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War Against Reason: The “Intelligent Design” Scam

By Owen Williamson

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2006 – print

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1-25-06, 1:00 pm

(illustration by Victor Velez)

In November 2005, the first significant legal challenge involving the so-called “intelligent design” [ID] theory of creationism wrapped up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Court arguments in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District lasted 22 days, and involved a challenge by 11 parents who oppose the teaching of “intelligent design” (ID), a “lite” variation of the same old creationism theory that has been constitutionally excluded from the public schools since 1987. Even televangelist Pat Robertson has checked in on the issue, pronouncing damnation on Dover for having voted out a pro-ID school board. On December 20, 2005, a federal district court ruled that teaching intelligent design clearly violates the establishment clause of the US Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Yet if things go as planned, this may be only the opening skirmish in a broad offensive by powerful ultra-right forces whose openly stated goal is total control of every aspect of American life.

As always, purveyors of right-wing pseudoscience rely on ignorance and lack of education as necessary preconditions for successfully peddling their poisonous product.

Intelligent design itself is in essence a scam: a theory based on lack of knowledge rather than knowledge, and as such impossible to disprove. ID theory claims that the anthropic principle, the remarkable series of low-probability cosmic events that allowed the development of multicellular life on Earth, the mysteries of quantum weirdness, the astounding complexity of DNA, the yet-undiscovered material basis of human consciousness and numberless other still-unexplored corners and closets of science all demand the presence of a “God of the gaps,” an intelligent designer. This heavenly designer is painted as a sort of divine CEO benevolently micromanaging The Universe, Inc. for the very special benefit of America, for private profit and for the Republican Party.

It is fascinating to observe that ID advocates nowhere dare to claim that our “intelligently designed” universe is perfect or even moderately well functioning. Pointing out the obvious, that hurricanes, smallpox, Scooter Libby, appendicitis or bird flu have no logical place in an intelligently designed universe fails to faze them, probably because the fragile artificial tissue of ID theory was never intended to stand up under hard questioning in the first place. Further examination reveals that ID always has a convenient escape clause for these sorts of questions. The universe was indeed designed perfectly to start, but sin, Satan, Eve, feminists and/or the liberals screwed it all up and left us where we are now.

Since they cannot (yet) push fundamentalist creationism back into the public schools, ID advocates, who never seem adverse to twisting truth to serve their utterly righteous cause, claim that it is the duty of science teachers to “teach the controversy” between science and ID, a controversy that they themselves are in the process of fabricating from whole cloth. In addition, according to Science magazine book reviewer Steve Olson, “recently, intelligent design creationists have been forging alliances with some members of the discipline known as the rhetoric of science, which holds that scientific conclusions inevitably emerge from a process of persuasion, giving rise to the odd sight of conservative Christians making common cause with radical deconstructionists.”

Historical Background

At first glance it seems rather obvious that virtually any religious believer (except, perhaps, a Buddhist) must necessarily subscribe to some theory of intelligent design. However, the larger historical debate as to whether a “hand of God” is visible in the material universe is not a new one. Remarkably enough, in recent centuries it was mostly Calvinist Protestants (the doctrinal predecessors of today’s evangelicals) who proclaimed the “sola scriptura” dogma that fallen humanity is despicably wretched and thus absolutely incapable of discovering or deducing the existence of a God from the design of the material universe. In the 19th century it was this evangelical challenge, much more than atheism or nascent Darwinism, that prompted the Catholic Church’s First Vatican Council to cast its “anathema” (damnation) on those who would deny that reason alone can discover (even though not conclusively prove) the existence of God from observation of material reality.

In the specific case of today’s ID debate, there is an additional element of extreme bad faith. In an amazingly frank document called “The Wedge Strategy” (available at www.texscience.org/files/wedge.htm), leading creationists wrote in 1999 that:

we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points.

The authors of this document blame evolutionism for most of the “evils” in today’s world, from product liability suits and welfare to the crime of trying to better the world. “Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.” And the ultimate goal of ID is made crystal clear. The movement “seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”

The authors put forth an aggressive 20-year plan of action to achieve their goals, “to cultivate and convince influential individuals in print and broadcast media, as well as think tank leaders, scientists and academics, congressional staff, talk show hosts, college and seminary presidents and faculty, future talent and potential academic allies.” By 2019, they aim for the complete and total defeat of American civilization as we know it, in order “to see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.”

