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 Sa'ami are the Sami. Problem in looking up Sami on the net is you get all these guys named "Sami". It's a common Arabic name!
"Crackpots is crackpots, baby."
Like G. W. Bush, eh, "Right Wing" Professor?
"Stop hitting yourself!"
Circular arguments.
Why argue the unprovable in science or religion?
Does the Nicene Creed suffice? I say it and believe every word of it every Sunday, and on occaisional weekdays. But maybe you don't consider Catholics to be Biblical Christians.
So how about this guy, an evangelical Protestant:
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
I like this article of his:
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1993/PSCF9-93Miller.html
Or how about the good people at Wheaton College? They accept evolution, and are good Christians too. Scroll down to their statement of faith:
http://www.wheaton.edu/welcome/mission.html
Is there a bibilical equivalent of Enkidu?
There is so much on this thread that demonstrates a misunderstanding about free will, and God's all knowing nature, it's hard to pick the right spot to butt in. But this is as good a place as any.
Current science supposes that the whole of the Universe emerged in a "Big Bang" event. Yes, I know that's not the only Theory, but it's the one with the most traction at this time.
The big bang isn't matter exploding out into empty space. It's matter AND empty space AND time exploding out of...for a lack of better word...nothing.
God is outside of ALL of that. He isn't dragged along sequentially by Time as are we. So he can create us with free will, and know the outcome of our lives before it happens FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE INSIDE THE CONFINES OF TIME.
There are some interesting parallels between Enkidu and Adam - deciphering them (not especially hard) is left as an exercise for the reader ;)
What is like a mosque in Riyadh?
PLACEMARKER
This has nothing to do with religion. This has to do with crackpot science, in which certain hacks are claiming they can PROVE that certain life forms are too complex to have evolved in the Darwinian sense.
I am a Christian, and believer, and I do believe God intelligently designed the universe. Believing it doesn't make me or anyone else a crackpot. It is NOT, however, what the term "intelligent design" refers to in the context of the crevo wars.
You misunderstand, I am sarcastically using wildturkeys wild ideas against him, I am showing him the fallacy of his reasoning by demonstrating it, tell him not me.
Check out my tagline, "kosmic".
I guess you're kidding..
Your post. Only the name of the deity is different.
If one believes in Jesus, and trusts what he says, then to say otherwise would be, well, foolish :-)
It is not being kind to a Buddhist to tell them to just continue to do what they are doing, and they'll be just fine, if you believe the opposite to be true.
Lot's of moral, well intending, GOOD people may well not live eternally with God, if what Jesus said is true. You don't get there by trying to be good enough. It's not possible.
Guess I'm not.
Clottiing is out, presumably related cascade phenomena are out, flagella, eyes...most taxonomy is out since it presumes genetic relatedness (DNA) when a Intelligent Designer would not be so constrained.
Shall I go on?
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.