I actually believe in a fairly substantial deference to parental judgement of what is best for a child in *education*, even to atheist parents.
I also realize that people do convert as adults, that people are not deterministically driven by their upbringing, and that it is possible for Christians to get a chance later to try to convert people who have been sent to atheist camp (yes, there is such a thing) as kids.
So I'm not going to start agitating for a Christian state to come in heavy-handedly and insure that every children have an explicitly Christian education.
It's really revealing that in this area of education the Christians are far more tolerant and reasonable than people like Dennett.
I view the moral status, and thus right to life, of a person as increasing with others' emotional bonds to them and with their increasing consciousness as they develop...
This is incoherent, presuming as it does that these two things will 'develop' in tandem, and that the objective value of a human being's existence rests on the subjective emotional whim of someone else. You haven't intruded upon a private party, you just had no taste for the libations on offer. Have a good day, A.
If there are walls around a belief sheltering it from contrary ideas or ensuring that certain foundational premises are given privileged status, then it is a belief with flawed epistemic standing.
I fail to see in what way Christianity (or any other theistic belief for that matter) is uniquely walled off. Every group wants to educate its children into its idea of the Good. You claim your idea of the Good (i.e., "free-thinking" as you define it) is neutral, objective, etc. I also believe that my Christianity is objectively true, though I refuse to concede that any idea of the Good is truly neutral.
If you are trying to say that Christianity cannot survive rational criticism, that somehow it is necessary for people to be sheltered to accept it, I can only find this a patently absurd notion. Many, many people still believe in the truths of the Christian religion after going through the entire public school experience, from kindergarten through their Bachelor's. Furthermore, in my personal experience, knowledgeable Christians have been more forthright in answering questions about their faith than atheists are defending their ideologies.
Your assertion also seems to be an exact inversion of reality. Premises of modern atheism are unquestionable in academic circles. Methodological naturalism in the sciences is a given, for instance. Questioning it means that you aren't a "real" scientist. Yet, somehow you are able to claim that Christian parents teaching their kids Christianity as the True Religion is against free inquiry and independent thinking, even reason itself. Sorry if I don't take this assertion seriously, aside from its disproportionate political weight with authoritarian technocratic bureaucrats.
Lydia's insinuations to the contrary I'm not looking to see everyone indoctrinated to the same content, I just think that we ought to be able to agree, by force of a logical argument, on a specific ethical principle that prevents the corruption of epistemology.
Well, I suppose I agree with this in a way, I just believe that this winds up with us teaching kids the Bible. If the Bible is veritably the Word of God, then educating people without it is itself a corruption of epistemology. If the Bible really is a source of infallible knowledge, depriving all children of it by force in the name of epistemological "neutrality" would be a national crime. We cannot brook a compromise on this where we agree to both send our kids to schoolhouses where no one gets told about religion because of how it is a "corruption of epistemology" because we can never concede that teaching anyone from the Scriptures is wrong at any age. You will either 1) Let us be or 2) Have to take our children by force. There is no option three we can both agree on.
Are you saying that public schools are "atheist" schools?
-A
"Are you saying that public schools are 'atheist' schools?"
While it might not be the case everywhere, in general, yes. Public schools teach materialistic naturalism generally speaking. The idea that there might be something more than what we can see and touch is entertained lightly, if at all. It mostly depends on the district, school, and even specific teacher. My school in Washington State was thoroughly materialist. My biology teacher made it a point to explain to us how the Virgin Birth was impossible via "science." One hardly tempted fate by daring to apply any aspect of the idea that God rules the universe to any work. In what way is that not atheism, or at least an agnosticism that presumes atheism?
WL: "This is incoherent, presuming as it does that these two things will 'develop' in tandem, and that the objective value of a human being's existence rests on the subjective emotional whim of someone else."
I don't follow. Their consciousness and self-interest ultimately will be sufficient grounding for their rights, so nothing will rest on subjective whims. I'll actually retract that their rights come from the bonds with others, those are different right altogether, rights of those others.
-A
nate895,
I've said that I do think people can and do come to the conclusion that Christianity is true freely (or as freely as anyone else). I also think there are indoctrinated atheists, who have come to their belief through irrational processes. I'm not saying that reason obligates everyone to wind up with any specific set of beliefs, just that if you care about objectivity in beliefs you can't wish to indoctrinate.
If you want to believe that a Biblical view is objectively true then you need to justify it without taking its veracity as a premise. To do that you have to start with logic and empirical evidence and work out what makes sense. To the degree that any starting point isn't neutral it is 'walled off'. Nobody is ever going to work their way from first principles to a complete world view with logical deductions alone, there will be plenty of short cuts all over the place, but wanting objective belief we want to strive to do the best we can. People will end up in different places and that's a good thing, that enables ideas to be exchanged and view points sharpened by the challenges poses by others.
