Designer Intelligence
Creationism is back in the news yet again. This is an extraordinarily loaded topic, so after a discussion last night, I've had a few thoughts that I'd like to pass on.
One of the core concepts of Intelligent Design is "irreducible complexity" — organs or structures or whatever that appear to be so well-adapted that they couldn't have been cobbled together out of other parts. The mammalian eye and the human brain are the most commonly cited examples, although their evolution is in fact reasonably well understood within the constraints of our knowledge of their structure and operation.
In the first place, paleontology is an historical science, not an experimental one. In part, it constructs plausible materialist narratives of how the past happened. In the second place, science – unlike revealed religious truth – is a continuing endeavor. Anti-evolutionist rhetoric, though, often implies that if science has not yet been able to explain something, it never will. Do I really need to critique this idea?
In the third place is the way that anti-evolution people often conflate all the different scientific evolutionary theories into a single monolith called Evolution. In part, this is because different sciences use the term to describe almost-but-not-quite analogous things. Evolution in biology describes change within a population; change in an individual is development. In astronomy, though, stellar evolution is what happens to individual stars in the course of their life; but if used analogously to biological evolution, it would mean the appearance of the different generations of stars with increasing amounts of the more massive elements that only get formed in stars. Geological evolution is also more like geological development. These three things have vastly different causes and operate by vastly different mechanisms, but they're all called evolution, and you can connect them into a nifty continuum from the Big Bang to us. So the metaphysical evils of biological evolution, which has nothing to say about anything other than life on Earth (not even about the beginnings of said life), get patched onto all the rest of the sciences.
So — there's what they say. Now for what they don't.
(By that I mean only that very few anti-evolution activists [or their supporters] seem to be able or willing to articulate these ideas [in part because it could be politically unwise to be too explicit], but they are very easily distilled from what does get said).
One is the notion that Christianity is fundamental and essential to America the state and America the idea. The ideals that make our state American can only be sustained by the strength of the moral authority of Christianity. Anything that undermines the moral authority of Christianity will inevitably lead to a change (i.e., degradation) of America — which is, of course, the best state the world has ever known. (There's a lot of 'God's chosen people' stuff going on here [e.g., spreading democracy across the world, when the foundations of democracy are derived from God {as a certain President has said in so many words}].) They've made an historical accident of the U.S.'s beginnings (the near-total proportion of Christians among the first citizens) – perhaps even a crucial one for the origin of a U.S.-like state in this place at that time – into a necessary condition for the U.S.'s continued existence. To marginalize Christian moral authority in the U.S. is to impugn the U.S.'s past accomplisments, to vitiate the ideals that make America great, and thus to obstruct God's will. Evolution, through its incompatibility with a literal reading of Genesis 1:1-31, is a challenge to that moral authority (because if one part of the Bible isn't literally true, what protects the rest of it?).
The second major point is similar, but targets the intellectual influence of the Enlightenment (particularly Cartesian dualism). It is the Enlightment that has allowed secular humanism to thrive. In fact, by divorcing the material and spiritual worlds, the Enlightenment constitutes a latter-day Fall of Man. Can you think of a better way to spit in Jesus' face? Evolution, by providing a convincing connection between animals and people, is a stunning validation of philosophical materialism and, by extension, of dualism (with materialism in the ascendancy). It's not so much that evolution kicked God out of science (the anti-evolutionists did that) as that it kicked God out of human biology; and as our individual humanity can be traced increasingly to neural operation, God's presence in us becomes ever more insubstantial. Creationism restores the connection, which is a move toward the remarriage of the material & spiritual.
I think that the most useful way to look at anti-evolution activity is not from the perspective of replacing evolution, but discrediting it. They're not trying to get evolution out of the schools (at least for the moment), they're trying to obfuscate. They don't want kids to learn evolution, so they're politicizing it, because controversy is a lot more entertaining than theory and they know that that's what the kids will pay the most attention to. And with creation science pretty much sunk, they needed a new alternative to evolution: hence ID.
