Vol. 3 No. 8 (December 2004)
Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
"The legitimate
powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But
it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of
CONTENTS
Eye
on the Right: Intelligent designs
Wit and Wisdom: Free speech in the military
Check It Out: Soldier's pay -- Election
irregularities
Quoted! Bill O'Reilly on the spirit of Christmas
Featured Article: "Redemption and American
Politics"
Happenings: Education report published
Endorsements: Carolyn Doggett
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor
Is American education devolving? Are our school districts regressing to an
earlier form of intellectual life? Does the specter of William Jennings Bryan,
prosecuting attorney in the 1925 Scopes trial, walk abroad at night?
One might be tempted to think so, given the mounting attacks on the teaching
of evolution in the public schools. With rightists now dominant in all
three branches of the federal government, the conservative movement is well
poised to extend its ideology more deeply into the capillaries of local
jurisdictions. Near the center of that ideology is a determination to see a
greater role for Christianity in public life, and right at the top of the
agenda -- next to anti-gay and anti-family-planning efforts -- is a campaign to
get state and local educational boards to include the religious theory of
"intelligent design" in public school classrooms.
>From
What distinguishes intelligent design (or ID) from traditional creationism
is that its advocates sell it as a scientifically respectable alternative to
evolutionary theory, one that addresses the shortcomings of the Darwinist
paradigm while embracing the empirical ideal. Seeking to avoid the charge of
backwardness that has plagued Biblical creationists, they represent themselves
as the advocates of free inquiry and open-mindedness, while painting
evolutionists as dogmatic zealots trying to stifle debate.
The basic idea behind intelligent design is that "neo-Darwinism," to
use their phrase, cannot account for the emergence of highly complex organismal
structures, given its theoretical reliance on the principle of chance in the
system of natural selection. Therefore, the argument goes, we can only conclude
that some power above and beyond nature must be responsible for the appearance
of these structures. The theistic orientation of this philosophy aligns it with
the various forms of pre-Darwinist evolutionary science, all of which
maintained that the processes of speciation and biological transformation were
actuated, sustained, and guided by the divine mind, and that they fulfilled
some larger purpose.
A number of ID advocates have doctoral degrees in relevant fields, and some of
them are undoubtedly intelligent people. But we need to be very clear that
this debate, or struggle, is not about scientists disagreeing with other
scientists. It's about the promotion of an ideological agenda, and should
be understood in the context of four major, ongoing, and related conservative
efforts: 1) to advance the social goals of a particular version of Christianity;
2) to erode the division between church and state; 3) to undermine the public
educational system by casting its science curriculum as anti-American; and 4)
to "take back" the universities from professors and administrators
who do not think that creationism should be taught in science classes.
Lest this all sound like a liberal rant, consider the "Wedge Strategy,"
a long-term plan developed by the Center
for Science and Culture, an arm of the Discovery Institute, a leading
creationist organization. In its own words, the CSC "seeks nothing less
than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" and
"explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science
raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case
for a broadly theistic understanding of nature." It proposes a three-phase plan
for advancing its philosophy in the public sphere -- a plan that is striking
for how shamelessly it puts politics before science:
"
Individual Research Fellowship Program
Paleontology Research program (Dr. Paul Chien et al.)
Molecular Biology Research Program (Dr. Douglas Axe et al.)
Phase II. Publicity & Opinion-making
Book Publicity
Opinion-Maker Conferences
Apologetics Seminars
Teacher Training Program
Op-ed Fellow
PBS (or other TV) Co-production
Publicity Materials / Publications
Phase III. Cultural Confrontation & Renewal
Academic and Scientific Challenge Conferences
Potential Legal Action for Teacher Training
Research Fellowship Program: shift to social sciences and humanities"
As Edward Lankford has noted,
"What is troublesome about the document (and CRSC in general) is that it
focuses on overthrowing evolution, not from within scientific establishments,
but through convincing the public that its theory is the morally acceptable
one." (Read Lankford's
full critique).
Yet increasingly, ID proponents are trying to insinuate themselves and their
ideas into both the scientific and educational establishments. Their efforts in
the former case have, thankfully, met with little success. Indeed, the brouhaha
that greeted the publication of a peer-reviewed ID article by Stephen Meyer
titled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic
Categories" (in the Aug. 04, 2004, issue of the Proceedings of the
Biological Society of Washington, a relatively obscure journal) only points
up the glaring lack of anti-evolutionary work in the professional literature.
(Meyer, incidentally, is the Republican director of CSC, and the author of such
articles as "Why Clinton Crime Bill Doesn't Pay" (World, April
17, 1995) and "What's the Difference? If George W. Bush Would Spell It Out
He Has a Fighting Chance" (Insight, Oct. 21, 2000). The then
managing editor of the Proceedings, Richard Sternberg, who in his
own words "took direct editorial responsibility for the paper"
(www.rsternberg.net), has of course denied any bias. Sternberg is now listed,
however, as a Fellow for the International Society for Complexity, Information,
and Design (ISCID), along with a number of regulars on the closed ID circuit,
including Michael J. Behe, John Angus Campbell, William Lane Craig, William A.