When the priority is placed on maintaining a dogma that healthy exchange of ideas is replaced by inbred ideas. The most troubling thing I'm hearing here is that the absence of Christian assumptions -- which is to say _neutrality_ -- is being disparaged as atheism. If a public school isn't theistic, that doesn't make it atheistic. It seems to me that a some homeschooling happens with the specific goal of avoiding neutrality, and framing everything within a biased ideological framework. I find that immoral. I'm not taking the claim that there is no neutral stance seriously. Yes, there will always be impurities (but I'm pretty confident that more teachers slip a bit of theistic bias into public schools than atheistic) but by and large it can be neutral. I think only someone looking at it from an extreme could see it any other way.
This is also why I don't find the 'persecution' of homeschoolers in Germany that was mentioned all that problematic. I was unfamiliar with the situation before it was raised here, but doing a bit of googling what I gather is that they do prohibit homeschooling, though it still happens to some degree. They also have religious schools that receive public funding, as well as standard (neutral) public schools. This all seems pretty reasonable. There was a crackdown on a sect that was imposing corporal punishment on children a few years ago which got some attention because the children were removed (not sure how that played out) and a case where a family sought asylum in the US because they were going to be fined and their children forced to attend public school. The German education system rates well above average by international standards. Nobody is saying what can and cannot be taught to children to supplement the education they receive in public school. What is so appalling? A tiny minority of parents could provide a better education than this by homeschooling, and the majority who would homeschool wouldn't. Among those who are doing it because they are concerned about the *ideological* upbringing of their children I suspect the numbers would be very bleak.
-A
I'm not sure what alternative to methodological naturalism you propose for science. What would a supernatural law of physics look like? Would it have equations? Would it be measurable and testable? If it was wouldn't it then move into the realm of nature, rather than super-nature? Perhaps we might discover inexplicable gaps in our ability to explain things (there are actually quite a few) and attribute those to the supernatural. This has been done a lot through history and there is a rich tradition of those gaps being squeezed as scientific knowledge grows. I'm not sure what reason there is to prefer to attribute the remaining gaps to supernatural causes rather than undiscovered natural laws. There's no pragmatic value for science to do so -- it would only curtail potential future discoveries -- thus methodological naturalism. It isn't an ideological premise at all, it is a logical one.
-A
I like the way that, if I understand you correctly, A., you "suspect" that the vast majority of families who want to home school in Germany and is being forced not to (it is illegal, period) would do a "bleak" job of educating their kids. Prejudiced at all? How do you even know that? So you don't care about the Wunderlichs who literally *cannot leave Germany* because, gasp, they might home school their children abroad! Which is a crazy situation. Home schooling is not child abuse. The hubris of the German government not only to outlaw home schooling within its borders but to prevent families from leaving its shores lest they home school elsewhere is simply staggering.
But you think this is no problem and reasonable. Sweet, yeah, that tells us how "mild" your version of Dennett's "disarm and cage" is.
Nothing that Nate or I have said depends upon a premise such as, "If a school is not a Christian school it is an atheist school." In fact, I thought Nate gave a balanced answer concerning variation from one school to the next and the variationof individual teachers. I would add that charter schools are a whole phenomenon on their own and have introduced more variability still into the educational system.
However, there are certainly ways of treating religious topics that are faux neutral while actually being tacitly negative and hostile, and I think that is a legitimate point that Nate was making.
In any event, as I said from the beginning, the education of a child is not a matter of limited technocratic conveyance of knowledge. If we were merely talking about teaching how to do arithmetic or algebra problems or when to use capital letters, there might be something to such a picture, but education *as a whole* is a much bigger matter and is fraught with worldview issues. Anywhere that a child spends a large portion of his day (as in the case of a bricks and mortar school, whether public or private) and learns about subjects from history to math to sex education is going to be a place where a great many of a child's values are formed. This should be mere common sense. To pretend that at that level a child's education in general can be neutral is so obviously wrong-headed as to be actually dangerous, because things will be taught as "This is mere neutral information, how could anybody but a crazy person possibly object to having this taught to their kids?" when it is nothing but. And indeed, we've seen that again and again and again in the public schools.
What the Dennetts of the world are demanding at its core is that people's kids be turned over to them to raise. They may graciously allow the children to go home and spend their time around the edges with their parents, who can then try to convey some of _their_ values to them in that time. Along with letting the kids sleep of course. And if the kids aren't just too tired of being educated (which they may well be) and want only to relax (which they may well). But the great majority of the children's most alert and teachable hours are to be spent with "experts" who will teach the approved materials and ideas.
That some of us find this attitude and approach repugnant and totalitarian both in spirit and in execution is, I realize, so weird to you as to seem like an indication that we have some dark intention with regard to our own children. We must want to keep them ignorant and hyper-controlled.
Well, that's what you think, and this is what we think.
I still maintain that a liberal with more imagination, sense, and perspective would see Dennett's ideas as extreme and creepy. Such a "reasonable liberal" would distance himself from Dennett (and from the outlawing of home schooling in Germany, for that matter), not defend them. I used to know a few such liberals, but they seem to be a dying breed. Evidently you're not one of them.
