ID: Turnabout's fair play

So fundamentalist Christians like Wichita Baptist minister Terry Fox are plotting to use Intelligent Design as a Trojan horse to destroy liberalism? Well, here's a counterplot from Centerfield. Rick Heller shows how ID could actually backfire on creationists, while staking out a centrist position for Democrats that would be far less alienating to the American majority than hard atheism:

While ID sticks in scientists craws, it wouldn't be so bad if Intelligent Design theory became more popular--if the movement was out of the biblical literalism camp toward Intelligent Design. The toxicity that we see in religion comes primarily from the close attachment to ancient Scriptures. Opposition to homosexuality, for instance, is based on Leviticus, as well as some interpretations of the New Testament. Whether ID is true or not, ID rejects the literal biblical account of creation. Once one rejects the literal truth of one portion of the Bible, one opens up the question of the veracity of every chapter and verse of the Bible. To a biblical literalist, ID could be a step onto the slippery slope toward (gasp!) liberalism.

Furthermore, the creation account has a special role in traditional Christianity. It is the source of Original Sin (In Adam's fall, we sinned all), and it is this sin which we cannot transcend by good works alone, but through faith in Christ, whose death was a substitutionary atonement for our sins. Those who do not believe--e.g. atheists--are therefore damned, and thus hard measures, including the Inquisition and conversion by the sword, can be justified.

So even if Intelligent Design is wrong in a scientific sense, I see it as less toxic than the leading myth, the biblical creation account. Are humans really capable of living without myths? Even as Marxism banished religious myths, it gave birth to a myth of a future Communist heaven on earth. Perhaps what we need is not to abolish myths, but to replace them with more humane ones.

Rick quotes a Gallup poll stating that "45% of Americans reject evolution, 38% believe that evolution occurred under God's guidance, and only 13% take the view that human beings evolved with no assistance from God." And he places himself within that middle 38%, saying that his intuition is that a higher power set the conditions for independent evolution and might even have "loaded the dice" -- "a deist perspective." Interesting! A third ground really is beginning to be staked out. (My own weird speculations -- which could be roughly summed up as 'Maybe DNA is God's brain" -- are here.)

- amba

Comments

[Rick (Centrist Coalition)]

I noticed your mentioning of Henry Stapp in your linked post. He is an author who's work I'm interested in. There absolutely has to be some way in which mind and body interact. However, I don't think the mind is telling a specific electron to jump to the left or right so that some bifurcation of events occurs. It has to be more holistic than that. Similarly, if there is a higher power that governs evolution, it would be interacting with nature holistically, rather than creating a "miracle" for one specific animal.

I know that's hand-waving. But ultimately, my philosophical stance is with Bishop Berkeley, that mind and perception are the only things we can truly know, and that the existence of matter itself requires an act of faith!

[amba]

My friend Jeffrey M. Schwartz (neuropsychiatrist, expert on OCD who coached DiCaprio for "the Aviator") knows Henry Stapp well, and has collaborated with him (and others) on papers about how quantum theory can provide an explanation of how mind can influence matter. Jeff believes there is scientific evidence that the mind 1.) is not completely reducible to the material brain, and 2.) can actively and directedly change the matter and functioning of the brain -- he calls this "Mental Force." And note that it provides a model for how the mind of God might create, or influence creation.

[Marcus Cicero]

I'm not thoroughly familiar with Intelligent Design, but if it simply allows science to advance while asserting that there is a God, then I have no problem with it. There are scientists who believe in God, and others who don't. Their merits as scientists should have little relation to their personal deistic beliefs.

On the other hand, if Intelligent Design is a device that intrudes into scientific inquiry, and becomes a sieve for data, I have a problem with it. I don't believe that the existence of God is provable, or else we would need no faith. Science seeks to prove -- by observing, recognizing and measuring. If scientists are out to prove the existence of God, then it is another Tower of Babel they build. Little else. Let's hope that scientific inquiry is not blessed or cursed by God.

Something about the Intelligent Design debate depresses me. My entire scholastic childhood was staffed by nuns and priests in a Catholic school, and never once did they suggest that evolution was an improvable theory, or cast doubt on scientific inquiry. I grew up thinking that the Scopes Trial was resolved. Obviously, I was wrong.

[amba]

It seems obvious that the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven. I would like to see scientists focus on a much smaller question: is mutation purely random? Or is there some way that the genome responds intelligently to environmental changes, though in a much longer time frame than we can perceive? I do not know if this is in any way testable. If you could create two identical populations of Drosophila fruit flies (I don't even know if that's possible -- can you clone fruit flies?) and subject the populations to very different conditions, and if there were then some way of knowing whether the mutations that arose were in any way statistically related to those conditions . . .)

[Ryan Daly]

I have two problems with the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools' science classes:

First, it's just a variation of the "God of the Gaps" explanation, ie. we don't know how or why something happens in nature, so it must be God. Science is a process which attempts to fill those gaps with testable theories and hypotheses. Several hundred years ago, God was believed to be the reason that it rained, that seasons changed, that the sun travelled across the sky. Eventually, scientists came up with naturalistic explanations for those phenomena. Intelligent Design says, among other things, "DNA is too complex to have developed naturally, so an intelligent designer must have done it." For intelligent design to merit being included in the science curriculum of a public school, its proponents need to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of reconciling it with the scientific method. Peer-reviewed published articles in hard scientific journals would be a good start.

Second, ID covers a broad spectrum of ideas and ideollogies. On one end are the Young-Earth creationists, biblical literallists who view it as a wedge to getting the Genesis creation story into our schools. At the other end are scientists who think God created the first spark, after which evolution and other naturallistic processes occured over millions of years.

Who will set the agendas on what sort of ID is taught in the schools? Should the people vote on it? Should the School Districts decide? In heavily religious areas will the full Biblical creation story be taught in science class? Currently, the science curricula in most textbooks is determined by scientific consensus; in other words, the prevailing theories that a majority of scientists believe. From my understanding, ID is heavy on marketing, media savy, and scientific jargon, but light on hard science.

[achromic]

I thought asthist didn't believe in any G*d not just an Xtian G*d. OR are we allowing people to define everyone as Xtain and not Xtian?

This is what I keep going around and around on this ID thing is. That so many of our children are lacking basic socialistic achievement, why not focus on all other aspects of learning, even in science in the Elementary/HS level? If we put this much energy into teaching them real literary, basic good english, a true knowledge of a second language, math up to trig., basic law, some art, and applied science...... if our public schools could really do that ALL of that, then we can get into if we have the time to teach ID vs. Darwin debates.

[achromic]

Another thing that I don't get, there are so many Xtian schools out there, why don't the people who want their kids taught all this G*d crap just send them there? IF you believe in ID why don't you be responible for teaching to your kids? It just seems like by taking the schools to court over this stuff you are guarantying less money to be spent doing the thing that schools need to be doing which is teaching.