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.
http://www.caseforacreator.com/home.php
a very good book.
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.
He loves Maureen Dowd. 'Nuff said.
No issue makes us look like a bunch of uneducated moonbats than the NUTS who push junk science known as "intelligent design" based on a fairy tale.
The left doesn't have a clue about anything intelligent. Let them get vociferous over something they know nothing about.
No, quite the opposite. Intelligent design is irrational, and that is why it will sink us in the end. Reason will prevail eventually.
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There are many arguments that evolution is part of intelligent design and a rather beautiful and elegant part of that design to boot. In the same way man guided the evolution of canines to todays great danes and chiuauas so too is there a divine hand in the evolution and creation of all the world's creatures.
What's funny is that some of the people who support intelligent design the most aren't ignorant bible thumping conservatives but pysisists and astronomers on the bleeding edge of science who must deal with the impossibility of all this being a random coincidence on a daily basis.
And that is why intelligent design will ultimately succeed because it's not just faith which backs it up its the fact that if the "settings" of the universe were off by a billionth of a billionth of a percentage point (speed of light, electron volt, etc) the life, the universe and everything would simply not exist at all.
Some people are truly blind.
What merits? The Utilitarian Code of Merit? Liberals, libertarians, and conservatives who support stealing my money to kill human beings don't argue the case on its merits, they lie, obfuscate and instill false hope and fear in those afraid of their own mortality.
Your link is broken.
Do I believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old? No. Do I believe God is built the universe and everything in it as He saw fit? You bet. And part of our job is to honor and celebrate this wondrous creation by appreciating it and trying to understand the sheer magnitude and magificience of its complexity.
Well, I think that, superficially, much of "the public" would agree with the notion that the world is "designed."
still waiting for the scientist to duplicate evolution in the lab.
So you believe in...what? The theory of willy-nillyism? Accidental everything?
How sad for you.
And how ignorant you will appear in a few years. Most of the scientific community is actually moving toward intelligent design, by that or several other names which mean the same thing.
Exactly, intelligent design is a matter of faith. Unfortunately, some crackpots are trying to push it off as science. That's the problem. That's what makes us look like moonbats.
Outstanding find. Douthat eloquently expresses the fears that many of us here on FR have also held about what ID will do to conservatism.
That statement was designed no understanding of what generations have considered godless.
I know next to nothing about Intelligent Design.
Do all Intelligent Design proponents, nowdays, believe exactly the same thing -- that it is an alternative to Darwinism?
I do know I was taught in HS Biology, 40 years ago, that the theory of evolution was acceptable as long as one believed God was behind whatever evolution took place. That has always seemed, to me, like the common sense to way to look at the world.
Was what I was taught the same as "Intelligent Design"?
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