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.
Crackpots is crackpots, baby. We see enough of them in science.
Buddhism is but another false religion. Comparisons between elements of Buddhism, and Judeo/Christian elements is meaningless.
The fact that a religion is based on a belief in a God, is not relevent. Satan believes in God. Belief in God is not the issue.
The issue is the condition of the human soul, and the remedy for it.
There is an almost endless spectrum of religious beliefs. Devil worship is one of them. I think we can agree that Devil worship is not likely to get ones eternal soul into Heaven.
God offers a solution, in the form of a gift, and he did it in a way that is extremely exclusive. He came in the embodiment of Jesus, and said that He is the way, and the only way. Then he backed up his claim with demonstrations of his divinity, such as no other figure in history has done. Notice I said history, not legend or mythology.
The best way to catch a fish is with a worm. It is REAL food for the fish, but there is problem of that HOOK on the inside.
Satan has lots of ways to appeal to the basic need of the human soul for salvation. Buddhism is but one of them. Some will take that bait. Some will take another. Some will refuse all religion altogether. Satan's just fine with that result also.
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically. Albert Einstein
God always takes the simplest way. Albert Einstein
That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. Albert Einstein
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty. Albert Einstein
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. Albert Einstein
Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish. Albert Einstein
Let's look at a profound statement from another intellectual genius who recognized "a superior reasoning power" as the Source of life and liberty:
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." - Thomas Jefferson
A concept of "Creator-endowed," therefore unalienable, life, rights, and liberty lies at the heart of the American experiment in self-government.
Ideas have consequences! Are life, rights, and liberty gifts from the Creator, or are they mere chance "grants" from some other individual or collection of individuals in positions of power at any given time and place? The answer to this question has determined either liberty or tyranny for individuals.
If we are to train our future citizens that "science" cannot include an acknowledgement of a "superior reasoning power," then we'd better examine the long-term consequences of that idea on the future of liberty in the world.
Lincoln declared:
". . . it is no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. . . .The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. . . . And yet, they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. . . .All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a . . . revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers [initiators of threatening change] of reappearing tyranny and oppression."
Ideas do have consequences!
Enough of scientific snobbery! One is inclined to suspect scientific subject matter which must be mandated by government!
Jefferson: "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
Why? The stories that were written down were based on oral traditions, which continued to exist as oral traditions among the common people, who were generally illiterate. Abraham probably received the oral tradition from his parents, took it with him to Caanan, and passed it down to his descendents, who eventually wrote it down after the Kindgdom was established.
If Abraham brought the writings with him from Messepotamia, then there should be some archeological evidence of Summerian writing in Caanan from the time before the Israelites went to Egypt. In fact, we don't.
It's like a mosque in Riyadh. Only the language is different.
Then how come the Kansas creationists invitd an Islamic to fortify their position?
You can find all sorts of folks to get into dispensationalism ~ I ain't one of them!
Gilgemesh is most likely a humanization of a "god" story, as it applied to a single city-state in Sumer. We simply have not dug up enough stuff there yet to figure it all out.
And yes, Gilgemesh is a whizbang of a story. I particularly like the more modern sci-fi/fantasy-fi take-offs some authors have tried. Their success in doing so gives you an idea of the power of the literary outline of the ancients who wrote that one down. They were masterful ~ and most likely benefited from many centuries of "oral tradition" concerning how you build a story.
Is "Sa'ami" related to "Sami" - as in the far northern Europeans?
The intelligent design people are making is much stronger: that they can PROVE certain aspects of life are too complex to have evolved. That is anti-scientific, anti-intellectual nonsense.
Finding an anti-Bhuddist is rare around here. The implication that it has no value as a philosophy (this near Atheist views all religions in philosophical terms), is quite misplaced. There are many roads to understanding universal truths. To traduce roads that some have used in their culture in their attempt to not only live, but live the just and moral and self empowering enobling life, is well, foolish.
Even the Great Fish of Hinduism is there ~ that's a manifestation of the Messiah as a fish that saves Ma-Nu (Noah) from Mt. Ararat and thereby saves both humanity and all the schools of wisdom and knowledge.
There are other references in that book that clearly point to this lesson, otherwise why would God have inspired men to keep this book in the canonical texts?
I have a better idea. Why don't we just leave politics and religion out of science?
Let the kids learn about how God created the universe in Church or from their parents. As a Christian, I simply do not trust anyone else to teach sound theology.
Moses had some really good sources for the work he set out to do. I suggest he had written documents.
I would agree if that is what they assert. But about that, I suspect there is dissension. I am pinging an intelligent interlocutor on that one, with whom you have crossed swords, because this issue really isn't within my intellectual portfolio.
Whether or not there is a superior reasoning power is a question that science cannot answer. That is a philosophical question. Science neither includes nor excludes God.
Remember, Sumerian is a stylized, but still hieroglyphic technique of record making.
It is believed by many specialists that the Sumerian method, in its earliest forms which were more clearly pictoral, were adopted by the people who created Egyptian hieroglyphics.
These same folks also appear to have invented Chinese writing.
Any chance you have a website on the Chucki, Saami and Californian myths?
I have a longstanding (but strictly avocational) interest in both language and comparative myths.
There was an article and long thread about that the other day...
This is more of the 'henny penny' so-called conservatives who are afraid of liberals and what they think of them, afraid to confront liberals and liberalism in the theater of 'battle', afraid to stick by their professed convictions. This is no way to win in the market place of ideas by living in fear of what the liberals might think about us, or might do to us.
Pure and simple, this article is hogwash.
The leaders of the successful wing of the conservative movement over the last 25 years (Reagan, GWB, Rush Limbaugh, etc) would never take the fearful positions that you advocate.
Additionally, all of them professed publicly their belief that our Creator was exactly that...and that we are directly a result of God's creation.
All this nonsense about believing in Creation being the downfall of conservatives flies in the face of any facts, results, trends, etc. If anything, the last 5 years have proved mostly otherwise.
On a personal note, I have yet to read the testimony or expressed personal beliefs of faith from anyone who professes that evolution is compatible with being a biblical Christian. I've seen rhetoric, but no 'beef'. Mostly I have seen some pretty hateful things said about Christians, and about God.
For those who try to be legalistic about The Bible, all I can say is to read the words of Christ, our saviour:
John 3:12
"I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?"
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