Origin of the Specious

At the New Humanist AC Grayling reviews Steve Fuller's book "Dissent over Descent", and a rollicking good review it is, too.

There is an added thought. Fuller claims to be a “secular humanist”. But having been educated by the Jesuits, so he tellingingly informs us, he “knows how to reconcile the irreconcilable”. Indeed! For at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to “realise its full potential in the public debate” – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.