Which one?
This one maybe?
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.
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 2 Timothy 3:16
I'm also a believer
Congrats! Just "believing" puts you in the same category as a demon.
You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. James 2:19
Gee, just what does "Intelligent Design" predict? How can it be tested?
They wrote it down long before Abram became Abraham.
When God created mankind he knew you would be typing here tonight. You have no choice but to follow his master plan.>>>
But did GOD make me type here? Your line of reasoning removes purpose in life. Maybe tommorow I will quit my job buy a gun and shoot up a place, what does it matter then, its GOD plan or maybe tommorow I will get up shower and eat breakfast and go to work. Which one of those is GODs plan then? If I purposely change the path I walk on, am I interfering with gods predertimination of me?
I know someday I will die, GOD knows I will die also. So why wait then, lets remove the purpose of freewill and off ourselves since then no matter what we do god knew we would and therefore we are only following his master plan and therefore it isnt freewill. I guess that removes hell as a punishment, since GOD is the only person to blame and GOD is infallable so no matter what we do, its on GOD and not us.
That's an easy one to explain. Liberals inhabit the same darkness as Jihadist, Buddhists...your whole list. None of those things are rejected by liberals (other than lip service), because none of them are Truth.
Which one?
This one maybe?
Not much of a movie fan...who is Rael?
Since he preordained all you would do in your life, I guess you had no free-will to do otherwise. If you want to call that "making you do it", I guess so.
Remember, if God had wanted you to ride, he'd created saddles!
I've often though along these same lines. An omnipotent being can do anything, even limit his own powers in certain cases, which would be necessary to give us free will. That, I believe, is why God created a quantum universe with fluctuations that even he cannot predict. To the cognitively challenged, this may sound like heresy, but God can do anything he wants.
Not movies, reality. Are you really too stupid to do a Google search?
Uh, you miss the point. God has already chosen your path for tomorrow. You have no choice. We will find out tomorrow what God has planned for you.
Hmm - better read every word before posting my .02.
My bad.
But, OTOH, if conservatives are going to profess ideas and ideals colored by what liberals are going to think about it, we're DOA right now.
Who gives a flying (insert noun) about what M. Dowd or any other mentally ill liberal thinks? That's actually half of the problem right there - trying to appeal to fools and knaves. What we need are statesmen who have the courage of their convictions, not poll readers and appeasers.
Omniscience is not to say all-controlling, prior knowledge of something does not preclude control of it.
Take for instance I know that tomorrow the sun will rise, or maybe tonight a meteor will destroy the earth, or clouds will cover the sky or it might rain. Knowing all these could happen, if any of them do does that imply I have control over them?
There's a real problem with this "genetic engineering" business and that is that we would have no idea if it had happened.
Maureen Dowd is one of those stopped clocks that mysteriously is never right twice a day.
Actually they were intended to be possible "partners" for Adam. Only after Adam 'tried' each partner for 'compatibility' did God realize his error and then created a women for Adam.
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