Intelligent design: Truth in advertising

I haven't read all of the recent coverage of "intelligent design" in the news, which I understand has been hit-and-miss due to reporters' insistence on treating both sides of a controversy as equally valid, but here are two signs of progress. A week ago on NPR's "Morning Edition," host Susan Stamberg referred to "the teaching of creationist-based intelligent design in Kansas," and on Tuesday, the New York Times referred to "creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force." Amen. Intelligent design is religion, not science, and descends directly from creationism.

Also, Bill Frist recently tried to blur the same distinction in an early pander for 2008:

Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, spoke to a Rotary Club meeting Friday and told reporters afterward that students need to be exposed to different ideas, including intelligent design."I think today a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith," Frist said...

Via Brad DeLong, here's Pharyngula taking apart Frist's statement:

I don't even understand what he's babbling about in that first sentence—he's muddling together fact, science, and faith, and implying that faith is a subset of the first two. What does it mean to have a "wide range" of those things? Do facts have reasonable ranges, such that we can simultaneously argue that humans evolved, and humans were created? That science, the study of the observable, should encompass religion, the invention of the invisible?

Frist's statement is a logical disaster. And yes, the man is a doctor who should know the difference between fact, science, and faith. (Hint: Intelligent design belongs to only one of those three categories.)

Note: For much more on the debate over intelligent design, see my friend Chris Mooney's science policy blog and his forthcoming book, The Republican War on Science, which I'll be blogging more about soon.

Comments

[Thomas E. Brewton]

Mr. Nyhan:

You assume a science / religion dichotomy that doesn't exist. If Darwinian evolution is not religion, it's original purpose was and main thrust has been to attack religion. Darwinian evolution is as much an ontological doctrine as any religion or philosophy.

Are you unaware that, in his autobiography, Charles Darwin stated that the reason he spent decades dreaming up evolution was to discredit "the damnable doctrine" of Christianity?

Are you unaware that Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog" in the 1860s, said that Darwin had proved that there is no God, thus no sin, no right or wrong, merely the struggle for survival.

Are you aware that British Marxists in the 1860s enthusiastically embraced Darwinism as proof that Karl Marx's secular and materialistic religion of socialism was the truth?

Are you aware that America's most prominent socialist intellectual of the early 20th century, John Dewey, said that Darwin had proved that everything is continually in flux, therefore religion, morality, and right and wrong are false ideas; that pragmatically all that counts is whether your actions achieve your personal desires? In other words, that there being no higher law of morality, life in the Darwinian world is, as in Hobbes's Leviathan, by nature nasty , brutish, and short.

Are you aware that eugenics was spawned by Charles Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton, who opined that Darwin having shown that life has no inherent purpose and no moral content, intellectuals should be free to weed undesirable traits from the breeding population, a thesis that Hitler found very useful.

I challenge you to demonstrate a single actual use of Darwinian evolution. It has zero predictive value; it can only presume evolutionary links by inference, because no one ever has demonstrated a specific evolution of one species into another. Certainly the millions of intermediate life forms of such a transition, necessitated by the hypothesis of evolution, are nowhere to be found in the fossil record.

Cladistics has no need for Darwinism, as it came into being with Aristotle. Still today there are warring camps among evolutionists concerning classification of certain species.

I challenge you to find a scintilla of evidence to support the most basic assumption of Darwinism, without which the edifice collapses: that life is an accidental and purely material phenomenon and that every living thing came from a single primordial blob of accidental life.

Tom Brewton