How Intelligent Design Hurts Conservatives (By making us look like crackpots)

The New Republic ^ | 8/16/05 | Ross Douthat

[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.

[Torie]

Of course we don't know whether it is too complex for evolution to handle, because we don't fully understand the mechanisms of evolution. As I said, the emphasis should be on the mystery of it all, and be careful to elucidate what we know, from what we don't. If one believes in a divine force, to dismiss its intervention in this matter cannot be refuted yet by science, particularly given the apparent conundrums and gaps. As I get older, savoring the mysteries, interests me more than savoring what is already under the belt. I suspect tolerance and acceptance of that which is unknown, and likely to remain so, is part of the human life cycle as a generalization.

[furball4paws]

You certainly are in rare form tonight. But what would you say to a theist?

[Revolting cat!]

There was a good reason why they called these guys 'PREFAB FOUR'

[little jeremiah]

I have a feeling that the majority of people who have not decided if they're liberal or conservative won't be either put off or attracted by this issue.

There are other issues which are more urgent in peoples' minds. Just MHO.

If someone is thinking about conservative viewpoints, weighing them, and reads some debate about ID versus Darwinism, it's not going to be the pivot point. And so many conservatives are not in the ID camp anyway.

Abortion, "gay" marriage, taxes, the WOT, and borders/illegal aliens are much hotter issues, don't you think?

[kidkosmic1]

Ah, debate tactics 101.

No, if YOU find fault with Behe's work because of your own research and observations, lets have it.

I'll give you a graceful out--you're up on your Stephen Jay Gould, yes? Where did the man see problems with Darwin's theories? What completely unprovable theories did he devise?

Run over to TalkOrigins if need be. We'll wait....

[curiosity]

All available information suggests that consciousness is a result of brain function.

Physical consciousness maybe. How do you know there is no spiritual consciousness?

If you want to reply, please do it privately. I don't think this thread is the place for such a discussion.

[syriacus]

I neve really thought about what language Abraham spoke. Did Noah speak Sumerian, too?

[TAdams8591]

"If someone is thinking about conservative viewpoints, weighing them, and reads some debate about ID versus Darwinism, it's not going to be the pivot point."

I think you might be right about that. I had the same thought. Probably the biggest concern regarding this issue, is in the scientific community.

[muawiyah]

Another reading is that God selected Jeremiah ~

[Holden Magroin]

It seems that conservatives would make more progress talking about the origins of the universe. Here, liberals are the ones in danger of looking like crackpots because it requires a far greater leap of faith to deny the self-evident truth that the universe can't be self-caused.

[Right Wing Professor]

The "oral tradition" idea was totally discredited when the first stories parallel to those found in the Bible were discovered to have been written down in Sumer before Abraham had his name changed.

Fair enough. So since Gilgamesh far predates any extant fragment of the Bible, we should consider it the more reliable text, no?

(It's a better story, anyway)

[muawiyah]

Noah, or Ma-Nu, as he's known in the East, most certainly spoke Sumerian ~ leastwise he wrote in that language as well, and is credited with keeping some pretty good records ~ and the language of writing ~ actually, at that time, the ONLY language of writing was Sumerian.

Best ancient Sumerian story is still current among the Sa'ami and Chuchi ~ it's a lesson. The deal is that a mother who doesn't tend to her daughters' needs for husbands might find herself turned to stone and then they'll have to sleep with their father to have children.

This same story, over 7,000 years old, may be found in petroglyphs in Finland. It's covered in a couple of websites.

To make a long story short, the 9 Sa'ami languages have one additional cognate language ~ and that's ancient Sumerian, and possibly one Indian language in California.

So, there you have the story of Lot's wife and Lot's daughters ~ pretty ancient stuff ~ and thousands of years before Abram became Abraham. No doubt he knew that story well, and the various Sumerian versions. Odds are he had it written on tablets kept in a box his followers and herdsmen carried around with them on their journies through the ancient world.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Can we disprove with any certainty that sometime in the future new information and theories will surface that are able to predict the decay of a particular atom?

Were such a theory available, there would be testable consequences. For example, such a theory would allow one to label a set of radioactive atoms by their time of decay. Such a set of atoms would not obey either Bose-Einstein nor Fermi-Dirac statistics; they would obey Maxwell-Bolzmann statistics. No such system has been found; current QM theory claims such a system cannot exist.

[Torie]

As an addendum, teaching the scientific method should be job one. Teaching about the tools that one should use to separate wheat from chaff should be job one. Evolution might be a useful example of how the two intersect, but of course that requires very intelligent hands indeed to handle, and the issue in secondary schools is simply too hot button. Pity. But from my distant memory, the main failing I found in secondary school science classes was a failure to be candid about what we did not know. I was left with the impression that much more was known than it was, from evolution, to gravity, to electricity, you name it.

Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge.

[muawiyah]

Or, the other way around. Brain function could be a result of consciousness which may well arise "elsewhere", perhaps in the 95% of existence which is hidden from our ability to sense it.

[Tribune7]

I resent the inference that anyone thinking along these lines is a "crackpot."

When they start calling names, it's not science.

[Just mythoughts]

"Another reading is that God selected Jeremiah ~"


Yes I would agree that Jeremiah was "selected" or maybe the better word would be elected. Either word tells that Jeremiah's soul existed before he was conceived or born of woman in the flesh body.

We are also told of Jacob and Esau before ever being born, Jacob was loved and Esau was hated. They had a history as well. Ecclesiastes tell us the there is no remembrance of former things in the flesh.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Having heard Behe lecture, I would use the term charlatan rather than crackpot.

[Right Wing Professor]

To make a long story short, the 9 Sa'ami languages have one additional cognate language ~ and that's ancient Sumerian, and possibly one Indian language in California.

Got tinfoil?

[syriacus]

I notice in reading through those really old stories

Many years ago, my brother, who had been teaching his little children about the Epic of Gilgamesh, built a "sand castle" version of Uruk on the beach in front of a cabin my parents had rented for all of us.

Wish I could remember more of what he taught us. I started reading a copy of the Epic on my own, but I'm more of a non-fiction fan.