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Intelligent design: "childish ignorance"
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by LotusFlower | October 2, 2008 at 08:18 am
125 views | 7 Recommendations | 1 comment
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A good old ding-dong is going on between two eminent academics at a level of celebrity bitching that just has to be aired somehow as a TV debate - a debate that would surely be more interesting and engaging than many of the political TV debates that our nations' and the world's future seem to hang on. Prof. AC Grayling holds exactly the opposite views on Intelligent Design to Prof. Steve Fuller who feels ID should be taught in schools. The subject may be Intellegent Design but the debate at times could hardly be called intellectual or intellegent turning to personal insult at times. Grayling describes Fuller's new book Dissent over Descent as "300 pages of wasted trees".
If someone could get these two together in a TV studio or even better still a boxing ring I'd be the first with my money out for the 'pay to view' coverage. I'm thinking the odds are in Grayling's favour for an intellectual knockout but hopefully not too early on in the bout - lets see some action!
oh apple!
how did you come to be
so tasty?
If you think the celebrity sniping in Heat magazine is bitchy, it has nothing on a good old academic slanging match. The pages of New Humanist magazine this month are filled with one of the best intellectual cat-fights I've seen in ages.
It starts with the philosopher Prof AC Grayling's less than congratulatory review of sociologist Prof Steve Fuller's book Dissent over Descent or "nearly 300 pages of wasted forest" as Grayling puts it.
Fuller has form on this topic. He appeared as a witness for the defence in the infamous trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in December 2005 over the teaching of intelligent design - he was there to advocate the teaching of ID in science lessons.
Fuller describes ID as an effort to establish that life was purposefully designed by an intelligent agency that works "by the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence".
"No," cries Grayling, as he wades into a "swamp of BS".
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LotusFlower
Nottingham, United Kingdom
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 13:55 on October 2nd, 2008
LotusFlower, I like this story. It's good stuff.
I like Grayling - he's like a slightly less ranty version of Dawkins.
I don't have any problem with Creationism being taught in Biology classes, so long as it's taught in the same way that my A-Level Psychology teacher only taught us about Freud so we could disprove his theories. It's dogmatic quackery by any other name.