Great piece of lab equipment for cooking primordial soups
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.
Bingo.. Theres much common ground between "Evos", Atheists, even Agnostics and liberals..
Sorry. I was scanning the thread, and just picked a convenient spot to insert my two cents. I should have backed up a few to see what the previous comments where.
There is remarably little dissention. All the major ID "theorists" are at the Discovery Institute. Here is what they say about intelligent design, straight from the horse's mouth:
Questions about Intelligent Design
1. What is the theory of intelligent design?
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
2. Is intelligent design theory incompatible with evolution?
It depends on what one means by the word "evolution." If one simply means "change over time," or even that living things are related by common ancestry, then there is no inherent conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory. However, the dominant theory of evolution today is neo-Darwinism, which contends that evolution is driven by natural selection acting on random mutations, an unpredictable and purposeless process that "has no discernable direction or goal, including survival of a species." (NABT Statement on Teaching Evolution). It is this specific claim made by neo-Darwinism that intelligent design theory directly challenges.
http://www.discovery.org/csc/topQuestions.php
Why should the alleged origin of anything preclude studying it?
Well, I'm still not sure I understand, but if you are suggesting that Christianity and Islam differ but by the name of the Diety, I think you are quite wrong.
Study up on Mohammed. Study up on Jesus. I think you will find them to be polar opposites in just about every respect.
Lack of predictability for things like taxonomy.
If something like a flagellum is declared "irreducably complex" because we have accepted the ID notion, no one would fund studying it any more than there are grants for perpetual motion machines.
I couldn't help being amused at the transparent way that Sagan's "Cosmos" made Christianity look foolish and then ended with a friendly glance at Hinduism.
None of us had any illusions otherwise. But shshsh! The Discovery institute will be upset if you let the Big Secret out.
Hi, my name is MaxMax and I must be a crackpot.
Even the Great Fish of Hinduism is there ~ that's a manifestation of the Messiah as a fish that saves Ma-Nu (Noah) from Mt. Ararat and thereby saves both humanity and all the schools of wisdom and knowledge.
There are other references in that book that clearly point to this lesson, otherwise why would God have inspired men to keep this book in the canonical texts?
Sorry, but I'm just not quite sure what you are saying.
If you are saying that because there are certain things in the Bible which are similar (identical even) to things contained in the writings of other religions, that somehow those other religions are validated or legitimized, then I disagree.
The Koran coops a lot of the Judeo scriptural references. But the Koran is simply another synthetic intended to lure souls away from Jesus. The best way to catch a fish, is to put real food (worm) on the hook. You can put a lot of "Truth" in the scriptures of any religion, and it can still be a false religion.
Oops
Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools- Philip Johnson.
Interesting.
BTW, I would be really, really careful about taking anything the Hysteric Leftists at New Republic say too seriously. When they offer the Right advice, it is a really good idea for the Right to look for the hook. This is just another example of the Left writing what they WISH would happen.
Where does a criticism of the current state of evolution theory end, and intelligent design theory commence? Let the games begin. It does not bother me. I find it stimulating. You may find ID kooksville. I find that contention overstated, without considerable qualification. I simply don't find those who indulge a leap of faith kooks. We all do it, whether we be secular or otherwise.
Well, some, yes. But some of the most vocal opponents of intelligent design are faithful Christian scientists. They fight intelligent design because it is bad science.
Then there are others, like Edward Oakes, who see intelligent design as bad theology, and fight it for that reason:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0101/reviews/oakes.html
No, like it or not, intelligent design is about the hand of GOD.
No, intelligent desgin is about asserting false evidence for the hand of an awkward, lumbering, tinkering false god. It is not about Yaweigh, the God I worship.
Not only that, notice how quick the "open minded" Left is to pronounce their own dogma holy writ. I though science was SUPPOSE to be about asking questions and investigating hypotheses. Instead it turns out to be about pronouncing anathema on any heretics who wander off the Left wing Ideological plantation. To the Hysteric Left, what they CALL "Science" is really just their form of religion. It differers in rituals and terminology from other religions some but it is similar in how Hysteric Left embraces it with the same blind faith they accuse their foes of having. Claim it is "Science" is just the Left's wave of claiming their version of papal infallibility
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