I'm very glad he mentioned that. That is precisely the motivation behind the DI's pursuit of the whole ID crusade: They think that we're all incapable of learning from history. We're incapable of reasoning our way to a moral system that's objectively good & life-affirming. So they think that without everyone believing in a supernatural Authority Figure, all major moral struggles will always end up being more passionate versions of Coke vs. Pepsi. And therefore, without God all there is is Hobbes' war of all against all, as the most ruthless interest groups try to crush each other in pursuit of their own interests, unrestrained by any objective morality.In an Aug. 4 interview on National Public Radio, Santorum stated that "if we are the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us - than if in fact we are a creation of a being that has moral demands." In other words, the problem with evolution, in his view, is that it invalidates morality because it does away with God. ... That kind of visceral opposition isn't going to respond to scientific evidence, and it certainly isn't going to be affected by a judge's ruling - even from a judge whom the senator himself supported for the bench.
IOW, creationists fear that the postmodernists are right: There is no objective Truth. Creationists, to their credit, hate this possibility, but they are stuck in stage 3 of the grieving process: magical thinking. They hope that if the intelligentsia can get back to believing in the same Authority Figure god again, then the major moral arguments of the day can get settled once & for all, and everyone will be happy again.
But it's all so unnecessary. It may take time & much painful experience, but we can learn from history, because there is objective Truth out there to learn from.
Superb post. I've touched on this earlier, by asking, and getting no answers, to this question: If God announced that His work here is done and He's leaving this universe forever, wouldn't we still have the ability to know right from wrong?
Some of the ID advocates are motivated as you suggest, but others have a darker purpose. They want what every swami since time began has always wanted. They want to convince you that you have no capacity to observe and understand reality. Thus paralyzed, you will have no alternative but to turn to the swami for his profound wisdom, and his gentle guidance.
The Discovery Institute's campaign against evolution -- and against the scientific method itself -- literally amounts to a full-blown war against reason. Those who don't understand this are already in swami-land.
Exactly. So they cling in palpable desperation to the inerrancy of scripture, afraid that if one chink is allowed the dam will burst asunder. There can be no balancing of inerrancy against other worthy considerations.
Or rather there can be, and certainly is, such balancing, but it can never be admitted to occur. It has to be resisted specifically in the most visibly prominent instances (e.g. Genesis) even though it is qualified away or ignored in many other cases (e.g. Biblical claims that God creates individuals as well as species, ignored prohibitions against women wearing jewelry or fancy hats in church, Paul claiming the gospel has gone out to the whole earth circa 100 A.D., suffering witches to live, etc, etc, etc).
By the same token, just as creationists are afraid that postmoderinists are right, they are also afraid that scientific atheists are right. They share with this crowd the central common presupposition that, if a naive "common sense" literalist understanding of biblical cosmic history is incorrect, one must immediately (or at least logically should) plummet down a slippery slope to atheism.
In both cases creationists share a radical either-or-ism, and accept far too may presuppositions foisted by, those who should be and are their intellectual enemies. It's rather odd really, if you get to thinking about it. It seems almost impossible to even BE a creationist unless you've uncritically (or tacitly) accepted a great many assumptions that historically come straight from modern anti-theistic or secularist sources!