Are you a hipster? How about a Christian hipster? I know you're out there. I see your status updates on Facebook all the time. So why not come on down to the Delta Lion Pub on Monday, January 31 to hear my fellow Kindlings panelists and I deconstruct our incessent quest to be cool?
The stimulus for our discussion will be Brett McCracken’s debut book Hipster Christianity. McCracken alleges that we are, "turning Christianity into a shape-shifting chameleon with ever-diminishing ecclesiological confidence and cultural legitimacy." How should a thoughtful Christian respond? Can church be cool? Should church be cool? There's only one way to find out...
From my blog anyway. It's been a LONG time, to the point where I'm thinking about shutting this thing down.
What's been keeping me so busy? A lot of travel for one thing, both work-related and with family. I'm also in post on two docs and in production on another.
Plus I just bought a MacBook Pro and am learning how to use Final Cut. So that's more than enough to keep a guy out of trouble--and off his blog.
Anyway, I probably will keep the blog up for a little longer, if only to promote these upcoming projects. Stay tuned, because every one of them is bound to stir up some controversy--and some fun.
A few other things of note: On September 27, I will be back on the Kindling Muse Canada West podcast panel as we record live at Belle's Pub in Surrey. If you live in the Lower Mainland and haven't been to a recording before, come on down. Then the following month, I'll subbing in for Bill Hogg as host for the evening.
On October 2, I'll be heading back Down Under to teach a one-week screenwriting class at the Youth With a Mission film school in Brisbane.
All right, that's it. Time to put the kids to bed.
Have a listen to the latest Kindlings Muse Canada West podcast and decide for yourself. This month's panel includes yours truly, Allyson Jule and David Diewert of Streams of Justice (who also happened to teach my "Introduction to Biblical" class when I was at Regent College). Trust me: After listening to this, you'll never look at the Olympics the same way again.
Next month we move on to lighter fare: The Oscars.
The entire time I was researching and writing Expelled, the Intelligent Design proponents we interviewed kept drawing parallels between the struggle they face from the Darwinian establishment and the challenges faced by climatologists who dare to question whether global warming is real and/or whether human activity has anything to do with it. Denial of grant money, refusal to publish their papers in peer-reviewed journals, denial of tenure and a generally hostile attitude toward the dissenting scientists and their work are just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, when we made such allegations in Expelled, the Darwinian establishment accused us of being conspiracy theorists, of exaggerating the problem and of outright lying. There's no conspiracy to stifle Intelligent Design. And even if there is such a conspiracy, it's well deserved, because everyone knows that "it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but we don't like to talk about that)." So if these ID guys are challenging Darwinism, it has nothing to do with science. They're simply out of their gourd, and they deserve to be treated as such.
I don't have the time give a proper response to such distorted depictions of the objections ID proponents are raising--which would involve an extended discussion of how every scientific theory begins with a set of unprovable philosophical assumptions, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and just for good measure, David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. However, I will say that such thinking contradicts another belief that Darwinists hold to be true in virtually all other cases, namely, that science progresses not through stifling dissent but through encouraging it. Rigorous peer review is supposedly the foundation of good science, essentially creating a self-correcting mechanism whereby if one scientist makes a mistake, his or her peers will be sure to catch it. I've heard many scientists say this process gives science an air of virtual infallibility. If we don't catch the error now, someone will catch it sooner or later.
That's all fine and dandy when everyone is working within the same scientific paradigm or frame of reference. In such cases, no one is asking IF the reigning paradigm--i.e. Darwinism or man-made global warming--is true but merely how and why it's true. But what's to say the paradigm itself is correct? The scientific peers may be holding each other accountable within the system, but who or what is holding the system accountable? After all, if the astrology community made a similar claim--that their research into how the motions of heavenly bodies affect our lives can be trusted because they follow a rigorous peer review system--most people would still write them off as quacks.
Which brings me back to this story, which seems to reveal a systematic attempt to stifle dissent and squelch data that casts doubt on prevailing views about man-made global warming. All along, I said that the dynamic we unearthed in Expelled is not unique to the field of evolutionary biology. All scientific research is a high stakes, highly politicized activity driven by big money and even bigger egos. Scientists stake their personal and institutional credibility on their work, and when someone comes along and questions not only their particular findings but also the theoretical framework upon which they rest, people get a little testy. Which only goes to show that the glowing rhetoric about the merits of peer review as a self-correcting mechanism in science is completely disengaged from reality. Rather than ensure quality, it merely enforces orthodoxy.
This isn't just bad news for dissenting scientists, it's also bad news for the general public, who have been led to believe in a fable called "disinterested scientific inquiry." But as philosopher Daniel Dennett says, "There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage has yet to be examined." The same can be said for politics, journalism and education. Anyone who thinks differently is naive.
On the other hand, maybe this isn't such bad news, because perhaps next time we won't be so quickly fooled by hucksters in lab coats who try to convince us that the science on a particular matter is "settled." As the late Michael Crichton pointed out, consensus science is like patriotism -- the first refuge of scoundrels:
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear, the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Update December 1, 2009:After spending a weekend reading through the e-mails, Clive Crook of the Financial Times says, "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering." Christopher Booker of the Telegraph couldn't agree more.
