Stupidity and religion (2)

Nick Cohen has a column in today's Observer, in which he goes from the tendency of American conservative Evangelicals away from the Republicans, featuring one Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals who has indicated support for (although, so far, not formally endorsed) Barack Obama for president:

'I'm a conservative, but it doesn't mean I'm going to vote that way,' he announced. 'I could disagree with Obama, and do, on same-sex marriage and abortion, but that doesn't mean I'll vote against him.'

Cohen goes on with one of his usual caricatures of someone he disagrees with:

Cizik has been criticised by the American conservative press, but his abandonment of faith in the Republican party may be a sign of a wider disillusionment. Foreigners, who bought Michael Moore's cartoon version of America as a land dominated by quasi-fascist bigots, may not understand why, but Christian conservatives have good reason to feel cheated.

Having read many of Moore's books and seen some of his films (including Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko), I do not recognise this in Moore's writing. Moore's view of American society is that it is more left-wing than it likes to admit – in particular, see chapter 9, titled "A Liberal Paradise", of his book Dude, Where's My Country?. Cohen's general assessment of why evangelicals are turning their backs on the Republicans has some merit – that they have delivered neither social justice nor "the conservative counter-revolution they promised" – but Cohen just has to get a dig in at someone on the anti-war left, in this case Michael Moore. He cites "creationists in Dover, Pennsylvania" who were supposedly supported by "an English academic postmodernist, one Steve Fuller of Warwick University", and argued that truth was relative:

Teachers should not discriminate between evidence and superstition, but tell children that it was as reasonable to believe that a god-like intelligence designed life as to think that species evolved through undirected natural selection.

Uh, I always thought that creationists believed that truth was absolute, and that man in particular was created in God's image, and that whatever "science" suggests otherwise is false. I would not have thought that most creationists would have much use for an obscure British postmodernist relativist. What are you on about, Nick?

He then moves on to a general complaint about the Turkish state censoring various websites (including that of Richard Dawkins) because they criticise Harun Yahya, whose work attacking the theory of evolution contains a number of mistakes. He alleges that Harun Yahya (real name, Adnan Oktar) has connections with American creationists, although he does not accept their beliefs entirely (particularly the "young earth" aspects of it). He cites Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship as alleging that fundamentalists ask for a debate, but then close it down when they get power.

The problem with this accusation is that censorship and laws restricting free speech are endemic in the Turkish state; in this, the Islamists in Turkey have had much less practice than their secularist enemies, who have controlled the state for decades, and have been known to prosecute people for saying they do not like Atatürk, or that the police and army in some districts rape women, or that there was a genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century. Since one cannot say these things in Turkey without fear of arrest or imprisonment, how can one expect to have an unconstrained debate on anything? Turkey is not a free country, end of story.

Lastly, he mentions that there are rumours that some academics favour expelling students who dissent from their view on evolution from university:

In Britain, academics talk of expelling mainly Muslim science students. They do not make a fuss about it in case post-modern relativists in the mould of Steve Fuller accuse them of religious discrimination, but say, very quietly, that if religion stops their students accepting evolution, there is no point in them staying at university.

There is a straw man here: Muslim students do not necessarily reject evolution itself, just the notion that mankind is a product of it. How they would decide who to expel from college is not stated – perhaps it would only be those (particularly undergraduates) who protested at every mention of evolution in a way that disrupted the learning of other students, which would be acceptable, but if it was anyone who responded to the question (posed, perhaps, because of their name) of whether they accept evolution in the negative, it certainly would not be. The purpose of academia is to further the good of mankind through learning and inquiry, so these academics should really have to justify themselves if they propose that a student who disagrees with their tutors on one issue or other has nothing to offer and should be expelled. After all, evolution is mostly concerned with biology, which is most commonly applied in medicine (human and veterinary) and agriculture, fields in which one can excel without believing in evolution.

Cohen argues that, as creationism evolves, its opponents will need to evolve to defeat it. However, the man himself has not "evolved" much over the past few years: his bugbears about the anti-war left and Muslims have not changed, and if anything, he seems only to have become more bitter and twisted as old friends have decided that his cause of the decade – the war on Iraq (the war itself, not opposing the war) – was based on deception.