Today’s Relationship of Forces

It is crucial to understand the balance of forces that are involved in today’s ID struggle in North America. As a website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science warns, “creationism appears again to be in a period of ascendancy,” and ID is aptly described by science writers Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross as “creationism’s Trojan horse.” Olson emphasizes that “intelligent design [advocates] have produced no evidence that anything other than naturally occurring mechanisms is responsible for the empirically observed world. But, as is meticulously documented in Forrest and Gross’s book, they have produced a flood of pamphlets, press releases, popular books, Websites, and other pronouncements” carefully aimed at school boards, legislators, clergy, rural white churchgoers and other “soft” targets.

Science writer Ushma S. Neil reported in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation,

A 1999 Gallup poll showed that a startling number of people (38 percent) believed wholly in creationism, 43 percent believed in a more intelligent design-like theory, and only 18 percent of those surveyed believed in evolutionary theory as the sole explanation for the origin of humans. The same poll showed that increasing levels of education correlated with a belief in evolution (65 percent with postgraduate degrees versus 20 percent with a high school degree).

As always, purveyors of right-wing pseudoscience rely on ignorance and lack of education as necessary preconditions for successfully peddling their poisonous product. However, Neil points out that even among scientists, some 40 percent say they believe in God.

Yet, opponents of ID include virtually all working scientists, believers or not, as well as almost every conscientious science educator. Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian religious believers have overwhelmingly rejected ID as the latest twisted monstrosity to crawl out of the intellectual swamps of American right-wing fundamentalism. And perhaps most importantly, vast sectors of mainline Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, are firmly speaking out against the ID scam in North America and around the world.

As an example, Dr. Neil Omerod, professor of theology at Australian Catholic University, recently wrote a scathing critique of ID entitled “How Design Supporters Insult God’s Intelligence,” In his article, published in the Sydney Morning Herald of November 15, 2005, Omerod points out that ID is “just a more sophisticated version of so-called ‘creation science,’ which is poor theology and poor science. As theology, creation science failed to read the biblical story within its historical and cultural context, reading it through the eyes of modern positivism, which equates truth with the accuracy of data. The Bible could only be ‘true’ if it were literally ‘true’ in every detail.”

Omerod points out: “This literalist fundamentalism finds few supporters in mainstream Christianity. As science it manipulates the evidence to fit this misreading of the Bible. Intelligent design seeks to go beyond the limitations of creation science. It does not reject or manipulate the scientific data, but argues that the scientific evidence for biological change reveals ‘intelligent design.’” He emphasizes that traditional Christian beliefs clearly allow for chance, and thus Darwinian evolution, and “because something necessarily happens does not mean it happens necessarily.… what God wills to happen by chance, will of necessity happen by chance.” He concludes that ID is “an unnecessary hypothesis which should be consigned to the dustbin of scientific and theological history.”

It is a major error for opponents of ID (even those who are nonreligious) to allow the right wing to frame the struggle as a serious debate of nonbelievers and secularists vs. Christians. The theory of ID remains political, not religious, at its core, despite advocates’ best efforts to validate it by plugging the issue into older philosophical questions of faith and unbelief. Nor is it entirely correct to portray ID as a struggle of science vs. obscurantism (the ancient canard that “there are some things that humans must never know”). The gurus of ID are far from knuckle-walking Neanderthals or ignorant snake-handling God-shouters, and they do not hesitate to use social science (and even evolutionary theory, as it is applied to petroleum geology, for instance) for their own profit when required – one of the prime movers of the ID movement formerly worked as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company. And, as is made repeatedly clear in the “Wedge Strategy” document, profit, and not faith, is what ID is ultimately all about.

The current ID offensive must be exposed and confronted for what it is: a vicious, carefully-planned political (not primarily religious) attack against the American people, perpetrated by a tiny, mendacious clique of well-educated and ideologically-driven right-wingers with virtually unlimited funding and unrestricted media access. As Neil writes in the Journal of Clinical Investigation:

We all must be informed and we all must get involved to make sure that our lay peers know the facts. The science curriculum is being changed to incorporate intelligent design in Ohio, New Mexico, Minnesota, Kansas and Pennsylvania – it is important to make sure this does not spread to other states, and that it is overturned in the states where it is taught. One thing is unambiguous: this sort of discussion – of religion – does not belong in the classroom.

To achieve this goal, progressives need to increase strategic cooperation with teachers’ unions, parents’ organizations, mainstream scientific, educational, political, academic and community groups, and should even consider tactical alliances with nonfundamentalist religious groups of all faith traditions.

In this struggle the ultra-right is already busy exploiting existing contradictions in American society (city vs. country – “metro vs. retro,” “town vs. gown,” Catholic vs. Protestant, gay vs. straight) and is eagerly seeking to create more. Only people’s unity can turn back the extreme right’s offensive against science, education and reason, and only science, education and reason can guarantee America’s and the world’s future.

--Owen Williamson teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso. Send your comments in a letter to the editor to pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.