[Vision2020] Why I No Longer Attack "Fundamentalists"

[Ted Moffett]

Assuming the website from which the short essay at the bottom was
sourced, truly represents the views, writing and research of Barton
Paul Levenson, this guy is a genius born again Christian with a profound
understanding of mathematics and science, who believes in evolution and
presents excellent research on climate science, that demonstrates the
seriousness of the problem of anthropogenic warming.  I discovered him from
scanning reader posts on Realclimate.org.  His contributions to Realclimate
are voluminous:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?s=paul+levenson&submit=Search&qt=&q=&cx=009744842749537478185%3Ahwbuiarvsbo&client=google-coop-np&cof=GALT%3A808080%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A34374A%3BVLC%3AAA8610%3BAH%3Aleft%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BALC%3A66AA55%3BLC%3A66AA55%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A66AA55%3BGIMP%3A66AA55%3BFORID%3A11%3B&searchdatabase=site
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The essay below is from Barton Paul Levenson's website at this URL:

http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/

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The climate science section of his website is well worth reading, as the
survey of published scientific work on temperature change from doubling of
atmospheric CO2 reveals at the URL below.  Note reference to Arrhenius's
work on temperature change resulting from atmospheric CO2 increase, from
1896, published in Philosophical Magazine (!).  The scientific basis for
atmospheric CO2 increases increasing temperature is established science
based on well understood principles of physics, as this huge body of
scientific work demonstrates:

http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/ClimateSensitivity.html
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 Why I No Longer Attack "Fundamentalists"
     If you read my essay on hermeneutics, written in the early '90s, you
see that I'm very critical of fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible,
especially in their insistence on a literal reading of passages like the
Genesis creation narrative. It's fashionable these days to say you're not
anti-religious, but you don't like "fundamentalists." The latter are
represented as being evil, narrow-minded people who want to impose their
anti-scientific worldview and crazy extremist politics on everybody else. I
used to talk like that myself. But in the past few years, I've stopped.

     Why? Because it isn't true.

     Fundamentalist Christians are my brothers and sisters in Christ, and I
owe them support for that if for no other reason. But beyond that, it's
simply not true that they're especially evil, other than in the scriptural
sense that we're all evil due to original sin. Since about the mid '80s I've
come to know more and more fundamentalist Christians as friends; as
individuals. They don't tend to believe in evolution and they do tend to
have right-wing politics, but they're not Nazis. For example, one
fundamentalist friend of mine thinks homosexual sex is intrinsically sinful,
a view I don't share. But he would never try to throw people in jail over
it. He has no desire to impose his morals on the rest of society by coercive
means. And I've found that a lot of fundamentalists are like that -- they
are very far right on social issues, but they would never use the coercive
power of the state to enforce their views.

     Evolution? Most fundamentalists don't believe in it and think it's
horribly wrong, but does that mean they're stupid people, blindly fighting
science because it conflicts with their religious views? Sure, in some
cases. And in others it's completely untrue. At some times in history the
anti-evolution forces were -- in political if not in scientific terms -- the
good guys.

     Did you know that evolution was used in this country as the
justification for laws that sterilized thousands of people without their
knowledge and consent? Such laws existed in Virginia, for example. On
"eugenic" grounds, people classed as "morons" or "idiots" -- very often on
the basis of flawed tests developed by people working from theories now
known to be wrong -- were hospitalized to treat things like appendicitis,
and sterilized while they were under. That was a real evil. The
pro-evolution folks in the '20s were all for it.

     Now of course evolutionary biology isn't responsible for misuses of it
by political crackpots. But the distinction isn't always easy to draw. When
governments were officially religious, atrocities were often justified in
the name of religion. Now that governments are more likely to base policy on
"science," atrocities are justified in the name of science. *Some* (not all)
people promoting evolution may be pushing an inhuman agenda even if their
agenda doesn't logically follow from their science. Think of Richard
Dawkins, who wants to close down religious schools and treat religion as a
"mental illness," or his mentor William Hamilton, who wanted a worldwide
program of eugenics using abortion, sterilization and infanticide.
Creationists may not understand biology, but they are often quite perceptive
about who the bad guys are.

     Does this mean I don't defend evolutionary biology with these people,
or liberal/libertarian politics? No way. On the former, I spend a lot of
time on AOL message boards, arguing with creationists that evolutionary
biology is not an attack on their faith. But I keep running up against the
same fact -- most of the people on those boards who claim to be there to
defend evolution are actually there to *use* evolution to push their brand
of atheism. They are mostly Christian-haters, and sadly, most of them don't
really know much about evolutionary biology. Some of the statements they
make about "science" are every bit as stupid and laughable as anything the
creationists say. The sad fact is that -- with exceptions on both sides --
in general, in my experience, the creationists are nicer people.

     Don't denounce "fundamentalists" if you've never met any. My best
friend in the world (other than my wife) is a man who once, after getting
home from a long day at work himself, drove a dozen miles to my workplace to
give me a jump for my car when I'd left the batteries on. That man is a
fundamentalist. Another man, who lent me desperately needed help, financial
and otherwise, during a long period when I was unemployed, is -- you guessed
it -- a fundamentalist. The same man has been known to defend complete
strangers from attack by criminals on the street, despite putting himself in
danger to do so. And he would never think of asking the people he was
defending whether they agreed with his views on religion or not.

     I know atheists and believers in "liberal Christianity" who are also
nice people. But a lot of them think it isn't a sign of religious prejudice
to denounce "fundamentalists" and to stereotype them as a group. I used to
think that way too. By God's grace I'm learning not to.

-BPL
11/28/2004

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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