Intelligent Design, Part Two
If Intelligent Design is so obviously wrong, then what is there to debate? Why did I say that this is not a cut-and-dried issue?
Well, the fact is that just because one side is right doesn't end a debate much of the time. People cling to their faith, beliefs, ideologies, superstitions, etc. against all reason. What we have here is two sides talking right past each other. One embraces reason and one embraces faith, and never the twain shall meet. And evidence increasingly shows that there is little overlap between the two camps. That is, there is almost no room for a middle ground.
So what? Well, here's the bad news - the correct side, the side with all of the evidence, the ones on the correct side of history, my side! - are losing. At least in this country. We're a minority. And unlike other issues (relatively uncontroversial things like gay marriage and stem-cell research), we're not making headway. Why? That pesky talking-past-each-other problem.
Now, I know what many (most?) educated liberals will say - the American people are just too stupid to believe anything other than religion, and to understand something like evolution. This is just further proof that liberals are smarter. A couple problems with that, though. First, support for evolution is far higher in Britain, for instance, but I have never seen any evidence that the British people are any smarter than Americans. Second, support for evolution may have much to do with level of education, but unless liberals want to play the part of the elitists that conservatives already think we are, we'd really better not argue that only educated people are smart. Third, religiosity and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. Many of the greatest minds of history have been very religious.
Finally, and most importantly, no matter what, we still have to share a country with the religious right. That is why I try (though I don't always succeed) to maintain a civil and respective dialogue with conservatives.
Evolution, however, challenges religion in a way that, say, gravity and progressive taxation do not. And I don't know how, in the long term, we can win this fight without escalating the culture wars and further playing into the victimology of the religious right. In the short term, however, we have to fight to keep evolution in the classrooms.
4 comments:
I honestly think that ID annoys me even more than just plain creationism. If you really really believe that God created everything, good for you. Say that, be proud of that if you must, but don't try to pretend that there's some sort of scientific basis in your views. And most of all, don't try to act like your theory, which has no science behind it at all, somehow holds equal weight with evolution. If you do so, be aware that I hate you and want you to die, because I'm not nearly as tolerant or nice a person as Jake.
The thing that annoys me about ID is that basically, its premise is that some things are so complex that we humans can't understand it and it must have been created by God -- which is a way of reducing everything we can't understand to "wow." It is an extremely lazy way to look at the world and that large groups of people with the worldview to reduce the complexities of life to "wow" affects more than just progress in biology it affects the other sciences and social views as well.
I don't know how to challenge ID in the short term but, I think that there needs to be a culture where "because I said so" isn't good enough. And the idea that science and religion step on each other's toes is ridiculous. The Vatican has said that nothing in evolution theory contradicts the existence of God because. (Evolution theory doesn't aim to prove or disprove the existence of God -- all it does is aim to explain what happened.) In fact, not learning how the world works is an affront because it is denying how God works.
The thing about complexity is that it is a negation of god. Complexity is the end result of a long process of trial and error. An all-powerful being would have no use for it. An all-powerful being could draw a line between two points, not a labyrinthine spiral structure or whatever. The very fact that we are complex is just one of the many pieces of evidence that points to the nonexistence of an all-powerful god. The human body is not divine. It is crude. Filled with a myriad of systems that all consistently and inevitably go wrong.
Hey, look! People are debating the meaning of life on my blog! Bow down to my blogorific power! Hahahahaha!
But seriously ...
First, I think Christi is absolutely right about the "Wow" reasoning of anti-evolutionists. Intelligent Design is essentially the absence of reasoning. It is someone looking at nature and saying "Well, this is too complex for *me* to understand, so God must have made it." That's why it's not a theory. A theory is an explanation of how something works. ID is the absence of an explanation.
Second, I think that religion and evolution do not *have* to be in opposition to each other, but that in practice, they are. That was the main point of the Jacob Weisberg article that I linked to. Each offers an explanation for how life developed (evolution, contrary to what many think, offers no explanation to how life first arose), and acceptance of the one explanation tends to make people not belief the other.
Third, I think Anonymous is a mark off-the-mark in claiming that the complexity of the universe proves there is no god, because no rational god would have made such a flawed and needlessly complex universe. This, of course, assumes that we can know and understand what motivates an omnipotent and omniscient being. If such a being exists (I don't think it does), its motivations, reasoning, and desires would likely be beyond human comprehension. Sure, it might seem illogical to create an overly complex universe, but maybe it's more fun? The flaws of the human body might seem illogical and unfair, but perhaps they would not be flaws from the point-of-view of our hypothetical god. The possibilities are endless.
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