Reply #257: age old problem, doc; knowlege versus certainty [View All]

[kodi]

"despitus abdicare scrutinium": contempt before examination.

Latin for: a contemptible person who renounces something before making an honest search or examination.

When things like "creatonism" are held as gospel and attempts are made to thrust them into public discourse intellectual honesty demands that these positions are weighed in the common marketplace of ideas, and the sharp-edged tools of the common intellectual marketplace, viz., logic, rationality and scientific method, in short, Godless dialectic materialism, examine such ideas.

Positions on public policy driven by religious conviction are not exempt from analysis using the tools of logic, rationality, and scientific method simply because they are based upon religious dogmas. Once such ideas and opinions cross the threshold of the church door and amble down to the secular marketplace, they are open to critique. Critiques of these positions that point out the logical flaws of such positions (and their own age-old prejudices) are not prejudice or bigotry, unless by prejudice and bigotry one demands that the application of logic, rationality, and scientific method are themselves bigoted and prejudicious tools in a functioning democracy.

And that, after all of this is the point of the attack on evolution, for it is actually an attack on rationalism as a methodology of human examination of the exterior world.