If you want to believe that a Biblical view is objectively true then you need to justify it without taking its veracity as a premise. To do that you have to start with logic and empirical evidence and work out what makes sense. To the degree that any starting point isn't neutral it is 'walled off'.
But I'm questioning whether such neutrality is possible, or even desirable. For instance, I am not an empiricist, and there is no dictate of reason that demands I become one in order to prove my Christianity. The very idea of having to prove everything via sense perception and sense perception only is inimical to supernatural religious belief. It would be very difficult to detect a spiritual being via an empirical test, by definition.
I believe that common human assumptions necessary for reason itself demand theistic, and beyond that, Christian belief.
I'm not sure what alternative to methodological naturalism you propose for science.
I am not as inimical to "methodological naturalism" in science as to how broadly the term "science" is applied. For repeated, testable or observable phenomenon, yes, I believe appeal to only secondary causes is necessary and desirable. However, when we start trying to explain everything using only naturalistic phenomenon, then there is a problem. This is most obviously seen in origins debates. Even attempting to ask "science" the question "where do we come from" I think is a category mistake. You can't observe, much less repeat, where we came from, so the scientific method doesn't even seem applicable.
Their consciousness and self-interest ultimately will be sufficient grounding for their rights, so nothing will rest on subjective whims.
Grounding their rights in a certain level of consciousness and self-interest is your subjective whim.
I may be, in some fields, more likely than Nate is to talk about a neutral starting point. But there is going to be variation even within a particular field of knowledge. Boyle's Law is one thing. Human origins is another. Number theory is likely to be more metaphysical than basic arithmetic, and so forth.
But the question isn't whether there's a distinctively Christian and atheist way to teach algebra! I doubt that anyone in this thread would maintain that a parent would never want to hire a non-Christian to tutor their child in any subject. The question is whether it makes sense to talk about a child's *education as a whole* from K-12 as value-neutral in any meaningful or valuable sense. I think that's obviously impossible and silly, which makes it all the more important not to pretend that it is possible and then impose something that is advertised by the powerful elite as a value-neutral education on everybody's children against their parents' wishes.
But the question isn't whether there's a distinctively Christian and atheist way to teach algebra! I doubt that anyone in this thread would maintain that a parent would never want to hire a non-Christian to tutor their child in any subject. The question is whether it makes sense to talk about a child's *education as a whole* from K-12 as value-neutral in any meaningful or valuable sense.
This is true. My rhetoric is more about education overall, not the elementary subjects that all must learn and are taken for granted. I'm not saying non-Christians are incapable of imparting important knowledge about the world, or that they have no access to the truth. Not even a movement Calvinistic Presuppositionalist would say that, and I'm somewhere in between that and the more Classical views. However, we do impart our philosophies through education, even at very young ages, and that can permeate much of the curriculum. I would also still argue that in order for these more neutral fields where the knowledge is agreed on by virtually all parties, that those still point ultimately to the Creator.
nate985
"But I'm questioning whether such neutrality is possible, or even desirable. For instance, I am not an empiricist, and there is no dictate of reason that demands I become one in order to prove my Christianity. The very idea of having to prove everything via sense perception and sense perception only is inimical to supernatural religious belief. It would be very difficult to detect a spiritual being via an empirical test, by definition."
If not with empirical evidence how do you justify your beliefs? Not asking for specifics, just what tools you use. I don't see how logic alone can do it, the standard logical arguments for the existence of God don't connect to specific religions, they just refer to a sterile concept. Connecting any argument to specific religious content (e.g. Jesus's divinity, God as a personal being, etc.) seems to require something more. The apologetics I've seen always seem to use historical (i.e. empirical) evidence. Is there another way, that itself can be justified? I don't understand "faith" as a valid way of knowing (as opposed to believing without valid reason) so if that's it I'd need some elaboration.
It seems to me that at *least* the means of establishing how you know must be neutral, otherwise they are circular. So it is more that possible or desirable, it is essential.
"I believe that common human assumptions necessary for reason itself demand theistic, and beyond that, Christian belief. "
I just don't see how this can make sense. Are you saying that your belief in Christianity is the foundation for your epistemology? That has to mean that the Christianity is un-justified, or self-justifying ("The Bible is true because it says it is the true word of God"?) This just doesn't fly because you could construct *any* belief that way.
"You can't observe, much less repeat, where we came from, so the scientific method doesn't even seem applicable."
This is just a failure of imagination. Evidence doesn't have to be direct. We piece together the puzzle by looking at what we can observe -- shared DNA, in a clearly branching pattern, the continues consistently with each new discovery; fossil records the mesh perfectly with that evidence; and much more. The amount of consistent, corroborative evidence really is undeniable. There is no point in me trying to hash this out here, you can google it and get a million sources. But, and this is important, this is where neutrality is critical. If you go to a creationist page you will get a lot of mumbo-jumbo that will easily bewilder someone without the background to sort it out, and easily convince someone pre-motivated to take it seriously. If you think that the standard scientific view on it is ideologically distorted then it'd be great to hear why you think so.
Here's a short, well written, and I'd say neutral, wikipedia article that is pertinent and even a bit entertaining (IMO): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precambrian_rabbit
-A
Lydia:
"The question is whether it makes sense to talk about a child's *education as a whole* from K-12 as value-neutral in any meaningful or valuable sense. I think that's obviously impossible and silly, which makes it all the more important not to pretend that it is possible and then impose something that is advertised by the powerful elite as a value-neutral education on everybody's children against their parents' wishes."
I guess I'm just not seeing the vast value-content in the standard curriculum. Individual teachers may occasionally slip in a personal slant on something (more often than not I'd think a Christian slant, given the demographics, but whatever), but for the most part I think it is fairly neutral. I agree that the growth and development is much more than just learning facts; morals, values, purpose, passion are all part of it too and I don't think public schools typically provide much of that outside of the rare gem of a teacher. The fear seems to be that what little of that is doled out in schools will somehow undermine what the child gets at home. That seems crazy to me. Even with full days, five days a weak, the small, random, unfocused drips of ideological tilt a public school education imposes on a child can't possibly compete with what a parent can give them. The only exception to this that I can see is if what the parents are providing is so out there that it can't survive exposure any outside ideas.
"Powerful elite" again suggests a conspiracy of some sort. I think we'd need to get into specifics to clarify this. Do you think *all* subjects are being used to purvey propaganda, or just some (like sex education)? Which things are problematic?
-A
A., I could write reams and reams of stuff in answer to your claims that there is only a small amount of ideology in a public school education and that a child's education can be or should be mostly value-neutral with only small drips of values and morals. The fact is that I simply don't have time to write the book-length treatise that I could write in response to this. There are so many examples that I literally don't know where to begin.
I'm going to give a _few_. I suppose you'll blow them off, but the point is just here that reasonable people _could_ object to these. I don't know if you will blow them off because you'll say that reasonable people couldn't object, or if you'll blow them off because you'll say they aren't enough, or what, but I don't imagine you'd be impressed even if I wrote the book-length treatise, so I'm not going to try.
Let's start with something fairly mild: What _can't_ be done, said, or discussed in a public-school classroom. Suppose that a classmate dies or some disaster happens and the kids want to talk about where we go when we die, or they need spiritual comfort. The teacher, even if a devout Christian, cannot pray aloud and cannot give them what he believes to be the true answer to these ultimate questions. The same is true in discussing sex or a great many other topics: The teacher is hobbled by extreme interpretations of the First Amendment.
A taboo on religious beliefs is going to have an influence on children. It is understandable that parents should want their kids in an environment where there can be a natural flow of ideas on religious topics and where they are treated as normal not as akin to pornography.
Speaking of pornography, the sex education materials purveyed in many schools are bizarrely pornographic. Many, many reasonable people could object.
Or consider how California has led the way in integrating (this was explicit, so don't talk to me about conspiracies--it was right in the light of day) into the whole curriculum the glorification of homosexuality. The idea was to do with homosexuality and other non-traditional sexualities what has already been done with minorities, women, and feminist gender roles--to drop random claims throughout history and other textbooks that so-and-so was gay (pause to celebrate his achievements as a "gay man" or whatever), portrayals of alternative families throughout the curriculum, and so forth.
Political and moral content can and does come up even in more naturally neutral fields, such as in mathematics word problems. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to realize that people writing the curriculum are going to have to make up their minds as to what sorts of real-world examples to use. And of course an initiative like the one in California positively _mandates_ that they try to include "Heather has two mommies" types of examples in all sorts of subjects, be it math, social studies, or whatever.
Then, yes, there's the science and human origins stuff. Yeah, I know, you think people are crazy if they find this non-neutral or remotely objectionable, but you asked for examples.
Then there's the extremely strong push on environmental activism. Even from the perspective of free-market economics, even if one were not a Christian, one could get tired really quick of one-sided portrayals of environmental issues, government programs, environmental law, etc., and the ways in which this stuff is purveyed widely in public (and also for that matter some Christian) schools.
And don't even get me started on peer pressure and all the dysfunctional ways of interacting that kids develop in groups. They range from little girls spending huge amounts of emotional energy wanting to be part of so-and-so's club, which is unhealthy and pointless at best, to kids loudly and extensively jeering at one another if they are virgins at the age of fifteen and sharing all sorts of pornographic, trashy talk, images, etc.
These are just examples. The idea that ideologically objectionable content and ideas are only a small smidgen of school is absurd. Any school or educational context (including a home school) is going to have ideological and moral content at multiple levels and in multiple ways. In a sense, that's how it _should_ be. So one has to decide where one wants one's child educated.
