If anyone had said to me a week ago that I’d be posting an editorial by Charles Krauthammer, you’d most likely have heard the racking of a shotgun and some mumbled warning about being on the wrong man’s property without permission. This time though, Krauthammer isn’t performing his normal ball-washing service for the GOP, but instead using LOGIC as the basis for his column on Intelligent Design.
I don’t think this is an issue that our resident right-wingers embrace at all, but Krauthammer’s piece is brilliant and I thought that hit should be given it’s due recognition on deadissue:
Phony Theory, False Conflict
‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution Against FaithBecause every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous: that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.
Newton’s religion was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and a member of the Church of England. Einstein’s was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.
Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. “He believed he was doing God’s work,” James Gleick wrote in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation — understanding the workings of the universe — as an attempt to understand the mind of God.
Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun’s motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton’s God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.
Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose “intelligent design” — today’s tarted-up version of creationism — on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting “God out of your city.” Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase ” natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us,” thus unmistakably implying — by fiat of definition, no less — that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and science.
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an “unguided process” with no “discernible direction or goal.” This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an “unguided process” by which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an “unguided process” of molecular interactions without “purpose”? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?
He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions — arguably, the most important questions in life — that lie beyond the material.
How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Chris:
I clicked on one of your advertisers and it was an ad for a magizine that promotes ID. At least someone is making money off of the debate.
I cannot even believe people are still debating this one, but I guess if people want to raise their kids to be ignorant that is their choice, social conservatives seem to be using Afganistan in the Taliban days as the model for what they hope to transform the US into.
Arguments about religion.
It boils down to this.
Reason is cumulative. We begin to reason when we are young. And each line of reason is built on the previous lines of reason. After a few years the relationships between lines of reason can get pretty intricate.
We can’t know everything, so part of the reasoning process is to fill the gaps in information with best guesses and assumptions.
Religion offers us a set of ready-made assumptions – even some full lines of reason. Many of us depend on these instead of figuring things out for ourselves.
A religious argument is usually an argument about trusted rules of thumb and assumptions that someone has reasoned with their whole life. So, in arguing about religious precepts, what you’re really doing is asking them to start over, scrapping all those lines of reason you say are flawed. That demand runs deep and covers a lot of ground.
And the chances of success? Slim to none.
A statement of logic is virtually irrelevant to someone who has based forty or fifty years of reason on assumptions endorsed implicitly trusted sources.
So the strategy of using logic to argue against religion is flawed. In matters of religion logic falls on purposefully deaf ears. It’s a matter of reflex – of self-protection.
And inevitably the religious zealot remains a religious zealot. It’s probably best to forget about trying to convert him with logic. For him, it’s too late. The better plan is to head off the damage he can do.
The real damage is done by parents and teachers who perpetuate the problem by indoctrinating the kids before they know any better – before they learn how to defend themselves. Surely it’s a cardinal sin to mislead your own progeny.
But, maybe I shouldn’t care. After all, they’re not my kids. On the other hand some assumptions are valid. And I think that it’s safe to assume that what goes around does indeed come around.
Steve
Steve:
Nice point. I guess if you think about like evolution the kids that are raised with these wrong assumptions should be less likely to survive so they should be at disadvantage. Unfortunataly for some reason these are the people that seem to reproduce the most.
This whole situation is pretty frustrating.
Okay friends read this book and let the verbiage cease. “The Great Monkey Trial” by L. Sprague de Camp published in 1968. 🙂
I have enough reading assignments 🙂
I wonder if liberals spend to much time discussing education, most people turn out OK regardles of the education they recieve. If you know how to read and right and do basic math you can probably learn what interests you at a later date. Of course the US already produces less engineers than almost any other devoloped country.
Maybe part of the reason that income disparities are starting to rise is that some people are almost raised to be stupid. I have known a couple of people who have had problems at college because they disagreed with what the proffessors said. What shocked me about these people was that they were both hardworking and intelligent but some really minor stuff would set them off. For example I was in a genetics class where the Prof said mostly in passing that we are all “equally evolved” This girl thought the teacher said it just to bug her. I doubt the prof even knew who she was. these people hurt their children by raising them this way, but should Liberals care.
That’s a brilliant question. Is our God merely in charge of our solar system or planet and not the entire galaxy? Christians who believe the bible literally…I’m convinced that they just need to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos from start to finish to realize how small we all really are.
My question as a born again Christian in high school, upon understanding how tiny our existance is here during our lives here on earth…it started creeping in, this notion that anyone who says they KNOW about things like this…becoming a big fish in a little pond.
Once you’re there, and you’ve got people who listen to you…it’s then important to give your followers the impression that the little pond is everything.
I wonder if liberals spend to much time discussing education, most people turn out OK regardles of the education they recieve. If you know how to read and right and do basic math…
You mean read and write??? Sorry Karl, I could’t resist ;- )
Like I said most people learn how to read and Write, I might not have been one of them. 🙂