An intelligent design follow-up.
After having had interesting (and very different) reactions from half this blog's readership on my comments on Coyne's intelligent design piece (y'all know who you's is), I thought I'd self-indulgently post about the meta-issue here for me. The thing is, a part of me has wanted to believe in ID... not that it actually qualified as "science" or belonged in the science classroom or anybody's science curriculum-- it so obviously doesn't deserve to be studied as a scientific alternative to neo-Darwinism -- but just that there could actually exist a movement or class of thinkers who were searching, with good faith if not good logic, to bridge the gap in American culture between the largely elite, and sometimes offputtingly defensive, world of secular science and the waxing, populist Protestant worldview that rejects it. Some price in educational rigour might be worth the value of bringing grace -- which whether us athiest/agnostics like it or not is a definitive and enduring American value -- back into the mainstream, trying to accomodate and challenge, rather than recoil from, the population's convictions. Afterall, knowledge, intellectual progress, is valuable only insofar as large numbers of people actually share in it, and feel enhanced by it. So I've been soft on ID for a long time in the hope that it was that such a movement, that at least some of its proponents actually saw and were trying to address the problem of the missing link between abstract science and tangible sociology.
But they're just not. Coyne's piece convinced me that I was quite wrong in wanting to believe in the ID movement's intentions. The IDers aren't trying to bridge the cultural gap in the US; they're not trying to find a way to accomodate grace in a field that is perceived as off-limits and inhospitable to all but a godless, forbidding elite. They're not interested in broadening the learning experience in US schools. They're not about tolerance. They're just another bunch of fanatical Bible-thumping cranks, yearning to restore a romanticised, values-centric past that never existed: the next generation, as Coyne says, of the Scientific Creationists. And on top of that, their "science" is an intellectual joke.
Where have the Jimmy Carters of this world gone? I don't know but I was quite wrong to look for them in the ID movement.
As for my contention that ID is DOA, and my arguments why, 25% of the blog's readership I've heard from thought I hit the nail on the head and 25% thought I misplaced the hammer. The debate does have a larger ramification for the federal courts, however, and is one more piece of evidence why the filibuster deal was such bad news. The federal courts ruled against ID in Georgia last January (forcing the state board to take the "theory, not a fact" stickers off evolution textbooks) and is about to rule against ID in Pennsylvania. Where ID has had success has been in schoolboard elections, where it has had the populism of the ballot box to turn to. In Kansas, the state board decided to let the schools teach "criticism of evolution". But my argument is that so long as ID can't make headway in the actual courts of law, and keeps wracking up precedent against itself, populism alone isn't going to carry it through. People don't care enough about ID, about the a Bible-friendly justification for certain tenets of evolutionary theory, to be outraged when it's rejected by the judicial "elite". Red staters might vote for pro-ID school boards, but they aren't going to rally around the theory when somebody inevitably decides to sue. When it comes to the origin of our species, there's just no third way.
Of course that changes when Bush stacks the courts with Eagle Forum fundamentalists who believe that the last sixty years of precedent is unconstitutional. That's when ID stops needing the populist appeal it doesn't really have to survive. But by then, of course, the whole "intelligent design" euphamism might not even be necessary anymore...
But they're just not. Coyne's piece convinced me that I was quite wrong in wanting to believe in the ID movement's intentions. The IDers aren't trying to bridge the cultural gap in the US; they're not trying to find a way to accomodate grace in a field that is perceived as off-limits and inhospitable to all but a godless, forbidding elite. They're not interested in broadening the learning experience in US schools. They're not about tolerance. They're just another bunch of fanatical Bible-thumping cranks, yearning to restore a romanticised, values-centric past that never existed: the next generation, as Coyne says, of the Scientific Creationists. And on top of that, their "science" is an intellectual joke.
Where have the Jimmy Carters of this world gone? I don't know but I was quite wrong to look for them in the ID movement.
As for my contention that ID is DOA, and my arguments why, 25% of the blog's readership I've heard from thought I hit the nail on the head and 25% thought I misplaced the hammer. The debate does have a larger ramification for the federal courts, however, and is one more piece of evidence why the filibuster deal was such bad news. The federal courts ruled against ID in Georgia last January (forcing the state board to take the "theory, not a fact" stickers off evolution textbooks) and is about to rule against ID in Pennsylvania. Where ID has had success has been in schoolboard elections, where it has had the populism of the ballot box to turn to. In Kansas, the state board decided to let the schools teach "criticism of evolution". But my argument is that so long as ID can't make headway in the actual courts of law, and keeps wracking up precedent against itself, populism alone isn't going to carry it through. People don't care enough about ID, about the a Bible-friendly justification for certain tenets of evolutionary theory, to be outraged when it's rejected by the judicial "elite". Red staters might vote for pro-ID school boards, but they aren't going to rally around the theory when somebody inevitably decides to sue. When it comes to the origin of our species, there's just no third way.
Of course that changes when Bush stacks the courts with Eagle Forum fundamentalists who believe that the last sixty years of precedent is unconstitutional. That's when ID stops needing the populist appeal it doesn't really have to survive. But by then, of course, the whole "intelligent design" euphamism might not even be necessary anymore...
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