Oh, how about all the stupid incidents of little boys getting in trouble for pretending to play with guns. The pop-tart incident? (He ate his pop-tart into the shape of a gun.) These stupidities are becoming ubiquitous since the schools' "no-tolerance policies."
The anti-bullying programs that are about bullying kids with traditional moral views.
The incredibly objectionable books kids can be and sometimes are being assigned in high school literature classes. (I switched home pages years ago after a conservative news organization included excerpts from a gay p*rn "novel" that a teacher was having students read as part of Advanced Placement English. I believe that was in Illinois.)
the standard logical arguments for the existence of God don't connect to specific religions, they just refer to a sterile concept.
Yes, to some extent. However, I think that ultimately these arguments demand the type of personal God that is only available in Christianity. A sterile philosophical god is not only boring, it seems to not jive very well with what the philosophers reason about him already. A benevolent personal God not revealing himself to his seems extraordinarily odd at the very least. Before you bring up the other Abrahamic religions based on revelation, I would say that it can be demonstrated that they are inconsistent with their own premises.
The apologetics I've seen always seem to use historical (i.e. empirical) evidence. Is there another way, that itself can be justified?
I am not saying we can't know things via sense perception. I'm just saying it isn't the end all, be all of knowledge. Furthermore, what we can know through sense perception is limited. Our sense perceptions in these contentious cases are also filtered through our worldview. Where I might see a miracle, you might attempt to find the mad scientist responsible for creating the technology necessary for such an unbelievable feat.
Are you saying that your belief in Christianity is the foundation for your epistemology?
I can see how this would not make sense to the uninitiated in the thought of Cornelius Van Til. To an extent, yes, my epistemology (such as it is as an amateur) is based on Christian belief, but not in the sense that I took Christian belief for granted and then made up an epistemology. Rather, I think the ordinary ways human beings gain knowledge, or even the ability to have knowledge, is dependent on the existence of the Christian God and the Truth of the Scriptures. If I were to abandon belief in Christianity, then I would have to become a radical skeptic of some sort. Note that I'm not saying non-Christians are incapable of having true knowledge about the world, or even that their knowledge is necessarily inferior to that of Christians.
We piece together the puzzle by looking at what we can observe...
I did not say that evidence is irrelevant to the question, merely that what is taught as the scientific method is. At least, it is not applicable in the same way it is to chemistry, medicine, etc., which leaves its conclusions more in doubt than those disciplines which are universally accepted. Furthermore, the evidence you cite requires interpretation. The "evidence" seems to me to usually boil down to evolutionary assumptions plugged into existing data to create a model. There are alternative explanations for sharing common DNA and other characteristics besides being biologically related. Which explanation you prefer depends on your philosophical presuppositions.
If you think that the standard scientific view on it is ideologically distorted then it'd be great to hear why you think so.
The ideological distortion has come about for two reasons:
1) Peer pressure. If you disagree with Darwinist/agnostic assumptions, then you are berated as some kind of backwoods hick.
2) Genuine confusion about what God does to the prospects of science. Many scientists think that if you let God do anything in nature, then all of a sudden you will be blaming the thunder on Thor. Obviously, that type of thinking is inimical to the scientific enterprise. However, allowing God to create living creatures is not the same thing as explaining everything by a kind of divine occasionalism.
Thank you, that was a great answer and helps me see a lot where you are coming from. I could actually add a lot of examples of inanity to the list now that you've got the ball rolling, and I'm sympathetic with many of the examples you list. I just don't see withdrawal as the the only way to deal with these sort of problems. Learning to coexist with differences of opinions, including ridiculous ones, seems like a pretty important skill. I can understand the preference to homeschool and I'm not against it at all, in general, in fact my partner and I considered homeschooling our two very seriously before ultimately deciding not to on the basis of their learning styles.
Again googling, it seems the book you mentioned *was* banned, and I would agree it is too explicit. Not that it couldn't be handled by a mature adolescent, but because there's no good reason to push the boundary, esp. when it will predictably be offensive to many. Pop-tart gun thing is silly, but it seems the boy was an ongoing problem and previous incidents were part of it. Of course the NRA will jump on it to make some political hay. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/pop-tart-case-gun-appeal-school-officials-say-the-problem-was-ongoing-misbehavior/2014/04/30/c5727900-cc6f-11e3-93eb-6c0037dde2ad_story.html). I think it's inclusion hurts your case more than helping it and shows the triviality of a lot of the concerns. If you get worked up into a frenzy it is easy to start seeing every little thing as an abomination. Really the parents are the ones who did harm to their child their, bringing the media in and circling the wagons around their son when it sounds like he needed some serious discipline. Not for eating a pop-tart into a sharp of a gun, but for eating a pop-tart in the shape of a gun deliberately to be disruptive within the context of repeated behavior issues. I don't think making a mockery of the suspension sends that child the right message at all.