Dembski, Paul Nelson, and Alvin Plantinga. The ISCID has now launched what
appears to be a vanity journal (or soapbox) dedicated to pet ID topics: "(1)
computer simulations of Darwinian evolution, (2) irreducible complexity and (3)
the application of intelligent design.")
Again, however, the issue is only superficially about science, and the
scientific establishment can surely take care of itself. The deeper issue is
religious, and the institutions that are more vulnerable to ID are the
public schools and, to a lesser extent, the universities.
Seeking to duplicate their success at mobilizing law and business students,
conservative groups are supporting student organizations advancing intelligent
design. The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA), for
example, distributes start-up packets for "IDEA Clubs" on high school
and college campuses, where -- in typically a priori fashion -- "students
can promote scientific evidence that supports intelligent design."
Aww, it's just a student club, right? Big deal. Well…it's not just a student
club. One of IDEA's "administration team" is a fellow by the name of
Tristan Abbey, who in July 2004 started something called the Intelligent Design
Undergraduate Research Center, whose parent organization is the creationist
Access Research Network, whose Board of Directors -- lo and behold -- is
composed of four of the usual ID suspects: Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Mark
Hartwig, and Dennis Wagner. The point is that, just as the theory of
intelligent design did not emerge from honest scientific investigation, these
student organizations did not emerge spontaneously from the wholesome desire of
young people for better scientific knowledge.
Meanwhile, government entities face increasing pressure to endorse
intelligent design. At this writing, the Kansas Department of Education is
considering proposed revisions to its Science Standards Draft
2004, which if approved will set the curricular guidelines for the state's
public schools. In 1999, you may remember,
The challenge in fighting back against the intelligent design movement is that,
when the argument is waged over the actual science, it quickly becomes a swamp
that most people have trouble wading through. ID proponents seem to have
mastered the art of the slippery and misleading claim that takes hours to
refute. They also seize upon the incompleteness of evolutionary theory (an inevitable
incompleteness characteristic of every scientific paradigm, and which
the scientists themselves will be the first to acknowledge) as somehow
evidence of the theory's profound erroneousness. What all this leads to is a
terrible blurring of the scientific issues, and a tendency for people to see
both sides as equally meritorious disputants in a very complicated scientific
debate. Even though it's a no-brainer for serious scientists, the ID people want
the debate to be fought over science, because that helps to validate them in
the public mind.
The response, therefore, must be political rather than scientific.
Americans committed to the separation of church and state (who should include
both religious and secular people, and those of all faiths and denominations)
need to talk about intelligent design in these terms. The conflict here is not
between faith and atheism, and it's not a conflict between different kinds of
science. It's a conflict between modernity and fundamentalism, between
those who believe the schools should be protected from the incursions of the
Religious Right, and those who would pervert science for religious ends.
We would do well to remember the words of Clarence Darrow, the defense
attorney at the Scopes trial, arguing in favor of the teaching of evolution:
Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
WIT AND WISDOM
"Over in Kuwait Donald Rumsfeld held a question answer session with
soldiers on their way to
CHECK IT OUT
Being a soldier in
Meanwhile: Concerns about voting irregularities in the 2004 election
continue unabated, despite the reluctance of the major media to really get into
the story. As the date (January 6) approaches for Congress to count the
Electoral College votes, two progressives named Peter Drekmeier and Amy Adams
have distilled the Left's essential fears about the integrity of the election
into a striking PowerPoint presentation. If you are not familiar with the
issue, or if you want a refresher, watch
the show online. Be sure to check out Slide #46. Also, in order to show
this presentation to a group, click in the lower right corner of the screen
below the PowerPoint image on Slide #1 to convert the show into a full-screen
version that can be used with a digital projector.
QUOTED!
"Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But
the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so
vicious, so dishonest -- and has to be dealt with." -- Bill O'Reilly,
of Fox News, on some kind of mysterious anti-Christian cabal operating in the
country that would replace "Merry Christmas" with "Happy
Holidays"
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from Dan McAdam's "Redemption and American
Politics," which appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of the Chronicle of
Higher Education:
"From Benjamin
Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more
pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical
debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach
themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with
vigor and confidence.
"The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming
hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often
tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead
directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of
atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward
social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and
riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their
health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved
to feeling free. From
Click here to read the
whole article.
HAPPENINGS
Education report published -- "Responding to the
Attack on Public Education and Teacher Unions," a ground-breaking
Commonweal Institute report by David C. Johnson and Leonard M. Salle, analyzes
the conservative movement's attack as a strategic process aimed at privatizing
education. The report provides a detailed plan for how public education
advocates can work with their allies to form a network of organizations and
individuals -- an infrastructure -- that will be able get their messages to the
broad public and increase political support for public education.
ENDORSEMENTS
"What you are proposing is critical to the well being of our state and
nation. Thanks for taking on this incredible task." --- Carolyn Doggett,
Executive Director, California Teachers Association
GET INVOLVED
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© 2004 The Commonweal Institute
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