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.
"I believe that if God had designed life, rather than letting it happen at random, he would have done a much better job."
You are blaming the wrong "god". This flesh age is not about man's perfection, only one has passed through this flesh age in perfection.
NO, that's not what I said, I didn't say it was man I said it was SIN
Can you grasp the difference?
God help you, because it's for sure reason can't reach you.
Reason? There is nothing more reasonably than belief in God
Excellent post!
Hmmm....so we're supposed to take advice from people (The New Republic) who want us to fail?
By the way, I can agree that Intelligent Design and Creationism are not matters of science. I would submit, however, that neither is Evolutionism, on the same grounds. I frequently see statements from evolutionists about how Creationism or ID are not science and why, but rarely if ever do I see evidence offered that evolutionism is any different.
Since God knew when he created man that they would sin, he created that sin. There was no free will since it was all determined when God created man.
When God created man, he knew he was also creating the BTK murderer and all the pain he would inflict on those innocent victims.
I understand. Thanks.
You must be new to these threads.
Hence communism which mass murdered several times more than all the above combined.
Are you kidding?
Was there some part of this you didn't understand?
Thanks for the explanations and the introduction to Intelligent Design!!!
Nor mine. Science doesn't phase me in the least until science steps directly on my toes as in abortionists claiming that unborn babies are "clumps of cells" and stem cell researchers claiming that embryos are not human life so they should be able to get the government to take my money to support their bad habit of creating human life to destroy it.
I'm neither an ID'er nor an Evolutionist but I can observe both intelligent design and evolution and thus recognize both as facts. I'm just a Catholic who believes Gods greatest gift to man on this Earth is free will and the greatest gift to mankind is the offer of salvation.
I'm from the Bob Ross School of Creation, which is to say that I believe this is all a "happy accident."
But I can easily reconcile this with my faith in God. The trick is, sometimes a parable is just a parable.
Without the ability to make a a bad choice, to have HARD choices to make, how do you grow, how do you become a full person, a mature, self-reliant, trustworthy and confident adult, and not just a spolied child?
That ability to make bad choices -- that's sin. Without that ability to make real choices by ourselves, we'd all be wimps, babies, nothings.
Yeah a perfect design of independent intelligent entities seems to need that "sin" so as to allow those entities the ability to mature, to become full standing adults.
Yes, Bill.
Why wouldn't Intelligent design folks work in labs?
I believe that being omniscient means knowing only that which can be known. God being omnipotent, can create whatever He wants, including creatures with free will. How free is free will if God already knows how it will be used? God need not, and I believe did not, have created automatons. My feeling is that He gave us free will, so that when we believed in Him and worshiped Him, it would be our own voluntary act, rather than something caused to happen. Kind of like when your kids tell you they love you without you making them do it, it feels so good. This obviously ain't science, of course.
I enjoy reading Sitchin's books and give him credit for being one of the best and most readable experts on ancient civilizations and biblical archeology as well as understanding early language BUT...
There is one more planet in our solar system, orbiting beyond Pluto but nearing Earth periodically; Advanced "Extraterrestrials” -- the Sumerians called them Anunnaki, the Bible Nefilim -- started to visit our planet some 450,000 years ago; And, some 300,000 years ago, they engaged in genetic engineering to upgrade Earth's hominids and fashion Homo sapiens, the Adam.
His absurd genetic engineering by extraterrestrials from a way past Pluto planet is contrary to common sense and contemporary genetics. The modern human genetic line traces back to 200,000 or slightly less years, it's only been the last 85,000 years that existing humans left Africa and 60,000 years that any humans settled in the fertile crescent and there's no trace of any genetic engineering in the meantime. There's never been any genetic engineering of modern humans (making all ancient astronaut fables rubbish) and definitely not in the time frame of Sumeria, Babylon or Egypt.
1. Darwin did not found the theory of evolution. It was being discussed from before when he was in short trousers, but most people thought it happened because some Intelligence was Designing it to happen.
What Darwin (and wallace, and some Scot forester) did was say it could happen Naturlly, by variation and environmental Selection,
Whereupon everybody struck their forehead with their palm and said "D'oh!"
2. So Darwin proposed a test which would have falsified his Theory, establishing it to be one of Science. Not just a made-up untestable fantasy like ID.
Why did Noah's flood happen and why was Noah and his family the only ones fit to survive?
It was called the teleological view as of a few years ago. The argument that a watch being so intricate, there must be a watch maker...
Before reading this, I thought that was the inteligent design argument. Outa touch I guess. Couldn't figure what the fuss was about.
M
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