©2004 UrbisMedia
Here we go again. From Acquinas, to the Scopes monkey trial, to creationism to the latest Right Wing Trojan Horse from the people who brought you “partial birth abortion.” “Intelligent Design.” Yup, “creationism” just would not fly as “science” in front of the courts, so the dunces are back with something that sounds scientific. The irony of this term, which is to be offered in our schools as an alternative theory to evolution, relies not on intelligence, but stupidity. If school boards are stupid enough to adopt it, and courts stupid enough to give it a constitutional pass, then our kids can be made more stupid by being fed religious poppycock as science.
But the people behind this backdoor foray into science classrooms are not that stupid. They wrap the project in the notion of “objectivity,” for example. ID is no longer God, the Creator, but now some vague “intelligence” behind creation, some teleological “author”. ID says we should welcome “controversy” as good for science, as though the truly scientific approach does not invite, and thrive on, constant challenge to prevailing theories. What ID proponents are doing is saying there needs to be an “alternative” to evolution theory, although it is incapable of providing any evidence that meets the cannons of scientific analysis. So the debate becomes not one about scientific evidence, but about rhetorical devices. Evolution becomes associated with “naturalism,” contraposed to “spiritualism.” Naturalism become to science what liberalism is to politics.
Unable to tear down the compelling evidence of evolution the ID proponents push the debate into the realm of language. As we know from “Pro Life” the appropriation of language is a major feature of the tactics of the religious right. So the first sortie into the case for getting ID into school curricula is to pose evolution as academically imperialistic, unwilling to allow its tenets to be examined and debated. This is spurious and untrue, but in the age of sound-bites it can be effective. So books such as “The Wedge of Truth,” and videos like “I was a Teenage Darwinist,” become the equivalent of Christian rock music.
One wonders, if ID were admitted to the scrutiny if scientific debate whether other “alternatives” to its view of creation would in turn be admitted, that infer “intelligent design.”. How about the credibility of Narreau the Elder, the Polynesian deity who created everything from “nothing”; or the Australian aborigine “Rainbow Snake” whose serpentine movements created the river beds and mountains, and who spit water that gave life to the land; or Nyame, the sky god of West Africa, who made a trapdoor in the sky from which he placed thing on earth; or Ra and Sekhmet of Egypt, and Nut, the sky goddess, who is the night sky; or Marduk of Mesopotamia, or Odin of Scandinavia, and the pantheon of India. They all have their pre-paleontological stories (theories?) of the intelligent design of the universe. Somehow I think they are going to be trumped by good old Genesis.
Interestingly, ID comes onto the separation of church and state battlefield at the same time as another piece of tricky backdoor legislation. Ant-Abortionists in Congress are pushing a law that would “protect” doctors in hospitals from being “forced” to perform abortions with the threat of being fired. OK, so lets also have a law to protect science teachers from being fired for refusing to teach the Bible as science.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.15.2004)