Customer Reviews

Ideas in Conflict: Writing about the Great Issues of Civilization

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*Ideas in Conflict* offers instructors of college composition an alternative to argument readers that present only current events and trendy essays of the moment. The editors have selected a number of classic texts on themes and issues of enduring concern. Each themed section of the book includes an insightful essay on the intellectual, political, scientific, and literary trends that gave rise to the primary works excerpted. The editors preface each reading with an overview that highlights notable passages and the key concepts each author is known for, as well as the merits and drawbacks of their positions on perennial debates.

In the Faith & Inquiry unit, the editors challenge readers to examine whether various faith traditions of the world may be compatible in certain (limited) respects with scientifice theories for origins of the world. They note how texts like The Koran and myths of Native Americans may in certain details be more in line with processes of evolution than the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Arguments by St. Anselm and William Paley (grandfather of Intelligent Design), as well as Darwin in the last chp. of *Origin of the Species* are shown to provide food for thought, despite severe limitations. Theodicy (the problem of evil) is another major issue addressed with welcome readings from Boethius's *Consolation of Philosophy* and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy. A unit on Male & Female (gender roles) includes the Wife of Bath's Prologue and excellent excerpts from Simone de Beauvoir.

This textbook is a refreshing blend of nonfiction essays, theoretical works, and classics of literature that have had lasting influence on human thought. Each reading is accompanied by study questions on content as well as rhetorical strategy.

One reason I chose this text instead of *A World of Ideas* is that it also has a brief section that introduces basic skills of analytical reading/note-taking and writing, as well as an overview of the basic modes of composition; the latter is a bit disappointing, being fairly perfunctory and without depth on specific strategies for writing in particular modes. Another drawback is that ancient works like Hesiod's lack any kind of glosses for obscure mythic allusions. I would also quibble with a couple of fine points on the editors' overview of courtly love and medieval notions of gender, but on the whole, this textbook is useful and impressive for its breadth of readings and for the editors' academic treatment on how these works have been received through the ages.

This is not the best textbook I have ever taught with, but it is far better than many, and a rather good anthology of its kind. Other reviewers do not like its inclusion of faith-oriented writings (see my response to Richard Kaplan's review of this text, under Amazon's "Comments" button), but since these traditions have been so influential in history, it seems important to interrogate the seminal works like Anselm's or Paley's or Bryan's testimony in the Scopes Monkey trial in order to see how far back such arguments go, and what kind of weaknesses there were in such landmark cases.

I would definitely use this textbook again.

What sets apart this textbook is the presentation of wide variety of perspectives, allowing the students to decide for themselves. An example of the wide variety of opinions available in the book can be found in the "Human Nature and the Cosmic Order" section, which includes readings from the Bible, the Koran, North American Creation Myths, William Paley, Charles Darwin, and transcripts from the Scopes Trial. Another example of the diversity of the book's readings comes from the "Affluence and Equity" section that includes Hesiod, Sir Thomas More, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Edward Bellamy, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others. I cannot think of another textbook appropriate for upper high school and lower division college students that includes such a wide variety of readings.

I recommend the book for professors who teach logic-based argument and who want to present a diversity of opinions in their classrooms.

I cannot imagine a circumstance where I would be willing to use this textbook. Its presentation of ideas is exceptionally slanted. It calls to mind the Wolfgang Pauli quotation: "That's not right. It's not even wrong."

I am an argumentation teacher (I also coach debate), so I must take issue with the review that claims this book teaches "logic-based argument." Few things could be farther from the truth (though, I could probably skim this book to find a few examples).

There are other books out there that present a wide range of texts, many of them covering the same subjects. The one I am most familiar with is World of Ideas.

Please, consider another textbook, or an array of supporting materials, before making use of this text.

If you are a teacher considering adoption of this text, and if you place any value on science, stay clear of this book. If, on the other hand, you want a text that will indoctrinate your students into Biblical literalism, teach them to dismiss the theories of evolution and natural selection, and give them models of logical fallacies, then this is the book for you.

