The NYT: Much Worse Than Know-Nothingism

August 23rd, 2005

Michael Dietz, whose Reading A1 blog you should consult regularly, properly corrects me on a crucial point in connection with the Times’ appallingly bad article about intelligent design and evolution (discussed in detail here yesterday).

Michael writes:

Kenneth Chang, obedient to the Times’ new version of PC, is so far from wanting to offend the sensibilities of faith-based Americans that he’s basically willing to give the game away to them entirely, at least in that part of the article he expects them to read. Having been charged to write about the science of the ID controversy, what, in Chang’s mind, is the most urgent “scientific” question his article needs to address? Whether science can properly “include the actions of an unseen higher being.” With respect to Arthur Silber, this is no kind of merely passive know-nothingism.