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fubarobfusco comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Someone who claims that faith is a good thing should not also use it as an accusation of impropriety.
The creationist does not claim — before cowans, gentiles, and the unwashed — that Darwinism is the wrong religion; rather, he claims that it is "a religion" as if to say that this is condemnation enough. To fellow creationists he may well say that Darwinism is Satanism, or a rival tribe to be vanquished by force or deception. But he does not expect that argument to fly with outsiders. With them he merely asserts that the (straw-)Darwinist is a hypocrite, a know-it-all elitist nerd who commits the grave faux-pas of mistaking his religion for science.
Meanwhile the sociologist of religion wonders where the temples of Darwin are. The strong-programme sociologist of science (who uses the methodological assumption that science doesn't work, even as he posts on the Internet!) can mistake a laboratory for a center of ritual, but one who has studied comparative religion does not see worship happening in the microscope, the genomics software, or the fMRI.
I get the impression that that argument is used more to undermine claims that darwinism is a science than anything else.
Physics is a clear science; you can use the right equations and predict the motion of the Earth about the Sun, or the time a barometer will take to fall from a given height. This gives it a certain degree of credibility. The theory of evolution (and how the creationists love to remind everyone of that word, 'theory'!) is also science; but they would deny it, on the basis that accepting it suggests that it is as credible as physics or mathematics. If they insist that darwinism is a religion, then both alternatives start from the same basis of credibility; the creationists can then point out, quite accurately, that their version is older and has been around for longer, and therefore at least claim seniority.
There's a short story by Asimov that gives a very nice view of the whole argument.
That is a quintessentially Asimovian story. +1.