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.
Migration:does THAT make ya smarter?
These ducks will soon outwit the hunters!
I see that any attempt at serious discussion goes right over your head.
God told me to tell you that you are wrong: "I AM made ya, and by Myself, I AM can break ya."
Because history is not entirely unrecorded. Forensic evidence is more reliable than eyewitness evidence in many cases. It is certainly more reliable if there is a conflict between the two.
It ain't a lie if I'm programmed to do it, and, since I did it, by your own rules you've stated here, God did it.
Better than missing something more important.
I have not seen any 'discussion' yet, merely jibes flying back and forth.
What arrogant idiots these leftist goons are. The American right consists of lots of people who are scientifically sophisticated, and reject the leftists' ridiculous ideas of what makes America tick.
If the mere interpretation of forensic evidence is what constitutes science, then why is it "unscientific" to interpret biological entities that function as machines to be the product of intelligent design?
I see that you missed responding to my post in an educated manner. Or, was it that I just blew you out of the water with that post?
Can't read?
I watched the train for years but never jumped on board because in thinking for myself, I noticed the train you mentioned never appeared to be on the right track.
Very neat point!
Selection is not just a WAG. It implies many things and predicts many knnds of evidence that were not available when the hypothesis was first formulated. And many kinds of evidence not yet found. It predicted, for example, the minimum age of the earth at a time when physics was wildly off base. In short, it has survived 150 years of accumulated evidence.
I would rather stand up for God than be on the side of pure evil like the left no matter what the cost thank you very much.
In order to know what God's intelligent design really is, you would have to be as intelligent as he is. Maybe his "design" is for life to evolve--what works works, what doesn't dies out. Maybe it's something for us to ponder in our own lives---what works makes our lives and the lives of those around us better, what doesn't makes people unhappy and is commonly called sin and the souls of those who practice it tend to die. Maybe. He didn't create us as robots, after all. He gave us free will (sorry, Calvin). The beauty of life, physical and spiritual, is motion: adaptation and change and the possibility of improvement. Not that the species aren't beautiful per se. But evolution is beautiful too.
Do you really think science needs a testable design hypothesis to tell the difference between a machine and a non-machine?
Actually it's about 40. That's when your immune system starts to shut down, because it's not needed anymore, as it no longer matters whether you live or not.
It is difficult for humans to comprehend things that exceed their lifetime. That is why we have written history, art---and religion: an attempt to give the next generation the wisdom of the preceding ones. Evolution is one of those things. The so-called fossil record is one pinpoint in the story, completely incapable of explaining by itself the minute, step-by-step changes that have vanished and left no record.
I seem at 54 to have beat the odds then, along with most adults across the developed globe. Odd. Yes, I know you were elliptically suggesting something about procreation. Males however seem to be able to do that too past 40. It must be some sort of evolutionary gender discrimination. Sue the evolutionist. He is not PC.
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