jawfish

Intelligent Design Round Two
john posted in politics & culture on June 13th, 2005

If you have been in a cave, or perhaps doing something useful with your time, then maybe you haven’t heard about the re-appearance of Intelligent Design .

see Jawfish Intelligent Design Round One for more…

From time to time peculiarly American religious movements spontaneously arise from the thousands of fundamentalist churches scattered across the land. Starting with the admirable notion that individuals can do a better job at theology than the priests of trickle-down dogma, these everyday folks call on their own folkways to assemble a world view. In the past they were pretty much limited to the mores of agricultural life, Bibles, broadsheets, and traveling self-ordained preachers for their research. Nowadays even though they have access to the full panoply of Western thought, connected by libraries, Internet, radio and television, folks are still limiting their thought to the same berry patch as their grandparents. These people don’t seem to be able handle the notion of Evolution, and therefore they have doomed us all to live the Scopes Monkey Trial over again.

One oddity about this is, that the people who so adamantly deny the validity of science in sketching out the genetic history of our world, seem to have no problem with any other products of the scientific method. Even though nuclear power, internal combustion engines, and electromagnetic radiation are not mentioned in the Bible, anti-Evolutionists seem complacent turning on the light switch, driving a car, and watching TV. Indeed the very same folks blithely accept the results of genetic screening, raise genetically engineered crops, and take drugs made from genetically engineered microorganisms. Call me a cynical Old Boy, but I have to wonder if the recent evidence that humans arose as dark brown people in Africa, and only lately became palefaces has something to do with their squeamishness.

Intelligent Design is really just a stalking horse for the same old Creationism, though there are a few ID figureheads with science degrees. They hope that the fuzzy-wuzzy logic of Intelligent Design is more palatable than the fire & brimstone Old Testament Creationist dogma. You can see the same sort of lame conflation in Christian Science and Scientology, though Scientology may not qualify as a religion so much as a future target of the RICO act. In each case scientific symbols are used as pure icons, stripped of their content, to provide support for profoundly unscientific belief. ( OK, technically, belief itself is outside the realm of science. )

The logical fuzziness of ID is indirect proof that it masks the hostility of Creationism to science. ID posits that a creator set in motion all the evidence the world presents to us. In philosophy class this is called God the Watchmaker. Since the god of intelligent design is not present, and since there is no physical evidence of the Genesis moment, the truth or untruth of the idea is irrelevant. It can’t be tested, it can’t be observed, it has no effect once put in motion. This has to be the blandest theology possible, hardly worth fighting for. It’s just a pacifier for people unable to grasp a universe which is not human-centered.

The movement is better organized and harder to laugh off than a few decades ago. The bottom feeders responsible for send-money telethons and tearful talk shows have latched onto this upwelling anti-monkey sentiment and cleverly found political bedfellows in the Protestant anti-abortion ranks. They have risen up the Republican party tree to make an act of vertical political marketing. The naive, defensive followers of these beliefs make pliant consumers. Unencumbered by critical thinking, they can be told terrorists are a pressing danger, immigrants are ruining the country, WalMart provides good jobs, conservatives are victims of media discrimination. Pin-stripe Wall-streeters, Eisenhower main-streeters and Goldwater rugged ranchers used to disdain this sort of childishness, but somehow they have fallen in league with a Southern trope – white Protestant demagoguery.