This controversy is not about evolution per se; it's about trying to control the future by controlling what kids learn and how they think in the present.
One of the core concepts of Intelligent Design is "irreducible complexity" — organs or structures or whatever that appear to be so well-adapted that they couldn't have been cobbled together out of other parts. The mammalian eye and the human brain are the most commonly cited examples, although their evolution is in fact reasonably well understood within the constraints of our knowledge of their structure and operation.
In the first place, paleontology is an historical science, not an experimental one. In part, it constructs plausible materialist narratives of how the past happened. In the second place, science – unlike revealed religious truth – is a continuing endeavor. Anti-evolutionist rhetoric, though, often implies that if science has not yet been able to explain something, it never will. Do I really need to critique this idea?
In the third place is the way that anti-evolution people often conflate all the different scientific evolutionary theories into a single monolith called Evolution. In part, this is because different sciences use the term to describe almost-but-not-quite analogous things. Evolution in biology describes change within a population; change in an individual is development. In astronomy, though, stellar evolution is what happens to individual stars in the course of their life; but if used analogously to biological evolution, it would mean the appearance of the different generations of stars with increasing amounts of the more massive elements that only get formed in stars. Geological evolution is also more like geological development. These three things have vastly different causes and operate by vastly different mechanisms, but they're all called evolution, and you can connect them into a nifty continuum from the Big Bang to us. So the metaphysical evils of biological evolution, which has nothing to say about anything other than life on Earth (not even about the beginnings of said life), get patched onto all the rest of the sciences.
So — there's what they say. Now for what they don't.
(By that I mean only that very few anti-evolution activists [or their supporters] seem to be able or willing to articulate these ideas [in part because it could be politically unwise to be too explicit], but they are very easily distilled from what does get said).
One is the notion that Christianity is fundamental and essential to America the state and America the idea. The ideals that make our state American can only be sustained by the strength of the moral authority of Christianity. Anything that undermines the moral authority of Christianity will inevitably lead to a change (i.e., degradation) of America — which is, of course, the best state the world has ever known. (There's a lot of 'God's chosen people' stuff going on here [e.g., spreading democracy across the world, when the foundations of democracy are derived from God {as a certain President has said in so many words}].) They've made an historical accident of the U.S.'s beginnings (the near-total proportion of Christians among the first citizens) – perhaps even a crucial one for the origin of a U.S.-like state in this place at that time – into a necessary condition for the U.S.'s continued existence. To marginalize Christian moral authority in the U.S. is to impugn the U.S.'s past accomplisments, to vitiate the ideals that make America great, and thus to obstruct God's will. Evolution, through its incompatibility with a literal reading of Genesis 1:1-31, is a challenge to that moral authority (because if one part of the Bible isn't literally true, what protects the rest of it?).
The second major point is similar, but targets the intellectual influence of the Enlightenment (particularly Cartesian dualism). It is the Enlightment that has allowed secular humanism to thrive. In fact, by divorcing the material and spiritual worlds, the Enlightenment constitutes a latter-day Fall of Man. Can you think of a better way to spit in Jesus' face? Evolution, by providing a convincing connection between animals and people, is a stunning validation of philosophical materialism and, by extension, of dualism (with materialism in the ascendancy). It's not so much that evolution kicked God out of science (the anti-evolutionists did that) as that it kicked God out of human biology; and as our individual humanity can be traced increasingly to neural operation, God's presence in us becomes ever more insubstantial. Creationism restores the connection, which is a move toward the remarriage of the material & spiritual.
I think that the most useful way to look at anti-evolution activity is not from the perspective of replacing evolution, but discrediting it. They're not trying to get evolution out of the schools (at least for the moment), they're trying to obfuscate. They don't want kids to learn evolution, so they're politicizing it, because controversy is a lot more entertaining than theory and they know that that's what the kids will pay the most attention to. And with creation science pretty much sunk, they needed a new alternative to evolution: hence ID.
This controversy is not about evolution per se; it's about trying to control the future by controlling what kids learn and how they think in the present.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 12:37
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