Postby Technomancer » Sat Nov 01, 2003 5:23 am
I've read a number of his tracts, they're nearly all worthless.
The existance of citations do not make any assertion true. You merely shift the question of credibility. In the case of Chick, he finds sources just as ignorant and bigoted as himself. In the case of Catholicism for example, a large portion of his information comes from Hislop's "Two Babylons" This is a book that was considered laughable when it was published about a hundred years ago. No competent scholar would have used it then, much less now. Chick also asserts that the Inquisition killed tens of millions of people. You won't find this taught in any university history program. Care to guess why?
When it comes to evolution, it's just as bad. For a start, Chick relies of Kent Hovind. This is a fellow who is already guilty of academic fraud. Hovind's ignorance of basic science is well known, and his description of the theories of and evidence for is hopelessly short of the mark (do you know what a strawman is?). Moreover, his specific arguments are easily eviscerated by anyone who knows the subject.
I'm sure that if you took the time, you could expose similar problems in his other tracts.
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov