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May 2, 2005
Intelligent Design - Society's Leap Backwards to the Pre-Enlightenment Era
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters.
This has always been one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible to me. And it is what leads now to a controversy that makes me worry, and one that makes the world laugh at those Europeans that thankfully left Europe to found what is now called the United States of America.
Creationism has been a big thing in the US for a while: the idea that our little planet was created by an super-intelligent individual rather than by evolution happening over millions of years. The roots of this are Christian, and in a specific interpretation of the passage that starts with the words above.
Ultra-conservative Christians in the U.S. believe that earth and animals and humans were created in seven days. They believe that a day is a day as we know it, and not a metaphor that stands for discrete eras that translate to many hundreds of thousand years each. And these people believe that they have to impose their belief on others, rather than preaching tolerance and allowing people to believe what they want, and to KNOW what humans have found out in a couple of hundred years of scientific research. After the U.S. supreme court has bashed the Creationism on the grounds of separation of church and state (the latter being responsible for school education), after numerous silly attempts of warning stickers on schoolbooks ("Watch out, evolution is just a theory!"), they're now trying to coin a new model, Intelligent Design. Sounds a bit better, but it's the same crap.
"It's very funny to think that the neo conservatives go to war over oil - the compressed remains of million year old creatures, yet believes the world is young", writes JohnFluxx over at Slashdot.
My American friends, eager to defend their country, tell me that Creationism has its proponents in the midwest and the 'bible belt'. I went to high school in Iowa, which is about as midwest as it gets. I wasn't taught bullshit, even though they made me go to lots of school prayers and the like. The religious right has spread further than that. They've made a Texas cowboy one of the most powerful presidents on earth, and they managed to get Creationism into schools even at Dover, Pennsylvania.
Part of the problem is that it doesn't seem acceptable to use reason to criticise somebody else's faith. It's something you don't talk about. Why? Why does someone have to feel "offended" if you contradict what his Bible or Qu'ran says? Nature (subscription required) has a good handle on it:
More fundamentally, most lecturers are unsure of how to handle the concerns of deeply religious students, says Jo Handelsman, a plant pathologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "When I talk to these students individually I don't feel it's my place to replace what their families or churches have taught them," she says. "There's a lot of confusion about where the line is, and how much it's OK to offend your students."
[Eugenie] Scott, who is perhaps the nation's most high-profile Darwinist, is frustrated by the scientific community's inability to grapple with the issue. "The point here is that Americans don't want to be told that God had nothing to do with it," she says. "And that's the way the intelligent-design people present evolution." Scientists need to do a better job of explaining that science makes no attempt to describe the supernatural and so has no inherent conflict with religion, she argues. "College professors need to be very aware of how they talk about things such as purpose, chance, cause and design," she says. "You should still be sensitive to the kids in your class."
And Benna at Kuro5hin adds as conclusion of a long article:
Intelligent Design would not really be anything of consequence if it were not for its targeting of public schools. There are plenty of people with crazy ideas, conspiracy theories, and the like, who do not cause anyone any trouble. Unfortunately, Intelligent Design's attack on the separation of church and state in our schools is something to be concerned about. It is a slippery slope, from the teaching of a theory with no scientific backing in the classroom, to school sponsored prayer in the classroom. It may seem like a stretch, but as soon as the line is blurred, it is much easier to rationalize each step until an extreme is reached.
I sometimes wonder: is our society is about to make a huge leap backwards to end up in pre-Enlightenment times?
Posted by dr at May 2, 2005 2:46 PM
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