"Intelligent Design": Stealth War on Science

Revolutionary Worker ^ | November 6, 2005

[Tailgunner Joe]

A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….

This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.

"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."

This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."

Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.

Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.

Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."

Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.

For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.

The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.

The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.

Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,

"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."

Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,

"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."

After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,

"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."

The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.

Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,

"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:

"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."

The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."

Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."

[Tailgunner Joe]

All you have to do to prove ID is wrong is show that irreducible complexity does not exist in nature.

[Torie]

I used that line yesterday, and I suspect you stole it, and tried to mask the lacency by using the parlance of a gay language.

[Roots]

I couldn't argue irreducible complexity better than this:

"The IC (irreducible complexity) argument also assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary, and therefore could not have been added sequentially. But something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary. For example, one of the clotting factors that Behe listed as a part of the IC clotting cascade was later found to be absent in whales, demonstrating that it isn't essential for a clotting system. Many purported IC structures can be found in other organisms as simpler systems that utilize fewer parts. These systems may have had even simpler precursors that are now extinct.

Perhaps most importantly, potentially viable evolutionary pathways have been proposed for allegedly irreducibly complex systems such as blood clotting, the immune system and the flagellum, which were the three examples Behe used. Even his example of a mousetrap was shown to be reducible by John H. McDonald. If IC is an insurmountable obstacle to evolution, it should not be possible to conceive of such pathways—Behe has remarked that such plausible pathways would defeat his argument.

Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin have shown that systems satisfying Behe's characterization of irreducible biochemical complexity can arise naturally and spontaneously as the result of self-organizing chemical processes. They also assert that what evolved biochemical and molecular systems actually exhibit is redundant complexity — a kind of complexity that is the product of an evolved biochemical process. They claim that Behe overestimated the significance of irreducible complexity because his simple, linear view of biochemical reactions results in his taking snapshots of selective features of biological systems, structures and processes, while ignoring the redundant complexity of the context in which those features are naturally embedded and an over-reliance of overly-simplistic metaphors such as his mousetrap. In addition, it has been claimed that computer simulations of evolution demonstrate that it is possible for irreducible complexity to evolve naturally.

[Torie]

They are stealing my lines John, and I don't mean coke.

[Roots]

All you have to do to prove ID is wrong is show that irreducible complexity does not exist in nature.

ID is not falsifiable! NO! That's like saying "all you have to do is disprove Christianity and it'll all go away", of course it can't be disproven, that's why IT IS NOT A SCIENCE!

[so_real]

You don't have to be a Creationist to be a conservative. You don't have to be religious at all really.

Perhaps so. I won't argue that. And if it was just one or two strange bed-fellows, I'd overlook it -- as another FReeper once posted, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But when all these groups come together and vehemently rally around an issue, any issue ... well, let's just say as a conservative I find it disquieting.

[Coyoteman]

with these naughty young minds cruising the internet, it is quite easy to be exposed to just about everything, and every point of view. Oh the horror.

Yeah, and they'll be getting pretty old before they head for either evolution or religion on the internet!

[Torie]

All sex all the time, can get boring, even for the young.

[Roots]

What strange bed-fellows Evolution has had coming to its support: Communists, the ACLU, the DU, the MSM, PFAW, Wiccans, Ted Kennedy ... the list goes on and on.

Are you suggesting conservatives should blindly oppose any issue that may be supported by a bunch of liberals? Should I retire any further rational arguments and critical thinking for the sake of the Party? I can't locate my "Official Voter's Guide", can you email me a copy of yours?

[so_real]

I'm suggesting that if those groups all got together and told me the sky was blue, I'd peak out the window (twice) before agreeing. I suspect a voluminous number of conservatives would peak out the window more times than that. My comment apparently struck a nerve with you; perhaps you'd peak out the window yourself as well if the issue in question was anything other than evolution. I don't think you should arrest any critical thinking whatsoever at all ... not even for the sake of evolution.

[Senator Bedfellow]

GMTA, I guess ;)

[Torie]

I did a google on GMTA, and came up with with Georgia Motor Trucking Association. They probably listen to Rush Limbaugh on the road.

[jwalsh07]

The "theory" goes like this.

If you poison the minds of the young with teachings that God created the universe, they will be unable to do integrals and derivatives when they get to Calc 1.

The "theory" sucks.

[Senator Bedfellow]

Probably. Perhaps we can interest them in audiobooks of Locke and Montesquieu...

[jwalsh07]

Hey I used that line the other day to Huck while talkng about Alito and Barnhart. You steal it from me?

[Torie]

Only after Aristotle and Plato, and then my favorite, Machiavelli, the latter the one about which I have real expertise, as a philosopher and pundit.

[Torie]

No, you stole it from me. I have the time line, and my post using the term was to YOU! If you posted earlier to Huck, that really sucks.

[jwalsh07]

LOL, sue me counselor!

[Torie]

Here's the gravamen of the complaint:

"Posted by Torie to jwalsh07 On Bloggers & Personal ^ 10/31/2005 2:07:38 PM PST · 52 of 60

What is disturbing about Alito here is not so much his failure to understand that there is an administrative cost to getting a result perfect in every case, as opposed to in most cases, and there is a cost benefit analysis that one must engage in. (The perfect in reality may be the enemy of the good.) Rather, what is disturbing is Alito's apparent failure to give any deference at all to agnecy determinations in administering a law. In that sense, he appears quite activist in having judges second guess agency dterminations that certainly were made in good faith and have a reasonable basis.

[Amish with an attitude]

"A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court..."

No doubt the author is speaking of George Washington.