Don't need no stinkin' research!
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 don't see what the problem is with taxpayers deciding how the government spends their money. Do you? Sure others will do the research, but presumably with less money, without Uncle Sam writing checks. The underground comment is silly. Even assuming the issue were one of funding rather than prohibition, the idea the research would be done illegally in some basement is ludicrous. It would just be done in countries where it is legal.
Garlic enemas, every two hours. For forty days and forty nights. Always works.
I think I may have found a new tagline.
Let's just survey the trailer park to see what they want our research money spent on, shall we?
Sure others will do the research, but presumably with less money, without Uncle Sam writing checks. The underground comment is silly.
Not at all. Do you really think the 50 billion spent on AIDS research in the last 20 years was really spent on studying one little retrovirus?
Even assuming the issue were one of funding rather than prohibition, the idea the research would be done illegally in some basement is ludicrous.
The issue is only funding. If you outlaw something specific, all you do is change the title on the research grants.
It would just be done in countries where it is legal.
It's already being done there as fast as possible and they are hoping we keep shooting ourselves in the foot instead of competing.
In short, your post is quite a mouthful in my view.
Facts are stubborn things.
The Creator, were He to meet the creation half-way, what might He do? Is it unreasonable to assume He might make use of human language? Is it outside the realm of reason that He might have a set pattern of words not subject to addition of correction? Would He leave it at a bunch of words, or might He also jump into the fray and do something?
The biblical texts indicate that in all situations where the Creator has had, shall we say "direct," dealings with humans, He could not reveal Himself in all His glory. That would require such a suspension of the physical laws of the universe that no human flesh would survive. Thus, it is for scientific, physical reasons, that we are not permitted a "face to face" with the Creator this very moment.
But, when the time was right He entered into biological structure, blood, DNA, and the like. "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." And, as needed from time to time (as it has always been) the laws of "nature" were momentarily suspended, as if it were not a miracle to begin with that the earth and heavens exist and continue as they do.
Drives the Darwinists and materialists nuts, as if science cannot function in an environment where the laws of physics just might demonstrate some downright unreasonable behavior on occasion. At the same time they will be the first to tell you "direct observation" can be deceiving. "We don't have to see a history of amoeba-to-man to know it is true and scientific."
What a hoot. Thanks for your post.
No insult intended. But if you ask for mob rule, you get mob rule. Would you prohibit illiterates from voting on basic research grants? Mental patients? Sciencephobes? Kerry supporters? Where do you draw the line?
posit fraud that cannot be checked so let's just make it all nice and legal,
Not necessarily fraud at all. The same basic research (especially biological research) can fit into a wide variety of research grant categories. And if the research has already been started, few scientists are stupid enough to flush it down the drain for purely political reasons.
and suggest that the US needs to do it just to compete, or somebody else will get the brass ring (no doubt we should fund cloning, and a host of other things to facilitate and expedite unbottling assorted and sundry genies for the same reason, in a race to the lowest common denominator).
If you prohibit basic research, you fall behind in more ways than just the research itself.
Don't need no stinkin' research!
Bye.
You surely seem to think you are a know-it-all. Too bad you no nothing.
I ignored both of jorge's posts.
hmmm. I think you have a problem ...
What's it gonna be? Bleeding statues, Images in church windows? On cheese sandwiches?
Feater, Fester, Fester. Science can only examing phenomena that follow regal patterns. When science examines a spoon bender or a bleeding statue, or claims of global flood evidence, you accuse science of being anti-God.
Of course science will investigate these things, but the only thing science is opposed to, in the long run, is ignorance.
Amazing how you can respond to and ignore posts at the same time.
You are too funny.
Neither of the above. Neither are mentioned in the biblical texts. I have no problem with science investigating the physical universe as it exists. It should be aware, however, that ocasions will come along when it cannot explain diversions from the norm. To the extent it is unwilling to shuck its presuppositions it is bound to reject certain aspects of reality. Meanwhile it's got enough to do without indulging creationism and evolutionism.
Science can't explain everything, just as the majority of crimes are never solved. But the police believe, based on their stubborn naturalistic bias, that the unsolved crimes are committed by human beings using ordinary means.
You should not be surprised that science, having examined countless cases of fraud, lunacy and errors of memory and judgement, is not terribly inclined to attribute unsolved mysteries to miracles.
Look into the past then, and tell me of an actual set of events that drove change.
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