I have used Winchell and Winchell's anthology Ideas in Conflict: Writing about the Great Issues of Civilization for a great ideas course at the college level. At first glance, the text has many appealing features; for example, there's a nice variety of selections in the section on "War and Peace." As I actually worked my way through the book, however, I became deeply disturbed by the editors' biased presentation of the issue of Faith and Inquiry, particularly with respect to the treatment of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. This treatment consists of an appalling patchwork of bias, logical fallacies, misrepresentation of facts, and what can most kindly be called outright falsehoods. I have never encountered such bias in a textbook that comes from a respectable academic press, and I will certainly never again use this text. Examples include the following:

1. The editors' introduction to the section on "Faith and Inquiry" makes the claim that Aristotle was "the first empirical scientist" (43). This is patently false. I am an English teacher myself, so I checked my impressions with with my colleagues in the sciences, and they are adamant about the fact that Aristotle was not an empirical scientist. Aristotle never tested his propositions; if an idea seemed true and beautiful to him (such as his notion that the planets are embedded in crystal spheres which rotate while holding the planets in place in the firmament), that was sufficient for him. He did not subject his hypotheses to experiment, and of course observation and experiment form the essence of the empirical method. The most charitable explanation I can come up with for the editors' statement is that they fundamentally misunderstand what "empirical" means. This is a serious weakness...and does not bode well for the rest of the chapter, in which they try to place Intelligent Design on an equal empirical footing with Darwin's theory of evolution.

2. The editors write that "there has always been a measure of skepticism about Darwin's theories in intellectual circles" and then go on to propose that "the advocates of Intelligent Design" offer a legitimate alternative theory (48). They write that "proponents of Intelligent Design are Old Earth Creationists, who accept most of the findings of modern science, while balking at certain aspects of Darwinism--particularly the adequacy of the concept of Natural Selection" (48). Masquerading beneath this veneer of even-handedness (which begins at the bottom of page 47) is a reprehensible, academically dishonest misrepresentation of the truth. First and foremost, this passage introduces Intelligent Design as if it were a legitimate scientific theory in competition with the theory of evolution. This distorts the meaning of "theory," playing into uninformed popular perceptions of "theory" as just any old untested notion. In science, a theory is a model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning that explains and predicts natural phenomena. In the case of a broadly accepted theory such as the theory of evolution, the theory has been confirmed through extensive testing and has repeatedly been proven to conform to the facts of physical nature. The editors' choice to omit, elide, or disguise this crucial distinction does a terrible disservice to students and is irresponsible at best, deceptive at worst.

3. Winchell and Winchell's choice of authorities in support of Intelligent Design are either biased or are non-scientists...or both. The entire chapter is an exercise in shockingly blatant abuse of argument from authority. For example, they point to a high school biology textbook, Of Pandas and People, by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, conveniently omitting Davis's widely-quoted statement in a 1994 Wall-Street Journal front page article, "Of course my motives were religious. There's no question about it." If their work is to be referenced at all, why do Winchell and Winchell not mention this bias? They then cite work by Philip Johnson (a professor of law--not a biologist, nor a scientist of any kind) and William Dembski (also not a scientist, but a mathematician and theologist who teaches at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary). Winchell and Winchell devote extensive attention to the book Dembski co-edited (although they do not give credit to Dembski's co-editor, John Wilson), Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, praising it as "the most diverse array of arguments on behalf of Intelligent Design" (49). The "diverse array" of fourteen contributors (not thirteen, as Winchell and Winchell incorrectly state) to this volume include two attorneys, a political theorist, several mathematicians, and Christopher Michael Langan, a self-educated former bouncer and game-show contestant with no scholarly credentials whatsoever, the proponent of a dubious "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" in which he maintains, among other things, that "you can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics." Despite this "diverse array" which impresses Winchell and Winchell, Uncommon Dissent does not have a single contribution from a biologist, paleontologist, or geologist. One wonders why Winchell and Winchell give so much space to describing what they see as weaknesses in Darwin's theory--more space, in fact, than they devote to actually explaining it--while not mentioning any flaws in Langan's. Endorsing Uncommon Dissent as an authoritative text, Winchell and Winchell point out that it was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. And what is this Institute? Not an Institute of biologists and other scientists. As self-described on its Web site, this conservative group advocates limited government, market economy, and "moral norms." Clearly this does not qualify them as experts in biology. The final authority invoked by Winchell and Winchell is a Newsweek cover story. Not only does this entire section illustrate logical fallacies and the worst kind of abuse of argument by authority, but it models intellectual sloppiness and slipperiness which we would not tolerate in our students.

