Inherit the Wind

Ross Douthat wrote in The New Republic Online The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.

And indicating his support for including an alternative that involves God, which is consistent with the beliefs of many more millions than the Athiest and Agnostics that prefer the Secular Humanist version of Evolution.

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives.

Or at least you hope it will.

Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism.

stem-cell research and end-of-life issues have people on both sides of the issue, and it depends on exactly what is being proposed, but if you think that liberals are going to win by pushing cloning (therapeutic or not) and large-scale genetic engineering you must have been smoking those funny cigarettes.

There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

Don't hold your breath (unless you look good in blue)

And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism.

No, it is Darwinism with God, rather than the Secular Humanist / Godless version of Evolution, and I cant believe that anything with God is going to be trumped by the same thing without God.

On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed.

How testable is the Secular Humanist version? As Joyce Kilmer said Only God can make a tree

The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.

How does the Secular Huminist think random chance caused it to happen, and how can you prove it? In terms of how it happened in ID, I would assume it was by the same procedure that vegetation was produced. God spoke it. I realize that may seem too simple, but then we do have an awsome God.

And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.

I don't expect him to order it by fiat. After all, this whole thing came up because of a question GWB was asked. But whether it is taught in American schools or not, you will not be able to convince millions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims that God was not involved in Creation.

If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.

Which is not unlike the way they are being described in public schools that dont allow prayer, or even the celebration of Christmas.