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.
"ID pulls the wool off of people's eyes re natural selection"
I disagree. The faulty presumption behind ID is "complexity" and a feeling that something observed as complex for the observer must have an explanation as coming from a designer.
ID is a thick set of wool.
That's just the problem. We can't assume everyone is on the same page.
If you want to bar religious discussion from a public classroom, it's only fair for you to clearly explain the rules you want to impose on religious discussion.
We don't make a practice of teaching science by presenting bad ideas and then showing they're wrong. And in any case, why pick this one bad idea among so many?
Have you ever taken a science course? How much chemistry do you think we'd get through in a semester if we did it by having a discussion over every concept? I find it amusing so-called conservatives are pushing this mushy, liberal, 'whole-science' approach to pedagogy, after the utter failure of 'whole math' and 'whole language', which also had students 'discover for themselves' the rules of math or language.
An additional irony is that scientists like Pinker, whose views are anathema here, and who is politically quite liberal (though not very liberal) is campaigning for the abandonment of such teaching methods, because they ignore how the brain actually learns things, and because they don't work. So we have mush-brained conservatives and hard-headed liberals; truly a world turned upside down.
No, it's been explicitly stated that it could apply to any designer
Sure; it's also been admitted that this is a prevarication. I'm simply taking people like Johnson at their word.
We have a myriad examples of known design. If elements of nature resemble complex items of known design, why not assume design?
We tend to interpret complex objects in terms of what Dennett calls the 'design stance'; seeing something, we ask ourselves 'what is it for?'. It's hardwired into the way we think, not the object we're looking at.
So micro and macro evolution only appeared in text books, and scientific debate because us crackpots inserted the terms? You havee lost me.
Why do you think it's a bad idea?
How much chemistry do you think we'd get through in a semester if we did it by having a discussion over every concept?
How much biology/chemistry/physics are we going through now in middle school/high school? How much global warming/gay gene/gender-myth pop-science crap is being foisted on students now in the name of science.
If we teach that there is a design to life and the universe, and a reason for our existence beyond chance, and truth is real and findable, we will have smarter kids and better scientists.
We tend to interpret complex objects in terms of what Dennett calls the 'design stance'; seeing something, we ask ourselves 'what is it for?'. It's hardwired into the way we think, not the object we're looking at.
Or maybe it's because they are designed :-)
I wonder if you even know what you mean.
I wouldn't dare assume you do.
I saw your tagline, but I was responding to your comment that likened G. W. Bush to a "crackpot."
Pretty straightforward.
I'd like to know what topics you would forbid in a public classroom.
Because you can't calculate a priori probabilities for a process without specifying mechanism in detail.
How much biology/chemistry/physics are we going through now in middle school/high school? How much global warming/gay gene/gender-myth pop-science crap is being foisted on students now in the name of science.
My kids didn't get a whole lot of that. Your Public School System May Vary.
If we teach that there is a design to life and the universe, and a reason for our existence beyond chance, and truth is real and findable, we will have smarter kids and better scientists.
I disagree completely.
Huh?
I'm being called a crackpot, so I'll just slink off into the shadows....
Dang! 300!
It was 290 last time I saw this!
(The Army could use your recruitment secrets!)
Here's the English translations from the Hebrew Bible. The translations are not significantly different from what the NIV has. There is no indication anything "became" the word in Gen is properly "was". Isaiah says He created it, not a waste. The whole universe was unformed and void before creation.
Gen 1:2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.
Isaiah 45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens, He is God; that formed the earth and made it, He established it, He created it not a waste, He formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD, and there is none else.
"moved"
Moved, hovered, was over...All the same.
" My dictionary says "science" is having knowledge. "
That def is severely lacking and so broad as to be meaningless.
Jeremiah 4 refers simply to the choices and consequences of the exercise of Free will. Following the Holy Spirit leads to Heaven. Rejection leads to the ruin, disaster and devastation of life in hell. That occurs even as and though the Earth passes away.
And if I wanted a smarter one, just what 'pressure' would have to BE applied?
An environment where food is scarce and can more readily be accessed through tool use might be one such pressure.
I don't want 'might'.
I want some ACTUAL examples.
I update the logo whenever I get an additional ten. Actually, I waited until it was 302, in case there were any dropouts. And there is one non-evo name on the list, still very much on probation (sort of an experiment), so it wouldn't be accurate to say I had 300 pro-evolution names until the list had gone comfortably over 300.
I can't see into the future to tell what stimuli, if any, will make certain animals more intelligent in the future.
What is the point of your question, anyway? Or is this one of your usual attempts at intellectual masturbation?
Seeing as this writer describes racism & eugenics as traditional right-wing values, I doubt that he genuinely want to prevent harm to the right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.