Again, I'm not against the idea of homeschooling at all. I think that not all parents are capable of doing it well, and I think if the decision to do it is based primarily on the desire to isolate the child from ideological views, regardless of ones competence to guide their education (and the incompetent will very likely be poor judges of that), then it can be a bad thing. I can see why a country might choose to ban homeschooling for that reason. Laws infringe on freedoms. Maybe I'm a phenomenal driver and I'm safe doing 120mph on the freeway, but that choice isn't mine to make in our society. In Germany they've made the choice to prohibit homeschooling and while I do think it is unfortunate for some people, I don't think it is the insufferable oppression it is being made out to be here. It is a social policy with complex pros and cons and *reasonable* states can differ on it. The Wunderlich case (which I also hadn't heard of -- probably the censorship of the liberal media) is odd, if there's no reason to think they are abusive to their children I don't see why they wouldn't be allowed to leave the country -- I imagine that ruling would make others who want to homeschool leave *before* breaking the law, maybe that is the goal.
-A
A., I appreciate your tone and am glad that you at least find the Wunderlich case odd. The German government's treatment of the Wunderlichs is entirely consonant with Dennett's proposal in the quotation in the main post. The German government regards religious home schooling as strongly akin to child abuse. Hence, the Wunderlichs are being treated much as a government entity in the U.S. (there have been a couple of such cases) might treat parents who were planning to take their young daughter overseas for purposes of having her genitally mutilated. The case of the Johannsons in Sweden is similar.
You refer repeatedly to "isolation," but if you regard my examples as having any force at all, then you should see (but I don't know that you will agree) that using the term "isolate" to refer to a parent's strong desire to avoid subjecting a child to those situations is prejudicial. Parents are responsible for the well-being of their children. If it is understandable that parents would consider even some of those things detrimental to their children's well-being, it is understandable that they would want to keep their children out of those situations, aka "isolate" them *from that ideological or otherwise problematic situation or material*. But the term "isolate" conveys something more like locking a child in the attic or preventing them from interacting with the outside world.
The German government believes that any parents who disagree with them sufficiently about the content of education as to wish to educate their children themselves are ipso facto abusive. The "ipso facto" is important. The German government truly believes that it is _harmful_ per se for children to be bonded to their parents and supportive of their parents' views. In the Wunderlich case it was held _against_ the Wunderlichs in court documents that the children finally agreed to go to the schools when their parents (seeing that it was the only way to continue to be allowed to live with their own children) told them to go. The court saw the children's recognition of parental authority and ability to be influenced by them as per se of some deep dysfunction in the family. Similar comments were made in the Melissa Busekros case approximately six years ago. The fact that Melissa (then age fifteen) agreed with her parents' moral and religious views was considered a *bad thing per se*, not because the contents of those views were crazy and dangerous (no suicide bombings here) but because the German government wants children to be more bonded to the state-defined community at large than to their own families. It is an outright rejection of what the Catholics would call the principle of subsidiarity. And if families in Germany do create "little platoons" in which families are tightly knit and children hold their parents' (conservative and Christian) moral and religious values, the state considers this abusive in itself and considers that it has a responsibility to stop it, whether in Germany or abroad.
I cannot help thinking that Daniel Dennett would most heartily approve.
nate895:
I wasn't familiar with Van Til, but reading up about it a bit it seems like I've already made a strong argument against it. It is another theological argument that leaps to connect abstract concepts to concrete dogma. Without an empirical case that just doesn't work. Brazenly taking on the name Presuppositionism is an interesting maneuver -- it is admirable that they own up to the fact that it is presupposing what they aim to prove, but it doesn't make it any more legitimate.
So reason and senses (direct and indirect) are valid ways of knowing. You suggest there are others but offer no more details. Why would you need to be a radical sceptic is you weren't a presuppositionist? Presuppositionism is exactly like the sort of ideology I'm claiming has moral problem being taught to children. "X is right because it says it is right" is a trap, one that is usually pretty transparent and would fool nobody, but when it is accompanied by deep religious indoctrination with emotional hooks it seems it can be hard to see past.
There are alternative explanations for sharing common DNA and other characteristics besides being biologically related.
Please share.
The ideological distortion has come about for two reasons:
1) Peer pressure. If you disagree with Darwinist/agnostic assumptions, then you are berated as some kind of backwoods hick.
2) Genuine confusion about what God does to the prospects of science. Many scientists think that if you let God do anything in nature, then all of a sudden you will be blaming the thunder on Thor. Obviously, that type of thinking is inimical to the scientific enterprise. However, allowing God to create living creatures is not the same thing as explaining everything by a kind of divine occasionalism.
There are no "Darwinist assumptions", it is a conclusion that followed the evidence, not something that preceded it. "Agnostic assumptions" is a funny concept. As for peer pressure, I agree that anti-evolution views are looked down upon; but what bias do you think has them disrespected, if not a genuine belief, based on the evidence, that there is no reasonable way to doubt it? There is no monolithic, single-minded ideology behind it, if you respect science that's where the facts lead.
