Joe Mulder — Thu, 8/4/05 12:43am

The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life.

I think here's where ID people might be missing the point; it seems to me, from what I've read, that nobody claims that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life. I thought the theory attempted to explain how we went from, say, organisms crawling out of the primordial ooze to upright-walking, intelligent human beings. As for how the spark of life came to our lonely planet three-and-a-half billion years ago, I haven't seen any evidence to indicate that Darwin's guess (or Stephen Hawking's, for that matter) is – provided you're grading on a bit of a curve – any better than mine.

Also, just as I've always said that there's no inherent conflict between religion and science, and anyone who says otherwise was probably either molested by a priest or humiliated at the chalkboard by a physics teacher (or something similarly traumatic), I'm beginning to suspect that there's no real conflict between natural selection and intelligent design...

Let's put it this way: say you believe that the Bible is the literal truth. Fine. As long as you're not one of those people who actually thinks that the universe is 6,000 years old (and I grew up going to church with some of those people), we've still got plenty to work with. Say you're God. Say you're all-powerful. You want to make Yourself a universe.

It always seemed to me that, even if You're omnipotent, You'd still do things the easiest possible way. Why just go "okay, there's Mercury, and the Crab Nebula, and Madagascar, and some giraffes, and let's see, what else, dinosaur bones, fossils, geologic records that indicate that the planet is clearly billions of years older than recorded human history..." when you could just program a speck of raw energy, make it go "bang," and wait several billion years for it to play out? After all, You're God. You're eternal; what's time to You?

To put it another way, if you're Superman, and you've got to get to the other side of a large mountain range, you could blast through them and emerge on the other side none the worse for wear, but you're not going to do that just because you could. You're probably just going to go around. I'm saying that whatever the extent of your powers, it's hard for me to believe that you wouldn't do things in the most expedient and practical way available.

The point (I think) is that if you're for God, or intelligent design, or you're big into the Bible, or whatever, I don't see how you have anything to fear from mainstream science, because upon hearing about any discovery regarding the processes that formed the Earth, or the universe, or life itself, you could just say, "so, then, that's how God did it."

And, though I've repeated this to exhaustion, I think it still (and always) bears mentioning: let's just let scientists decide what should be taught in science class.

Also, Bush took the occasion to continue to throw his support behind Karl Rove and Rafael Palmeiro, both of whom have recently been proven to be liars.

Yeah, but he's Rove's boss, and he used to be Palmeiro's. He's just looking out for his boyz.

Bee Boy — Thu, 8/4/05 11:53am

The problem with intelligent design – or rather, the problem with its current marketing campaign – is that it makes right-thinking religious folks (who aren't Biblical literalists) feel like they're under attack. There's no conflict between natural selection and the concept of a creator – the "speck of raw energy" argument settles that nicely – but intelligent design seeks to go beyond that, and that's where it conflicts with Darwinism: politics. The ID team pits it against Darwinism because that makes it a "debate" and gives them leverage to discredit or even overwrite some very rigorous and respected science, bolstering their ranks by rallying otherwise right-thinking religious people with rhetoric implying that faith-based values are under siege.

I'm for science. I'm not for God and I don't believe in God. (This should come as no surprise.) I'm like Jodie Foster in that scene from Contact, believing that 95% of the planet is delusional. I respect that I'm in the minority there. But if I were to become King of the World and the only rule was that there had to be something called God, I would say this:

"God is the natural laws of the universe. Not the laws of physics, the laws of Hawking or Einstein or Newton – those are just our best attempts to describe and codify the observable results of the natural laws. The actual natural laws that none of us can see, but that govern everything that happens."

And I think that would gel with what a lot of people are looking for – someone or something that can be said to be responsible for all that we see and how it works. Something that created that speck of raw energy, made it go "bang," and unfolded it into a moth's wing/a sequoia/Jessica Alba. Something that remains "all around us" and "in every living thing." For the people who need a big guy with a white beard, or the people who need someone to pray to that their son's soccer team wins, it probably wouldn't work.

Douglas Adams gave an excellent speech in which he asks why religious beliefs are given a special sanctity that other beliefs – like political views – are not. "If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, 'Fine, I respect that.'" The concern I share with Adams about this is that it protects these ideas from being challenged in the way that other ideas are. Scientific ideas are experimented upon and either refined or discarded as a result of those experiments. Political ideas, economic ideas, there are reasonable debates (to some extent) and there's a sort of natural selection process by which the best ideas survive over time.

But if you believe God created people, nobody can tell you that's silly. And if you don't like that science classes say evolution happened, you go in and change it – or if it won't change, you pull your kid out of school or you contradict his science lessons with Biblical teachings. And nobody can step in and say that this is bad for the child because s/he will grow up confused and suspicious of the scientific method. I feel like that's dangerous for a culture – not that I know how to fix it, because certainly that person thinks my beliefs are silly, and that's hard to contradict if s/he doesn't believe in science.

If people were thinking clearly, I think scientists would be deciding what should be taught in science class. But instead there's a bitter partisan war and a lot of misrepresentation and faulty rhetoric. Which, to be fair, is exactly how the current group in power has accomplished pretty much everything.