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.
Really? Care to back up that assertion?
Yes, and I'm sure that if Maureen Dowd came out against Cancer, you would say that "cancer is good."
Book burning? Perhaps the author forgot about the Nazis, as in National Socialists
I believe its a complex as is our creation. Evo's hide behind micro evolution such as slight changes in a bird's feathers or beaks and then extrapolate that to macro evolution for which there is little to no evidence. They prefer to argue it as a pacxkage deal - you swallow all of it because of evidence of micro evolution. Its the kind of sophistry game democrats play.
There is nothing in it about nuclear energy either.
If believing in God and believing in the Bible makes me a crackpot, then I proudly accept that label.
ID has never stood up to the scientific method. ID's proponents should be viewed as seriously as alchemists and baseball card economists.
The flaws of mankind are too obvious and too plentiful. These flaws alone should have squashed the ID theory.
No. "Intelligent design" is the claim that certain things, like bacterial flagella or the blood clotting mechanism are too complex to have evolved through Darwinian processes. In other words, it is anti-Darwinian.
It is not to be confused with the philosophical belief that God designed the universe so that intelligent life would evolve. Nor is it to be confused with the belief that God designed through the use of natural processes, like mutation and natural selection.
It is actually the assertion that man's orgin required SUPERNATURAL intervention, and further, that this can be scientifically demonstrated.
It is, of course, pure garbage.
A lot of people think it does.
Your problem, with your crackpot theory, is that you don't realize how many scientists have said there MUST be some form of intelligent design. Some of them ex-atheists, some from Hindu and Buddhist faiths, and even some among what's termed "new agers." So many from so many different walks of life, the majority of which are NOT Christians, have said the same thing based on the scientific evidence.
Add another billionth to the fraction to get in the ballpark. The universe of the Big Bang with inflation is so much bigger than the Hubble volume that the Hubble volume could be overlooked as nothing more than a grain of sand in the entire earth. The universe can look flat when such a microscopic portion is looked at by itself.
Who cares what they think? They already call conservative crackpots.
What does this writer want? Popularity? Geez.
Sorry, but I'll take my chances looking like a crackpot. Calling people like Michael Denton and Michael Behe "crackpots" basically makes anybody doing such namecalling look like an idiot in my book.
Do they drive German cars? Or Japanese cars? Or even 55 Chevys, or mega-hp pickups?
They must understand what design is, and how much work goes in achieving it.
Exactly.
If one of our Mars rovers discovers a city on Mars are scientists going to assume that the rocks "evolved" into the buildings, or will they see that an intelligent design took place?
I'd bet on the latter.
Most people think both ID and evolution should be taught and debated in school. So this whole argument is bogus.
Nope. What makes you a crackpot is disbelieving the scientific evidence for evolution. And yes, you can believe in all three things: God, evolution, and the Bible.
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