On your second point, allowing God to create living creatures just isn't science unless there's evidence for it. Go ahead and hold whatever view you like on the matter, but without evidence it is just dogma.
-A
Actually, A., there are _vast_ "Darwinist assumptions" that are controlling in origins science. I have been reading up recently on the theory of "trans-species polymorphism." By this theory, (some) population genetics scientists literally use portions of the human genome to construct an ancestral tree, which they then try to use to count how many ancestors humans had to have had millions of years ago, _despite the fact_ that such a tree, taken literally, would make it look like humans and other species are interbreeding *right now*. That is to say, portions of the genome are sometimes used for population genetics estimates despite the fact that their apparent relationship structure for the recent past must be ignored. The ad hoc nature of such a theory is striking.
Your claim that a commitment to Darwinism is purely evidence-driven is no doubt what you believe, but the often virulent and anti-evidential response to the intelligent design movement over the past fifteen to twenty years says otherwise.
As for possible other explanations of DNA similarity, I doubt that either Nate or I wants to get involved in a lengthy attempt to persuade you, and there is a ton of material on both sides of this controversy. But one possible explanation is common design for a variety of purposes. It is amazing to see the haste to declare portions of the genome mere useless junk, and indeed _evidence_ (to which you are so deeply committed) is increasingly calling this assumption into question. Yeah, yeah, I know, the vitamin C pseudogene. Did you know guinea pigs have it too? But nobody thinks we and guinea pigs inherited it from a common ancestor. Evidently some _assumption_ in the argument is wrong. I'm working on a post right now about the claim that humans are sometimes born with tails because of one of those "common ancestry can only explain this because it's just leftover junk" claims which turns out to be egregiously false. This based on the actual content of some evolutinoists' *own theory* of the underlying genetic cause of occasional human tails. But the meme just keeps on truckin'.
I was a theistic evolutionist for a brief time, until the evidence convinced me otherwise. That brief time was when I assumed that the "consensus of scientists" must be working from actual overwhelming evidence.
I wasn't familiar with Van Til, but reading up about it a bit it seems like I've already made a strong argument against it. It is another theological argument that leaps to connect abstract concepts to concrete dogma. Without an empirical case that just doesn't work.
You clearly missed the whole point of it then: You presume empiricism just as much as I presume more classical theories of epistemology which merely include empirical knowledge rather than make it the final arbiter of all knowledge. The basic presuppositionalist claim is that in order for intelligibility to exist, God must be there. In that sense, knowledge of God is a priori. Without Him, there isn't knowledge at all. Like I said, this isn't saying it is necessary to believe in God to know things, just that He must exist for anyone to know anything.
Presuppositionism is exactly like the sort of ideology I'm claiming has moral problem being taught to children. "X is right because it says it is right" is a trap, one that is usually pretty transparent and would fool nobody, but when it is accompanied by deep religious indoctrination with emotional hooks it seems it can be hard to see past.
1) Presuppositionalism would only be morally wrong to teach a child if it is wrong.
2) You clearly did not get the point if you think that the argument is "The Bible is right because it says so." Their appeal is to transcendental reasoning to show how the existence of God, specifically the God of Christian revelation, is necessary for the very intelligibility of the universe. This allows both the Bible's claim to be an ultimate authority and a non-fideist apologetic to stand.
3) The above is what I mean when I say I would have to resort to radical skepticism if I were to abandon Christianity. If there is no God, I can't even be sure there can be an intelligible universe, let alone what its makeup is. Much less, beyond that, do I have any reason to believe my senses or reasoning abilities reflect reality in anyway. These simply aren't problems if you believe in the Christian God.
Please share.
I do not have the inclination to go on a point-by-point refutation of Darwinism. Mrs. McGrew's notes on the subject are more than adequate. At the very least, I see no more evidence for the idea all living things have a common ancestor than for the idea God created unique types of living creatures. However, my point here is not mainly to argue for the truth of Christianity, but only to show that there are perfectly reasonable objections to the idea of a neutral education.
nate895:
No, I didn't miss the whole point. Importing big chunks of Christian theology as premises is completely different from beginning with minimal assumptions and building from there. As I observed before, you could concoct any arbitrary world view if you are allowed to pick and choose what you start with. Christian presuppositionism is just simple chauvinism wrapped in obscurantist language. In comparison empiricism requires very few assumptions, and those it does make are very basic and hard to associate with an ideological bias (unless not assuming Christianity is an ideological bias, which you seem to think is, but a follower of any number of other beliefs could feel similarly).
-A
A., you've stumbled into a bit an in-house debate in Christian apologetics circles--the presuppositionalist/evidentialist divide. I was trained in Bible college to be a presuppositionalist because that happened to be the side my particular Bible college was on. Since then I have become a rampaging evidentialist, and I'm quite unsympathetic to presuppositionalism. In fairness, though, I should say that the more sophisticated presupps. are using what is known in philosophical circles as a transcendental argument--the existence of God is a necessary condition for the possibility of rationality. I don't disdain an argument that falls at least roughly into that category. (C.S. Lewis called his version the argument from reason. Alvin Plantinga has what he calls an evolutionary argument against naturalism that is in the same family, broadly conceived.) However, it's certainly only one string to the bow, and one needs lots of others.
