I wondered why half a dozen young people were standing outside the entrance to Melbourne University today handing out hundreds of free copies of a book entitled : The Origin of Species - 150th Anniversary Edition by Charles Darwin. I thought perhaps that since 2009 was the 150th Anniversary of the published edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 1859, that there might have been surplus copies of the reprinted book. Then I noticed that there was a Special Introduction by the Christian minister and evangelist, Ray Comfort. According to Anthropologist and executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, Comfort initially deleted four chapters of Darwin's original that described the evidence for evolution, but included them in the second edition, which, by the way, still lacks Darwin's preface and glossary of terms. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Comfort#cite_note-29). The fact that Richard Dawkins (as well as Peter Singer and others) will be presenting at The Rise of Atheism - 2010 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in the next few days was probably the impetus for these young Christians volunteering to hand out the free books, which supposedly argues against Darwin's theory of evolution in the fifty-three page introduction. Thousand of these books have already been given out at Universities in the United States and I personally found it a rather duplicitous way of promoting a particular point of view. Might it not have been more ethical for Ray Comfort to give the book a title that more accurately describes the contents, so that those who accepted it would know what they were receiving? He obviously ascribes to Hitler's propaganda methodology. 'During WWI, the German government printed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and gave them to soldiers along with a copy of the Bible'. (For information about this quote please see Stephen Hicks: http://www.stephenhicks.org/tag/thus-spake-zarathustra/)
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I appreciate you are sticking up for F Nietzsche but Goebbels was a strange one who quite possibly didn't know Nietzsche from a hole in the ground. He was propagandizing race, and if Nietzsche had other anscestory his books would have been burned instead. Can't agree with Dr Hicks, he is running a fair argument but suffers wishful thinking regarding the influence of philosophers, imo.
ReplyDeleteHowever Goebbels would have known that ideas need to be packaged as familiar, and its not that unusual for one side in a debate to plunder another.
There is blind faith in Darwin as the father of all science on all sides and it is fascinatingly cultural, rather than thoughtful. M Foucault would have said that Mr Comfort appeals to an authority of specification in a dominant discourse to elevate his argument in reader's minds. That it is the contrary view doesn't matter, it is the appeal that counts. Puts leaving important stuff out in a different light, because the standing of the authority is paramount; not what it says, but its position in culture.
I agree that it was a clever marketing strategy, hijacking students as they were leaving Uni for the day, but I was annoyed because I thought it WAS an official 150th Edition, and instead found it 'polluted' with Mr Comforts 'introduction'.
ReplyDeletePollution is an interesting word to use about ideas :) Is any idea clean? It seems to me that ideas are messy, and you have to roll up sleeves (and possibly trousers) and just plunge into the muck, if you are looking for something that shines.
ReplyDeletePS your commenting system is throwing errors agin
PPS oh crap I could use my OpenID to comment. But then you wouldn't know it was me.
No, ideas aren't clean - they're biased and subjective. I just didn't like the contamination of science with religion (even though Darwin apparently used the word God a couple of times in the text), also, I saw Richard Dawkin on Q&A that same night and although he was quite reasonable in his approach to answers posed to him, a couple of the other participants (obviously Christians opposed to athieism) in the program gave him a hard time - I thought this unreasonable.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what error the commenting system is making, sorry, I have no control over that.