Benjamin Dueholm makes me want to be a liberal artist
Every so often (read: repeatedly and without mercy) I re-evaluate what it is that I’m “doing with my life” and invariably come up short in the “something meaningful” division. I’ve been reading quite a bit of blogging by a certain Benjamin Dueholm, a divinity student at the University of Chicago, and it’s not making me feel any better.
Observe:
We could teach the controversy over the extent of the Holocaust if we really wanted to; dissenters have marshaled plenty of putative evidence, and doesn’t the “academic freedom” of the students and teachers, some of whom may have “alternative theories” about the events in question, require us to hear them out?
Macroevolution isn’t well understood, and plenty of (scientific) challenges to strict Darwinism have already been assimilated into the standard biological understanding of life. But no one who studies the subject has ever made a serious biological argument that humans and apes don’t share a common ancestor.
In a way, the Holocaust denial example is unfair to Holocaust deniers. At least they ostensibly assume the same rules of historiography that mainstream historians do; they don’t sneak in metahistorical premises to justify their opinions (not counting those who believe in a Jewish conspiracy). The Intelligent Design people want to slip a metaphysical or supernatural premise into the study of nature. At best, their views are irrelevant to what we call science. At worst, like Holocaust denial, it’s a front for a deeper ideological agenda.
This use of curricula to advance religion is pernicious. For one thing, it degrades the boundaries among disciplines. Worried about randomness, about the logical difficulty of an uncaused universe? Take a philosophy class. Metaphysics has a place there. Scientists should be more humble about the exhaustiveness of scientific explanation, but to import the supernatural into science classes under the guise of critiquing scientific theories is positively Orwellian.
Allow me to sum up the above. “Whitebread! You don’t know how to write! You need a bigger vocabulary! Do you even know what pernicious means? Or how to use it in a sentence? Good luck making a difference! Better start applying to graduate programs in the liberal arts!”