In any event, as you see, the fact that Nate is presupp.-inclined and that I am a nuclear-bomb-grade evidentialist has not prevented us from agreeing that giving children a neutral education across the board is a dangerous myth.
Importing big chunks of Christian theology as premises is completely different from beginning with minimal assumptions and building from there.
You failed to address anything I actually said, but merely reasserted what you had already said. This is a caricature, especially for those who aren't movement Van Tillians or Clarkians, but only incorporate some of their insights into a larger case. Yes, presups presuppose certain elements of Christian Theology, but the non-fideist ones do so because they see those presuppositions as necessary for making sense of the universe. You can see this even in the classical arguments for the existence of God, especially the Cosmological. Essentially, the Cosmological Argument says that causality (a precondition for an intelligible universe) leads back to God.
In comparison empiricism requires very few assumptions, and those it does make are very basic and hard to associate with an ideological bias (unless not assuming Christianity is an ideological bias, which you seem to think is, but a follower of any number of other beliefs could feel similarly).
Sure, empiricism has fewer assumptions, but the argument is that our assumptions are necessary even to make sense of empirical knowledge (as well as other types). What you are essentially proposing is that we much teach kids empiricism as if it's the only rational option, and then pretending like you're being neutral when there are a lot of philosophical opponents to empiricism, whether Christian or not. If that isn't "chauvinism" I don't know what is.
In fairness, though, I should say that the more sophisticated presupps. are using what is known in philosophical circles as a transcendental argument--the existence of God is a necessary condition for the possibility of rationality. I don't disdain an argument that falls at least roughly into that category.
I only tend towards incorporating some of their insights myself. I personally roll my eyes at Van Til's rhetorical flourishes against against evidentialist and "Roman Catholic" apologetics. In addition to the rhetoric, Van Til and his more dogmatic followers tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to other methodologies. I do agree with them that it is very hard to confront the non-Christian without confronting their epistemology.
You failed to address anything I actually said, but merely reasserted what you had already said. This is a caricature, especially for those who aren't movement Van Tillians or Clarkians, but only incorporate some of their insights into a larger case. Yes, presups presuppose certain elements of Christian Theology, but the non-fideist ones do so because they see those presuppositions as necessary for making sense of the universe. You can see this even in the classical arguments for the existence of God, especially the Cosmological. Essentially, the Cosmological Argument says that causality (a precondition for an intelligible universe) leads back to God.
The properties of the being "proven" by philosophical arguments vastly under-specify the Christian God. Even if those arguments were persuasive they don't justify Christian doctrine. They claim to prove the existence of a being with several very specific abstract properties.
"Neutral" doesn't require any particular epistemology, it just cannot mean one that brings in a broad set of unjustified assumptions, like broad swaths of Christian dogma. I made the point that not assuming Christianity can't be considered a bias (any more than not assuming Hinduism or content-filled belief system X), that's all I've advocated. There is a difference between the large set of specific assumptions of a presuppositionist and the minimal assumptions of a moderate empiricist (or any other type of neutral epistemology).
It is really hard to see how a presuppositionist argument could hold any weight with someone who wasn't already on-board. That doesn't seem like a problem for you -- a serious challenge to the notion that it could be considered neutral? If you want to justify deism with a priori arguments that's fine (I don't buy those arguments, but I'm not too interested in debating them), but I've yet to see anything that justifies Christianity without an empirical argument to help fill in the content (e.g. historical evidence or personal experience).
You clearly did not get the point if you think that the argument is "The Bible is right because it says so." Their appeal is to transcendental reasoning to show how the existence of God, specifically the God of Christian revelation, is necessary for the very intelligibility of the universe. This allows both the Bible's claim to be an ultimate authority and a non-fideist apologetic to stand.
Yes, I clearly don't get how they have an a priori argument that shows the existence of the God of Christian revelation. One that doesn't assume what it is trying to prove, and thus have some hope of convincing a neutral reasoner.
The reality is we don't form out belief system by rational deduction as toddlers. Long before we can systematically piece anything together that way we get all sorts of experience and indoctrination. My argument is that there is a distinction between an upbringing that leaves one poised and capable to enter that process with objectivity and one where thoughts are channelled (essentially with premises injected) so that a particular outcome is deeply predisposed. If you haven't had that (even if you left and returned, as WL described, who's to say those seeds weren't still potent?) then how can you feel your beliefs are justified? In a way my argument turns the presuppositionist one on its head. Presupposing can't yield valid knowledge. And it has the benefit of not requiring a large body of abstract theoretical contrivances to prop it up.
-A
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