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.
What if someone told you there was an "optimal" road to travel to the cabin you rented at the top of a steep mountain?
You could go off the "optimal" road and you might get to your cabin.... then again.....
I think that saints are people who have, for the most part, kept to the optimal road.
I think most Christians keep quiet not because they are afraid those they lecture to about their truth being the only way will hate them. I think they have respect for others truths and value a civil society with tolerance for all.
The "truth of Jesus" is not everyone's truth, or did you notice?
Yes.Quite. Tah.
Can't prove it wrong any more than I could prove that you are not a cleverly designed space alien.
That's the point.
ID cannot be falsified by any mechanism because there is no possible research approach to do it.
Evolution can be...but it hasn't. That's why scientists continue to use it.
And evolution HAS????
Evolution is nothing without time becoming magical...if given enough time, of course.
So.. you are saying that there is predictability about the unpredictability...interesting.
And no evidence of one species morphing into another makes evolution require far more "faith" to believe...except it comes easier for those whose pride makes anything preferable to humbling themselves.
No worries, though. They mystery will be crystal clear to all one day...and EVERY knee will bend and EVERY head will bow.
Remember those words...they're going to be more thatn a "theory" to you some day.
Nope, you've got it backwards.
Go re-read my posts. With a Designer, intelligent or not so, what is true for organism A may not be so for any given organism B.
Studying them would be a potential exercise in futility.
Clearer?
Interesting...
The Physics of Chance and Necessity,Spring Semester, 1998
Course Description:
The course will introduce students to a wide range of important and beautiful concepts of physics, by emphasizing the role of probability and statistics in both classical and quantum physics. Early in this century, Einstein rejected the probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics with his famous statement: "I refuse to believe that God plays dice."Today, however, there is a general realization that while the universe is a lawful place, it is nonetheless a place in which chance plays a major role. Even in the domain of Newtonian physics, where determinism once was not doubted, the idea of a deterministic universe has had to be modified radically, and the behavior of many systems that are governed by Newtonian physics cannot be predicted accurately. By focusing on the theme of "chance", this course leads the student naturally through a very diverse range of topics.
Quantum biology?
I'm talking about biology. There is a reason there subjects are in different departments.
And the lack of predictablity when a creator or designer is involved is beasue the rules are different, not underlying features of the universe.
Which I'm pretty sure you know....
I'm done for today...planning a class on fungal behavior.
I understood what you wrote. You were predicting unpredictability would be a problem for believers in Intelligent Design.
The "truth of Jesus" is not everyone's truth, or did you notice?
If you mean "beliefs" when you say "truths" then you should say so. The two words are not intechangeable.
There is only one truth. Not two, not several. Just one. You can choose to believe that or not. Many don't.
Most Christians are not "afraid" that they will be hated. Not in this country at least. In other countries, sharing your Christian fate can be fatal. Many are willing to take that risk.
It is easier by far to keep your faith to yourself and just avoid the confrontations.
Unfortunately, that is not what Jesus asks us to do.
You know that many people do not believe what you are saying?
And you really are bullying here in my opinion. Your last sentence about remembering what you say and it would be more than a "theory" really was bullying. Shockingly bullying if you ask me.
But you don't ask others, you tell them.Because you possess the absolute truth.
I am saying your truths are your beliefs.
There is no truth here I do believe, only beliefs. A deeply held belief has the power of truth but not all hold your particular deeply held belief.
Used to be -- Physics, Chemistry, Biology.
Now --Biophysics, molecular biophysics, biochemistry and structural biology, chemical and molecular engineering, etc.....
This statement summarizes the silliness of the debate.
The two positions are not mutually exclusive, unless the goal is to bludgeon the other into adopting "your" position, when neither can be "scientifically" proven. Inferred perhaps, but not yet proven and not ever likely to be conclusively proven.
What an odd thing to say.
Of course, "faith", muslim style certainly doesn't, but otherwise faith is at worst charmingly harmless. There's nothing inherently confrontational in the concept and, historically on balance, it has had a beneficent effect on civilization.
Looks like Pious Twaddle's having a field day with this thread.
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