4. The editors make the absurd, outlandish claim that although recent scientific discoveries "do not, in and of themselves, support the specific dogmas of any of the world's major religions, they have made a position of outright atheism more difficult to defend" (49). This embodies the teleological fallacy to an extreme that I have never seen in a textbook from an academic press. The bias here, again masquerading under the disguise of objectivity, is flagrant and offensive. Atheist or agnostic students will feel themselves the target of religious indoctrination. Advocates of the teleological "argument" have made similar claims long before recent scientific discoveries, and in fact recent scientific discoveries prove quite the opposite: By the account of any respected scientist, newer findings have increased the already-broad acceptance of Darwin's theory. Any suggestion to the contrary is a distortion and a lie.

5. In the editors' introduction to the Darwin reading, they write that Darwin's image of the Tree of Life, "merely illustrates a vision of things, while proving nothing" (96). Their italicizing of "illustrates" and "proving" create the false impression that Darwin's theory is nothing more than an attractive metaphor, not a well-documented process of nature. The statement is misleading at best, even if regarded strictly as a response to that image.

6. The editors go on to say that if Darwin's theory were valid, "one would assume that the fossil evidence would show various life forms changing in minute degrees over a long expanse of time. Instead, the changes that are recorded by geology tend more often to be both extreme and erratic" (96). This trots out a well-worn, and thoroughly refuted, Creationist canard. Who exactly is the "one" who "would assume" this? Certainly not any geologist, archaeologist, biologist, paleontologist, or anthropologist, all of whom accept as simple fact the imperfection of the fossil record. Darwin himself anticipated and answered this concern, pointing out that the vagaries of fossil preservation are such that it's remarkable that any fossils at all are preserved. In fact, recent scientific discoveries have filled in many of the gaps in the fossil record, making the evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution stronger than it has ever been.

7. Winchell and Winchell's introduction to the selection from the Scopes Trial features their extraordinary claim that William Jennings Bryan "remained on relatively solid ground when he kept pointing out that an all-powerful God could suspend natural law for his own purposes. If anything, he began to lose credibility the moment he wavered in his literal defense of the scriptures" (114). This appalling editorial endorsement of Biblical literalism and fundamentalism has no place in an scholarly textbook. If one reads the selection in the text, one cannot escape the conclusion that Bryan comes across as remarkably incurious. Over and over again, he responds to Darrow with statements such as, "I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there" (115), "I have never felt a great deal of interest in the effort that has been made to dispute the Bible by the speculations of men, or the investigations of men" (125), "I have never found it necessary" to think about scientific claims that the earth is older than Bible says (126), "I have never felt it necessary to look up some competing religions" (127) and "I think they [other religions] are very inferior" (128), and "I am not much interested in" anything other than what the Bible states. And yet Winchell and Winchell tell our students that Bryan is doing well here, standing on solid ground. Do we really wish to inculcate this kind of smug, incurious, self-satisfied fundamentalism in our students? If Bryan's literal stance is "on relatively solid ground," then the earth, space, and biological sciences are not. Do we really wish to use our texts to indoctrinate students into a position of Biblical literalism that would result in throwing out the entire disciplines of biology, astronomy, astrobiology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and anthropology, among others? In their praise of Bryan's stance, that is exactly where Winchell and Winchell lead.

8. All in all, this section is riddled with logical fallacies, bias, distortions and falsehoods, and a shocking ignorance and lack of understanding about the scientific method.

When I read these selections, I was mortified, shocked, appalled. As teachers we should not be in the position of having to correct a text's untruths, distortions, and fallacies; we should not have to spend classroom time undoing the textbook's damage. I will never order this text again.