Update November 26, 2009: A breaking story out of New Zealand shows that the government's chief climate advisory unit--the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)--has allegedly been manipulating data there as well to reflect a warming trend over the past 160 years, to the tune of 0.92ºC per century. The raw data, however, reflects a statistically insignificant 0.06°C per century. An NIWA spokesman said they will issue a press release later today to justify their manipulation of the data.
And if you have 95 free minutes on your hands, you may also want to check out this video of climate change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton, who is also featured in a documentary I'm working on right now:
Talk about ignoring data that doesn't support your hypothesis. In a recent article bemoaning the lacklustre performance of several recent documentaries at the box office, journalist John Horn failed to even mention Expelled, which has earned nearly $7.7 million in the US and is poised to become one of the top ten grossing documentaries of all time once it is released in Canada on June 27th. Considering that the film had a production budget of just $3.5 million and an estimated marketing budget of 2-3 times that amount, Expelled will almost certainly be well into the black by the time it is released on DVD in October.
Clearly, Horn's thesis is incorrect. Documentaries can still make good money at the box office. Of course, the majority of them fail, but that's nothing new. Not many documentaries are suitable for wide release on the big screen, because they deal with subject matter that is only of interest to a few. Perhaps the only thing that's changed is that more documentaries are being released in theatres prior to going out on DVD in the hope that they might catch even a whiff of the success afforded to such films as Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins. This may give the appearance that the documentary genre is box office poison. But I think it's more a matter of bad decision-making when it comes to deciding how best to deliver a product to its intended audience.
So the question remains: Why would Horn fail to include Expelled as one of his examples? Could it be that he wasn't aware of the film? Highly unlikely considering all the controversy it has generated. Could it be, as I've already suggested, that he simply didn't want to deal with data that failed to support his argument? Or could this instead be a perfect example of the media bias we document in Expelled when it comes to anything that smacks of Intelligent Design? With a few rare exceptions, if the mainstream media isn't bashing ID--and films like Expelled that dare to suggest the movement has some merit--they're acting like it doesn't exist.
I guess only Horn knows the answer. But one thing is certain, documentaries--including Expelled--aren't going away any time soon.
Commenting on a preliminary injunction hearing in the case of EMI Records v. Premise Media (the company that made Expelled) regarding the filmmaker's use of the song "Imagine," Columbia Law School copyright expert Tim Wu said, “I don’t think this is a hard case; nor a close case. Playing 15
seconds of a song to criticize it is as fair as fair use gets. With
respect to Yoko Ono: if this case isn’t fair use, then copyright law
has become censorship law.”
I guess we'll have to wait a little bit longer to see if the judge agrees with him. Meanwhile, Ms. Ono and her sons have filed a separate suit, which is being fought simultaneously.
Deputy
Secretary of Defense Gordon England will present the Office of the
Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service to Ben Stein,
author, actor and commentator on April 15,
2008, in a ceremony at the Pentagon. Read the full story.
Now this is what I call journalism. It's an article written by Jason Rosenbaum of the Columbia Tribune that reports on a screening of Expelled that was shown to Missouri politicians in on April 2. Rather than use the occasion as a grandstand to air his own biases, Jason chose to present a balanced account of the facts and left the interpretation up to the reader. In fact, after reading the article a few times, I'm still not sure if I can say with confidence how Jason feels about the isssue. Why don't you give it a try? The only bad news is, if Jason keeps writing articles like this, he can kiss his future with the New York Times goodbye.
I guess it had to happen sooner or later: Evel Knievel died today after a lengthy fight with pulmonary fibrosis (the same thing that ended the life of my biological mother). While it's sad to see him go, considering the life he lived (he broke over 40 bones in his body) it's a wonder he made it this long. He was 69.
Like many children of the 1970s, Evel has always had a special place in my heart. Primarily because approximately 30 years ago, I begged and begged my parents to give me an Evel Knievel stunt cycle for Christmas, much like the one pictured here. Unfortunately, they decided to get me the Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car instead. It was sort of the same thing, but not really. I played with it for all of one day, and I never heard the end of it from my parents. Ironically, last Christmas Heidi and I pulled the same deal on my daughter Gretchen. She specifically asked for the My Little Pony Butterfly Island, but for some strange reason we bought her the My Little Pony castle instead. You'd think I would have learned from my parents' mistake...
I have no idea where my stunt and crash car ended up, but I suspect my younger brother Shawn wore it out and then my mom threw it in the trash. That's pretty much the way things went in our house. I do know, however, that if I still had the car today, it probably would have just doubled in value. In case you've never seen one in action, here's an old commercial for it. Sure looks a lot more fun than I remeber.
. However, I will say that such thinking contradicts another belief that Darwinists hold to be true in virtually all other cases, namely, that science progresses not through stifling dissent but through encouraging it. Rigorous peer review is supposedly the foundation of good science, essentially creating a self-correcting mechanism whereby if one scientist makes a mistake, his or her peers will be sure to catch it. I've heard many scientists say this process gives science an air of virtual infallibility. If we don't catch the error now, someone will catch it sooner or later. 
Recent Comments