roachboy

taltos: i do not see the basis for your censorship claim in the first place. so far as i can tell, the term "censorship" used in this context is a rhetorical device that functions to wedge the question over over over into a territory that it does no occupy. most of the debate at this point is really over whether you are going to be allowed, in the context of the thread, to shift the question in this direction. if you are not allowed to make that shift, it is because the arguments that you are presenting do not really make the case that there is any censorship. they are simple assertions. to demonstrate them, you make basically 2 moves.
1. you define censorship in a very vague way.
2. you work via analogy (x is like y).
3. the analogies are to do most of the work of defining censorship as you are using the term, and the situations within which it functions.
4. you go back to arguing that id is no better or worse than any other type of theory and so to not teach it is a form of censorship.
5. then the move is "and i oppose censorship. dont you?"

you can see all these if you unpack stuff like this:

so an interesting possibility for applying your logic would be: protestant fundamentalist schools should be required to teach thje work of alister crowley. they should take crowley's work seriously and give it the status of a "controversial topic that has not been adopted as mainstream facts." to not teach crowley is censorship. i oppose censorship. dont you?

as an explanatory theory of human evolution, id is worthless.
sure you can play the game of locating logical parallels in scientific method that rely on the application of notions understood as axiomatic, and say that these axioms amount to matters of faith--and in a way the parallel is correct--but it does not follow that therefore all types of axioms are equivalent.
if the defense of id moves through some (mis)reading of contemporary philosophy of science, it seems that something got erased along the way. what can function as axiomatic does so not because it is transcendently true (nothing is, least of all a signifiers given content by a dubious metaphysics) but because communities of agents accept them as legitimate as a function of their professional training, modes of thinking and operation, etc. intelligent design IS NOT accepted by any of the legitimate scientific communities that are concerned with either interrogation of biological systems (legitimate here in the sociological sense). period.

what the defenders of id do, then, is a kind of public-relations endrun: having no hope of getting their shabby theory accepted as legitimate science, they issue what amount to press releases that work the types of claims embedded in statements like that quoted above. that should end the debate.

but it doesnt, and explaining why it doesnt is NOT an epistemological matter, NOT a matter of the nature of scientific method as over against its intellgient design correlate/parody--it is a POLITICAL question pure and simple. the POLITICAL issue is whether fundamentalist protestants have adequate cultural power in particular areas to reshape the terms of legitimate (in the sociological sense) debate such that (a) their presentation of the scientific community and the dominant theories concerning the development of biological systems can be confused with fact and (b) within that to displace the question of id as scientific theory onto grounds parallel to those which you have outlined.

so at issue here is NOT anything about the transcendent value of scientific method and its definition, but rather the extent (and limits) of the cultural power of ONE (rather crude and uninteresting) version of christianity. the limits of the purchase of claims for id are the limits of the ability of that community to control the terms of debate.

variant:

in responses to your posts, you have been treated to a range of definitions of scientific method and a series of confessions of faith in that method. outside a context where the PARTICULAR version of christianity controls the debate, it ends there.

there is nothing you can say to these arguments, simply because what you are running into hierarchy of disciplines (reflected in the hierarchies of statements about them) particular to a different socio-cultural context. in that context, id looses. it will loose every time.

that is looses is NOT censorship: that it looses reflects the simple fact that id has not been and cannot be presented as a series of arguments that people find compelling outside of a very particular frame of reference. id is therefore NOT a legitimate scientific theory that is being suppressed unjustly-----it is not a legitimate scientific theory at all. the explanation for this is sociological first, then theoretical (the relation between these is circular).
but that's all there is to it.
the debate is over.

there are a host of conceptual problems that attend the philosophical underpinnings of darwin--most of these follow from the historical situation darwin occupied and the extent to which he simply inverted dominant conceptions of history and biology in his own work. so the claim would be that darwin did not go far enough simply because of when he was writing and the fact that he is a product of his historical circumstances--just as anyone else is. so pushing through these problems would push evolutionary theory entirely outside the purview where id would have shit to say about ANYTHING--because the formal symmetries between certain aspects of evolutionary theory and the crap that is id would disappear

(e.g. the assumption that all of evolution followed from a single moment....why single, why not multiple? why does it not make sense that there were any number of origins, any number of trajectories?)

but the fact is that this is not a theoretical discussion, and so to go into them would amount to a threadjack.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite