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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Get Plucked

By John Pieret

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Ouch!

A.C. Grayling, one of the "New Atheists," in the course of an otherwise well-deserved bashing of William Dembski's bogus requirements for his classes at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes off after Jesuits:

In the aftermath of the Reformation in the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit Order as an army of defence against the attack on the One True Church. The Jesuits saw that the reformers had learning and intelligence on their side; they were translating the Bible into vernacular tongues, and encouraging lay people to read it, and when laymen did so they could see that the doctrines and practices of the Roman church were a mountain of rubbish. The Jesuits aimed to be an army of very smart casuists and propagandists, skilful in rhetoric and argument, trained to counter the reformers' charges, not interested in truth but in Catholicism's tendentious version of it.

ThonyC, a historian of science, has a post up at his blog, The Renaissance Mathematicus, showing that Grayling may just be indulging in a little unthinking cultural bias. In fact, Jesuit and Jesuit educated and trained scientists made substantial and crucial contributions to the evolution of science from the late sixteenth up through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries.

The painful part is Grayling's statement that:

If anyone does not know how to pluck from history and the contemporary world examples of [those who smugly embrace ignorance] then he is either deaf, dumb, blind and illiterate ? or he is one of the creatures of faith.

Since Grayling shows some acute lack of ability to aptly pluck such examples from history, one has to wonder which category he falls into.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on August 22, 2009 (boomark / email).