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.
The bag is empty. ID has nothing to say. It's the only theory around which is about another theory being wrong.
There's only one thing keeping the left from killing us with this. The mainstream media doesn't know squat from science.
Science!
The terms "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" are pure inventions of the creationists. No such distinction exists in science. There is ONLY "evolution">>>
Bologney, I have had arguments with died in the wool pony tail wearing dirty frock and pocket protecting evcolutionist who speak of micro and macro evolution as evidence in evolution. Hell doing a google of micro evolution brings up 4.2 million hits, an awful lot for making things up.
More and more each year Behe, Dembski, and Wells are moving to ID!
Once again, bearing false witness. Shame, Shame on you.
Meanwhile we will probably end up losing Colorado & Nevada and possibly Florida and Ohio.
Really? What evidence do you have to support this assertion? Certainly not the exit polling from the last election where neither evolution nor intelligent design placed on issues concerning Americans. Of course, moral values did place, right at the top of the list. And lo and behold guess what happened? Yup, you got it, the Republicans extended their majorities all across the nation.
You guys remind of a stroy about a boy and a wolf.
I suggest you actually read about ID rather than putting words in there mouth, ID by its first proponents says it is meant to compliment and even explain processes that darwinism, neo darwinism anmd the like cannot explain. It is not meant to replace it, as evolution did to creationism, and you would assert.
The author seems to be referring to the Declaration of Independence "all men are CREATED equal" and "endowed by their CREATOR" with inalienable rights. He claims this concept was forged by science and ignores the Christian roots of the concept of equality.
Romans 10:12 - For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
Galatians 3:28 - There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Colossians 3:11 - Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.
Hard to recover the atmosphere in which Galileo found himself. He was convinced of the rightness of his worldview and his vanity brought him down. The great majority of all scholars were Aristotelans of some sort, and they hated him for his unorthodoxy. Rebels live a hard life, especially intellectual rebels, because scholars more than ordinary people, never change their minds.
The creos are running scared; threatened by what might be discovered by science.
What God created was perfect...you are forgetting what man "created"......sin
It was sin, that set in motion the deterioration (sickness, disease)of the perfect creation
That's a new one for me.
Who's the "large donor" who wants to replace the Constitution?
I know about the moonies and that the Kansas creationists were not above getting support from an Isamic guy who got evolution out of Turkish schools as un-Islamic
I for one will take morality over science in a heart beat. When was the last time you saw a book burned in this country? The last great fire I recall was in Waco, TX. I believe that Janet and Bill were both playing with themselves while women and children were burned to death.
Not very moral. My I suggest that this event was more like Hitler taking on the Jews. And the government didn't give a sXXt. I guess it was for the chulrun...you know it takes a fxxking village.
Screw the flaming liberals and their creationism. I go with ID. They will loose!
Words that mean nothing. Actions that should wake many of you up. If you believe that we all came about because of a big BANG and that the gorilla at the zoo is a distant cousin than you do in fact have alot to be afraid of. Fear the unknown.
Baloney! Neither off you read my original post. Your fight with me is misplaced if you believe in debate. Which I was assuming was axiomatic, given that you are Freeper.
I missed his cutting sarcasm in the first pass. I withdraw him from the anybody group but the statement stands.
You are saying that an omniscient didn't foresee all this? And being omnipotent, create it in the first place?
Intelligent design is not without science to back it up, and objective reasoning to support it...in most cases the objective reasoning in support of intelligent design is patently much stronger IMHO than evolution...but also rejected and denied on its face in a very unscientific and subjective way by the other side.
My point was that those supporting the theories of evolution apply their own version of faith in that support, whether they call it that or not.
You are right. I do normally avoid these science vs. theology threads. Too many terms that are defined diffrently by too many posters, apparently including myself. And too much hate, it seems to me. I didn't think there was room for vitriol among those who are scientists. Do scientists even CARE if anyone disagrees with them? I thought not. At bottom, or so it seems, we all have our agendas, even the "objective" ones among us.
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