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.
That's an interesting thought. I've never posted a vanity, but if any topic demands it, this is it! I'll give it some thought after I finish up with the remaining questions from Torie. Speaking of which, I won't get a chance now to post the rest until tomorrow evening. Farewell till then!
PS. Yup, a reliable, adequate source of fresh water is definitely crucial. Yet another discussion unto itself! Hmm.. I'll have to think about how I would concisely phrase the 'fourth pillar' if need be.
Are you that dense?
Election --- Kansas 2000 --- Science vs Mythology -- Science Won
That's your stinkin' poll, and it's the only one that really matters - an actual election.
Here read about it yourself, Election results signal changes in science standards by Kansas board
Quote
The board in August 1999 approved standards that omitted many references to evolution, the big-bang theory or the age of the Earth. The vote was 6-4. After the election, the balance on the board has shifted to 7-3 in favor of evolution.
It should be noted that in 2000 Kansas went 65-33 for Bush over Gore. So for Republicans to lose that bad in a year where Bush won big should be more than enough to tell you that pushing mythology over science is a loser.
I'm sure if you looked you won't find any poll in 1998 or before showing evolution vs mythology as an issue concerning Kansas citizens, as to most people it was settled back in 1925 after the Scopes Monkey trial. Yet in 1999 when they brought it up again and they made it an issue again and they ended up losing.
Now, It's not a stretch to figure that if the people of Kansas who are among the most religious and Republican in the nation rejected replacing science with mythology, that the people living in states that are less religious and Republican (i.e. Colorado & Nevada) than Kansas will also do so.
Plus remember the Santorum Amendment, where Rick Santorum tried to sneak ID into the No Child Left Behind act, If ID is such a winner or a non-issue why did they take it out? Rick Santorum is also the most vulnerable senator in this up coming election (coincidence?)
But this belief is NOT what is commonly known as "intelligent design," which is really an abuse of language. Hey, there's another thing I can say about "intelligent design!" Bad science, bad philosophy, bad theology, and bad philology.
No one is asking you to believe anything else. I would just encourage you to accept what science has demonstrated to be the process God used to make life diverse, i.e. evolution. God created man using the process of evolution, which was His brilliant invention.
You're not standing up for God when ignore or irrationally deny the evidence he left us about evolution in His Creation.
The bing bang has nothing to do with evolution and the intelligent design movement. You're mixing up apples and oranges.
BTW, the Bing Bang theory was first proposed by a Jesuit priest, who thought it actually strengthened the case for a creator.
You don't have to be an atheist to accept any piece of science, be it Darwin's theory of evolution or anything else.
The atheists have done an excellent job spreading the lie that evolution=atheism. Don't let yourself be fooled.
Yeah, and watched over it, and perhaps gave it a tiny, undetectable nudge here or there.
Thomas Huxley was not a scientist. His view was just his (incorrect) philosophical opinion.
I did?
But YOU answered wrongly.
But then, God made you do that, so I guess that you really don't get that scored against you.
Hot so!
That's what Evolution is all about.
NOT so!
That's what Evolution is all about.
(Well; H is close to N.)
The world is DEFINITELY screwed up!
BTW, the Bing Bang theory was first proposed by a Jesuit priest, who thought it actually strengthened the case for a creator.
Let there be Light Stuff!
Yeah, and watched over it, and perhaps gave it a tiny, undetectable nudge here or there.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs opened up a whole host of environmental niches for mammals and birds.
As a result, mammals expanded from mostly shrew-like creatures to the wide variety we see today.
Thomas Huxley was not a scientist. His view was just his (incorrect) philosophical opinion.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895): physiologist, anatomist, anthropologist, agnostic, educator, and Darwin's bulldog. ...
hmm. sounds like a scientist to me.
Sometimes for sure but not this time. You labor under the misguided notion that the Kansas School Board Election of 2000 was a bellwether of some sort. An analyst with a bit less density would look at the data and see it as a blip where a few moderate Republicans replaced very conservative Republicans on the School Board. Even this was reversed two years later.
So you take a blip on a graph and extrapolate it to the voting population of the United States where overwhelming numbers of those voters believe that God created the Universe.
Stupid analysis based on ideology, not objective fact. You're an ideologue that wants it to be true but there is, once again, NO data supporting your dense assertions. None, nada, zippo.
In fact, if one looks at the reportage of that story and the facts surrounding it one can easily come to the conclusion that certain populations in Kansas were subjected to propaganda and when they realized it they righted the ship. The propaganda would be that the School Board voted to ban the teaching of evolution. It was propaganda because it was false.
What's your specific gravity?
Don't be so sure of that. There are an awful lot of Americans who are no longer buying into the dogma of evolution.
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.