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.
If this, if that, but don't equate disagreement or even distaste with hate. That simply is a lazy and simplistic way of viewing the matter. It appears to me to be parroting mindlessly some passage of the Bible inappropriately, and inappositely.
You are right, and I apologize.
I got carried away, and inserted those comments at an inappropriate point in the thread. (I've done that more than once tonight).
That being said, I'm not off base in asserting that Christians are quite commonly hated. Most of the "separation of Church and State" nonsense in this country, is really an expression of hatred towards Christianity.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, liberals and athiests have a lot of tolerance for every other religious belief.
Atheists come in many hues. I quite favor a robust Christianity in the American public square. Take that and smoke it.
At pubemd there are 19,222 references to consciousness.
Some are marginal to the subject of location, but most aren't
here's the link:
Entrez PubMed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=PubMed
I don't think many reference the left little toe as the seat of consciousness.
That will learn me for jumping into the middle of a conversation
With over 400 posts, there must be something worth reading here. Bump for later.
Is that a problem for you? Or does everyone have to share your ideas about this?
Yes. There are many paths that take you to that destination.
I quite favor a robust Christianity in the American public square.
Why?
Take that and smoke it.
Gave up smoking 30 years ago. Gave up smoking for eternity about the same time :-)
Very wonderful quotes. But the world has changed in the past two hundred plus years. This is no longer a homogeneous society and no longer 95% Christian. I really don't know the percentages but the demographics of this country have changed and will continue to change. This ID is creationism and changing the name willl not change what this movement is promulgating. And that is a religious view of science. The two are best left separate in my opinion. One is faith, the other is objective evidence. And the only evidence for ID is faith. And faith has no place in schools or science.
Must the IDer have changed the rules?
Precisely...lack of predictability.
So what.
Anyone who has read the Bible knows that it clearly says "The wisdom of God is folksiness to them that are perishing." They aren't ever going to respect what they are unable to understand.
We should honor their "wisdom" over God's, so we don't look foolish to the lost and dying? What do we give up next, so as not to offend fools?
I'll pass on that deal, thanks.
Who said "shame". I have no shame about your views or those whom you call "us". I thought I was "us". But since you seem to want a division here, my opinion had to do with the anti scientific views, the theocratic vision of our schools, the imposition of anyone's "faith" on others. That is just plain wrong in my view.
Oh MY! Not this again...and again...and again...
Because, traducing the useful in order to try to launch on a quest to achieve the Quixotic impossible dream of the perfect is a fool's errand. Good night.
Ok, then prove ID theory wrong using the scientifc method.
Questioning the motivation of the source does not validate or invalidate the issue scientifically. This is my point about dogma. Your dogma, apparently based on dislike for the Moonies, is ID cannot possibly be fact because the Moonnies are the ones studying it. Using the Scientific method, your point cannot be proven or disproven. Your logic seems to be, If the Moonies then it is a lie. That is opinion, not science. I am willing to say about ID "I'll listen but show me the proof" rather then insist "Science" proves my personal opinions "true".
Whatever you say, Moonbat.
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