Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The August 22 issue of The New Republic includes a couple of items on the subject of Intelligent Design (ID). Both are well worth a read.

If you've only got a few minutes, start with Leon Wieseltier's current "Washington Diarist" entry, called "Creations."

Now, Wieseltier has suspicious credentials on the foreign-policy front. He's a member of The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and a signatory to PNAC's "Letter on War on Terrorism." I've always felt, though, that a person's disqualification in one area of discourse doesn't mean he won't embrace common sense and decency in another. And that's the case here, with Wieseltier. He lets us know from the start where he's headed:

The cunning souls who propound intelligent design are playing with fire, because they have introduced intelligence into the discussion. It is a standard to which they, too, must be held. The theory of intelligent design must itself be intelligently designed.

Ouch. And his conclusion pounds in the final nail:

I had thought, in my Judaic innocence, that Aquinas had gloriously secured natural causality for the Church once and for all. Now I must suppose that the Church's unsophisticated new construction of God's will is a manifestation of God's wisdom. For His agents on Earth have cultural uses for anti-Darwinism. They think it will make us good, because Darwin makes us bad. No doubt this is why President Bush wants "to expose people to different schools of thought," and have intelligent design taught alongside evolution: to retard our corruption. But isn't the idea that morality is founded in nature itself a sin of materialism? And are we to teach other false ideas alongside other true ones? I do not want my son to waste his time on phlogiston. I mean, what is truth? The question is begged yet again, this time by the pomo of Crawford.

A much -- much -- longer article in TNR is an extended review of a putative textbook, Pandas and People, which has been put forth as the alternative to Darwinist evolution textbooks in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district. The review is by Jerry Coyne, billed as "a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago"; its title is "The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name."

Coyne follows a brief overview of the Dover case with this:

Who could possibly object to students "keep[ing] an open mind" and examining a respectable-sounding alternative to evolution? Isn't science about testing theories against each other? The furor makes sense only in light of the tortuous history of creationism in America. Since it arose after World War I, Christianfundamentalist creationism has undergone its own evolution, taking on newer forms after absorbing repeated blows from the courts. "Intelligent design," as I will show, is merely the latest incarnation of the biblical creationism espoused by William Jennings Bryan in Dayton. Far from a respectable scientific alternative to evolution, it is a clever attempt to sneak religion, cloaked in the guise of science, into the public schools.

(I think "Christianfundamentalist" is a typo. If so, it might well be regarded as a divinely inspired one. I like it.)

He says (as I have, in different words):

It is important to realize at the outset that evolution is not "just a theory." It is, again, a theory and a fact. Although non-scientists often equate "theory" with "hunch" or "wild guess," the Oxford English Dictionary defines a scientific theory as "a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts." In science, a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature. Thus scientists speak of "atomic theory" and "gravitational theory" as explanations for the properties of matter and the mutual attraction of physical bodies. It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity.

I won't quote extensively further from Coyne's review; it deserves a full reading. I will tell you, though, that it demolishes many common "arguments" for ID, and that it does an excellent job of tying together the web of ID "researchers," writers, thinkers, and the no-pretenses-about-it religious institutions which support them. Here's his conclusion, though:

In the end, many Americans may still reject evolution, finding the creationist alternative psychologically more comfortable. But emotion should be distinguished from thought, and a "comfort level" should not affect what is taught in the science classroom. As Judge Overton wrote in his magisterial decision striking down Arkansas Act 590, which mandated equal classroom time for "scientific creationism":

The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.

P.S. When you're looking into the clouds of misinformation and bogus controversy swirling around the issues of evolution, biology, and pseudo forms of both, you need look no further than PZM's Pharyngula.

P.S. If both Pharyngula and TNR are too earnest for your taste, please dive into a recent post on the (on this occasion) mordantly blasphemous Fafblog:

Now we know God exists, it's time for deep space God exploration! Intelligent Designostronomers have located him in orbit around the moon and believe the first Godstonauts could make a manned God landing as early as 2012. God's surface is rich in deposits of wine and communion wafers which could support the beginnings of a God colony, where advanced mining techniques could extract the omnipotence America could use to supply its energy needs for the next coupla years! The sky's the limit! Til we hit God. Then God's the limit.