Ben Stein's "Expelled" Isn't Finding Conservative Acceptance

The release of Ben Stein's peculiar effusion has provoked a flurry of conservative kerfuffle, with a camp on the "ID is being persecuted" side and another camp over on the "hello, this is crackpot crazy" side of the ranch.

A fairly influential conservative columnist who is appearing on the Denison campus tomorrow night has tried to broker a dialogue, with the results reminding me of the old saying "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be spat upon by everyone." Or something like that.

Anyhow, in pushing back against the idea that ID should be taken on with other conservative baggage from the evangelical/fundamentalist rack, Jonah Goldberg has picked up a fair amount of flack, though he is not alone in trying to block the entry of anti-evolutionism from the temple precincts.

This recent post by him at National Review's widely read blog might be of interest:

Relativism V. Relativity [Jonah Goldberg]

A lot of readers seem to be reading me as actually saying that relativity and relativism are justifiably linked. That wasn't my point. Rather, it was that people often look to science to confirm their preconceived philosophies and prejudices. People were convinced everything was relative long before Einstein's theory of relativity arrived on the scene. They took the confirmation of his theory as confirmation of their political and philosophical views. Similarly, many atheists insist that evolutionary theories of one kind or another prove that God doesn't exist. Many ardent believers say that science proves an intelligent designer. (And lots of people reside somewhere in the vast murky middle.) Take an example far afield from all this stuff. Many liberals think conservatism is a kind of insanity. So, they look to science to confirm that conservatism is a kind of mental defect and have been doing so for decades now. I'm not saying that science can't confirm someone's point of view — of course it can. But we should be on guard for the use of science as a rationalization of perspectives that science doesn't speak to very well, just as we should be on guard for the use of religion as a justification for agendas that don't have much religious salience.