Shocking Article On The State Of Islamic Science At Salon

I won't turn this into another long rant where I bore you all. I'll just invite you to read it in full. The subject of the interview obviously knows what he's talking about, and his opinions are important.

But ultimately they're not a lot more than we -- we, not the jackasses at Salon or NPR -- already knew.'

What is shocking is the interviewer's combative apologism on behalf of the benighted and backward state of Islamic science -- or pseudoscience, in the main. A science writer for an NPR station, no less.

Watch how the interviewer continues insisting, in the face of an expert telling him "no, no, no" that Islamic religious orthodoxy prevents genuine science. And then set a pillow beneath your jaw as he begins arguing on behalf of creationism -- Creationism, that most hated of all beliefs, to liberals -- so long as the creationism in question is of a suitably privileged foreign, non-western culture. And then it just gets more ludicrous as this supposed writer on science issues for NPR begins arguing for a more humanistic approach to science -- one that incorporates Islamic style religious dogma, apparently -- as preferable to cold, clinical (monstrously successful) Western science.

There's no "right" way to do science, this NPR science writer seems to believe, just different views of it. And, of course, the ultimate moral this story is driving towards is that we can both learn equally from each other.

Yes, the US, with thousands of patents every year and the highest standard of living in history (and the broadest sharing of that prosperity as well) has just as much to learn from Pakistan, with a total of eight patents to its credit in the past 42 years, as Pakistan does from the US. Because their science is all concerned with philosophy and "the good of the people" and God and angels and stuff.

And obviously that super-special diverse-culture feature of Pakistan's science really produces some genuine benefits for the world, eh?

I never thought I'd read such an impassioned defense of Creationism in Salon magazine. But then, I guess I should have realized just how many of their other shibboleths they were willing to jettison if they were found to be in conflict with Multicultural imperatives. Truly eye-opening and jaw-breaking.

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God -- or, rather, Allah -- created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

Wow.

The Reality-Based Community.

Or, as another blogger (Riehl?) likes to call it: The Community-Based Reality.

Whatever the Community agrees to shall be their Reality.

Thanks to Hot Air.

Oh, and, remember... Western culture is precisely equal to all other cultures in all ways, except for the long list of ways in which it is decidedly inferior.

Equality is a one-way street. Where a nonwestern culture seems deficient, or even outright pernicious, it is the duty of the dull-minded to claim it is fact equal (but in different ways) to western culture, because all cultures are equal. They must be. God has apparently decreed it so; I can see no other possible reason for them to hold this religious doctrine with such zealous conviction.

Only when a nonwestern culture can be argued (usually facilely) to be superior to western culture is it possible that a state of non-equality can exist.

Says who?

God says, I guess. It's written in a holy book somewhere.

Thanks to Mike Z. for the cite on Pakistan's woeful number of patents.

posted by Ace at 01:44 AM

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