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.
It's not the Liberals I worry about appealing to, it's the undecided's and those in the middle.
A believer of what? Do you accept Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to earth and rose from the dead?
"God has already chosen your path for tomorrow. You have no choice."
WT, let's keep the bad theology out of this. Nothing turns people away from Christ like telling the world that the Lord who desires all to be saved also chooses some for salvation and some for damnation. It's nonsense.
curiosity thinks her evolution buddies can be keen on a naturalistic worldview (i.e. no God, no ID) and accept the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Balderdash.
Nope...just not ignorant enough to follow a name like yours...have a great day...
I basically agree with your entire post.
And using "theory" to prove "theory" is what kind of reasoning?
I agree, and I believe it too. So long as you believe God works through Darwinian processes, there is no conflict with the above and science.
That is not, however, what the intelligent design people are proposing. They're saying that Darwinian processes cannot explain certain "irreducibly complex" aspects of life. That's bunk.
I am of the belief that God created life on earth and continues to have a hand in its development.
What happens if some day scientists figure out how life spontaneously emerged from non-life? They haven't yet, but suppose they do. Will your faith in God be shaken? Mine won't, for I believe that God designed the laws of the Universe such that the emergence of life was inevitable.
That is not a belief that science could ever falsify, for it is completely outside the scope of science. I think there is a good philosophical case to be made for it, but it is not scientific.
Having foreknowledge of the future doesn't make God responsible for everybody's actions.
In that regard, IMHO, in such matters, flawed does not necessarily mean out of the question...or even wrong. Just that it needs fine tuning and tweeking to work those flaws out.
Yes, you can, and you can also see that there are huge flaws with Darwinism without being a crackpot.
Then you dont understand free will at all. GOD gave it to us, we did not take it or create it, why would GOD create something for which he gives freewill then remove its sole property by controlling it? Your initial argument was that foreknowledge by GOD meant since he knew all possible outcomes in your life, he therefore controlls your choices and it isnt freewill.
So the Bible is just a book to you, like any other?
That makes sense.
And Abraham, being from Ur, probably would have learned the same place names as his fellow Mesopotamians.
ROTFLMAO ~
XX Century - Fascism, Communism, Elvis impersonators, Deepak Chopra;
XXI Century - Intelligent design, Flat screens, End of History, Islamism (unfortunately), new energy sources, another Rolling Stones tour (Hey, it's still early!)
Let's get with the program you monkey uncles!
Just the opinion of a near Atheist who doubts that anyone was around to design anything. But that is beside the point. Most Americans profess a belief in God in any event.
Nonsense. That God always knows what I do does not imply that God planned it.
Your problem is that you fail to grasp that God is not constrained by time. In that sense, it is not technically correct to say he knew about something before I did. He simply knows, not before, not after, but just knows at all times and all places everything. He transcends time.
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