The Soap Box

New attempts to promote religious conservatism in the guise of Intelligent Design are reinforcing the deep divide between religious conservatives and Evolution. But this divide is not evidence of the chasm we’re told exists between religious Americans and liberal Americans, the new proxy for the Republican/Democrat dichotomy. Neither does it show that evolutionists are necessarily atheists. The raging debate between Intelligent Design and Evolution is but the latest manifestation of the true eternal clash of Liberalism and Conservatism.

The distance between Intelligent Design and Evolution is the ultimate strawman propping up that manufactured gap between science and religion which fills the conservative political coffers. In an attempt to lend legitimacy to that gap, and with an arsenal of strongarming tactics, high-priced consultants, and policy experts with little scientific training, the proponents of Intelligent Design deftly mangle Darwin’s legacy in order to claim that Evolution isn’t faithful to scientific inquiry, and that liberals’ stubborn adherence to it in our classrooms is nothing but base discrimination against “people of faith.”

Evolution, the Intelligent Design-ers claim, couldn’t possibly explain life on Earth because life is far too complex to have been created through chance; therefore, an intelligent force (the term substituted for God in order to preserve Intelligent Design’s scientific luster) must have created it. To a scientist, this is essentially a non-argument for many reasons. First, the subjective observation that something is “too complex” has no bearing on whether it could be created by chance. One could claim that the spiral shell of a snail is far too complex to have been created by such a small creature, but that does not stop the snail from performing its miraculous work.

Second, the “created by chance” proposition misses Darwin’s point. To begin with, Darwin never pretended to be able to explain how life on Earth began, a point which religious-types have missed since the Beagle first set sail. More directly to the argument, he also never claimed that the many species of the Earth - destined to become just as they are today - somehow arrived there purely by chance, however unlikely that may be. Darwin showed how species evolved through mutations over millions of years which either did or did not provide advantages for survival in that species’ particular environment, and therefore were or were not passed down through countless generations, creating whatever strange- or simple-looking creature best adapted to its surroundings.

Natural Selection is a process of trial and error where the result we see today represents only a small fraction of the changes that actually occurred, not a succession of miraculous biological changes that all happened to be spot-on for creating the complex being intended from the start. An Intelligent Design advocate would watch a slugger hit a grand slam at one at-bat, declare it impossible by chance alone that sluggers always hit grand slams, and credit some divine being for the glory that is baseball. That chance would create the same precise species every time is absurd, of course. But it is necessarily true that all of the conditions of the history of our planet, faithfully recreated as an expirement in a cosmic labratory would create those same species every time, and bypass all those same potential species that are not with us.

Last, but certainly not least, suggesting that Theory A cannot sufficiently explain the outcome does not even begin to prove that Theory B can. Intelligent Design advocates prove exactly nothing by saying that Evolution is insufficient to account for the creation of life. It does not follow that there is an intelligent creator, a proposition for which Intelligent Design advocates do not even bother to suggest a single piece of affirmative evidence.

True scientists can provide rebuttals to Intelligent Design theory far better than I, and they have. But the focus of the Intelligent Design debate should not be on the science since the significance of the theory is not scientific but political, and I suspect this is an open secret within the conservative community. No self-respecting scientist could ever honestly promote a theory which jumps from the premise “Theory A Cannot Be True” to the conclusion “Therefore, It Must Have Been God.” To a scientist, this conclusion has no more credibility than “Therefore, It Must Have Been Frank.” Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory simply because its purpose is to provide an answer to an unanswerable question without the bother of producing evidence, in order to achieve a political result.

The theory of Intelligent Design is the quintessential conservative political weapon, and it does not - as Republican rhetoric has claimed of late - prove once and for all that liberals have a bias against people of faith. For over one hundred years, Darwin has been used as the whipping-boy of religious institutions who twisted his words until they could accuse him of proving God does not exist, and then blame such heresy on those who would advance human understanding and liberty at the expense of the religious. But the explicit limit of Darwin’s theory was only to explain how life has developed since it was created and leave unanswered the question of the source. Where Darwin was content to admit ignorance, The Church demanded that nothing cast doubt upon the certainty of dogma.

And so, too, conservatives today. Whereas liberals are content to admit the limits of human knowledge and allow everyone the freedom to believe the rest as they wish in their churches, synogogues, mosques, and temples, conservatives feel the need - some sincerely to be sure, others strictly for policital gain - for their beliefs to be accepted as scientific fact, and so continue to whip Darwin for so much as suggesting an avenue toward proving their beliefs wrong . . . even if it means eviscerating the esential religious freedoms which form the beginning of our country’s fossil record.

I can only hope that some in the Democratic Party finally figure out how to deal with Intelligent Design as the political animal it is, threatening the deepest-held ideals of our nation, as opposed to the protector of religious values that the Republican Party’s coordinated efforts paint it as. It would be a shame if Democrats decide to abandon the evolution of scientific discovery and of the American freedom of religious belief in order to pander for pious electoral votes. Liberalism, in short supply among Democrats today, has been (since the days of Darwin) the only path toward the true evolution of religious freedom.