Posted on 08/18/2005 5:17:34 PM PDT by curiosity
The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.
In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.
And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism. On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed. The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.
And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.
If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.
This would be the liberal line of argument anyway, even without the controversy surrounding intelligent design. "The president is trapped between religion and science over stem cells," declared a Newsweek cover story last year; "Religion shouldn't undercut new science," the San Francisco Chronicle insisted; "Leadership in 'therapeutic cloning' has shifted abroad," the New York Times warned, because American scientists have been "hamstrung" by "religious opposition"--and so on and so forth. But liberalism's science-versus-religion rhetoric is only likely to grow more effective if conservatives continue to play into the stereotype by lining up to take potshots at Darwin.
Already, savvy liberal pundits are linking bioethics to the intelligent design debate. "In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs," Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote last week, "can the U.S. afford--ethically or economically--to raise our children on fraudulent biology?" (Message: If you're for Darwin, you're automatically for unfettered cloning research.) Or again, this week's TNR makes the pretty-much-airtight "case against intelligent design"; last week, the magazine called opponents of embryo-destroying stem cell research "flat-earthers." The suggested parallel is obvious: "Science" is on the side of evolution and on the side of embryo-killing.
Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable way, summed up the liberal argument earlier this year:
Exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education . . . a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a "culture of life" than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Terri Schiavo, sex education, stem cell research--on any issue that remotely touches on science, a GOP that's obsessed with downing Darwin will be easily tagged as medieval, reactionary, theocratic. And this formula can be applied to every new bioethical dilemma that comes down the pike. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued ethical guidelines for research cloning, which blessed the creation of human-animal "chimeras"--animals seeded with human cells. New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, writing on the guidelines, declared that popular repugnance at the idea of such creatures is based on "the pre-Darwinian notion that species are fixed and penalties [for cross-breeding] are severe." In other words, if you're opposed to creating pig-men--carefully, of course, with safeguards in place (the NAS guidelines suggested that chimeric animals be forbidden from mating)--you're probably stuck back in the pre-Darwinian ooze with Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
There's an odd reversal-of-roles at work here. In the past, it was often the right that tried to draw societal implications from Darwinism, and the left that stood against them. And for understandable reasons: When people draw political conclusions from Darwin's theory, they're nearly always inegalitarian conclusions. Hence social Darwinism, hence scientific racism, hence eugenics.
Which is why however useful intelligent design may be as a rhetorical ploy, liberals eager to claim the mantle of science in the bioethics battle should beware. The left often thinks of modern science as a child of liberalism, but if anything, the reverse is true. And what scientific thought helped to forge--the belief that all human beings are equal--scientific thought can undermine as well. Conservatives may be wrong about evolution, but they aren't necessarily wrong about the dangers of using Darwin, or the National Academy of Sciences, as a guide to political and moral order.
I'd call anybody who thinks the state has the power to order the death of citizens who have committed no crime my political enemy. I'd call anybody who thinks the government has a "right" to take my money for the utilitarian purpose of creating human life to destroy it my political enemy. And I'd call anybody implying that President Bush might order ID be taught as a replacement fot the ToE a lunatic as well as my political enemy.
Well said.
It's going to be a little hard to persuade India, Japan, most of Europe, Israel etc to stop research and buy into this stuff.
Progress will happen, just not here.
Most of those guys actually paid for the "bill of goods". DVD's, tapes, books, ...
No, I am saying my God can do a lot better than as design we are only one generation away from surpassing.
Money Quote, speaking of the God of Inteligent Design "Their God is a science-fiction God, a high-I.Q. space alien plodding along a decade or two ahead of our understanding. The God of Judaism and Christianity is infinitely vaster and stranger than that, and far above our poking, groping inquiries into the furniture of our rocky little daytime cosmos."
So9
"Accepting Jesus as Lord has nothing to do with it. Rejecting the evidence He left us in His creation is what makes you a crackpot.
There is no conflict between Christianity and evolution."
????????? and I thought this was about ID hurting conservatives. What brand of Christianity do you hail from?
Do you think anyone here believes that lie?
It's always best to go to the Source on these things, and English, Greek, Latin and Hebrew are entirely too recent a creation to be used very well to evaluate Divine revelations.
" Dig deeper the verb "was" is not the correct verb, should be "became", was not created that way "formless and void"
Where?
The Earth became formless and void?
darkness became over the surface of the deep?
or, the Spirit of God became over the surface of the waters?
What are "the waters" do you know?
You said: The flaws of mankind are too obvious and too plentiful. These flaws alone should have squashed the ID theory.
Perhaps among the flaws of mankind is the inability to articulate the concept of ID. If the ID theory were that man created everything your statement would have more validity, IMO.
It seems to me that in every crevice of missing knowledge and understanding of science, there is room for a Creator. These crevices don't prove the existence of God, they only fail to exclude Him.
I don't even approach any expertise in science of any kind, but am I not correct that evolution deals with the development of life from one form into another, and not the origins of life itself? Has anyone created life out of nothing? Or even out of non-living matter? If not, I don't see how even scientists can exclude the possiblity that an unknown Being created life.
Statements that provide comic relief for the Lord
That Derbyshire article reminds me of articles I have read (in a historical context, years after the events) about how amazingly wonderful a stock buy General Atomics is! Mortgage the house and Buy It Now!
What else could you call such crackpots?
US?
You speak for YOURSELF
Yet, I feel sometimes compelled to do the impossible: educate ID'ers about science. The goal, months and years ago, was not to have conservatives tarred by their brush, lest the leftist MSM would use ID aginst conservatives.
But no! Thanks to those of my fellow conservatives who are also intellectually-limited religious zealots, The MSM is beginning to paint all conservatives as akin to the "American Taliban."
Is "most people" a mouse you keep in your poicket?
Scientists don't exclude that possibility.
Compare it to the birth of a baby. Once, people just thought the stork brought them but now we know about insemination, cell division, genetics and a lot of other details. Much better to know the details rather than just say God did it. That is what the creos/ID'ers are pushing. Just stop the progress and say God did it. Stupid.
I did not state that scientists question evolution. I stated precisely the opposite: that most every one, including myself, did not question the facts easily observed and reported on regarding evolution and natural selection within species. You must have skimmed my message or merely chose not to address the distinction.
So, you unwittingly proved my point: To the cult of evolution there is no equivocation, there is no room for grays, there is no room for doubt nor questioning nor debate around the issues. It is the religious cultic faith of evolution wholesale with all its garbage or it is nothing. Reread my original post. Stop passing judgement trying to dismiss thoughtful posts with quick one-liners to make yourself feel better about your superior wit and intellect.
Rich; from all the DVD's they have sold.
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