Ben Stein uses the standard straw-man argument here.
This statement is true:
It is a reality of PC liberalism: There is only one credible side to an issue, and any dissent is not only rejected, it is scorned.
But that doesn't actually mean that "Intelligent Design" has any credibility. Again I would recommend Steven Pinker's "the Blank Slate". It is the best book on modern philosophy that I have ever read.
He explains that in today’s academic circles that anyone who is out of step with the established thinking in an area is ostracized and scorned. Especially when the subject is near and dear to the “progressive” mindset and the “progressive” view of the direction that society should be moving towards. And it is true that academics view religiosity as a primitive belief system that has been supplanted by science and the scientific method. To say you believe otherwise will cause you to be scorned by your academic peers. But, So what. You can argue that that their behavior is wrong. And you can argue that our universities should be more accepting of diverse view points and opinions (and I would agree with those arguments). However none of this bad behavior by academics means that Intelligent Design is any more true than Heaven or Hell are real places.
But when Stein suggests to Dawkins that he's been critical of the Old Testament God, Dawkins protests — not that Stein is wrong, but that he's being too mild. He then reads from this jaw-dropping paragraph of his book:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Sound about right to me. Did Stein present anything that disputed this statement? |
