The Intellectual Vandalism of “Intelligent Design”
All week, Jon Stewart has been running a “special investigation” on the Daily Show called “evolution or schmevolution?” It’s not the funniest thing they’ve ever done, but a proudly-fake comedy news show is probably the most appropriate venue for this particular issue. The jokes and potshots have landed with predictability, but what’s really funny is how even taking the debate seriously enough to make fun of it highlights its capacity to irritate and annoy thoughtful people far beyond its significance.
The first annoying aspect of the debate is the dishonesty of it. People on the ID side say they’re innocently positing an alternative way to explain the origins and diversity of life. But the real issue isn’t about the truth or falsity of a particular theory – it’s about the method by which people arrive at that theory. Science isn’t about wild speculation. It is a disciplined process by which ideas are tested against reality, modified, refined, and, if they can be successfully repeated in an experimental setting, eventually given status as “working truths.” Over the past 350 years, this has proven a surprisingly good way to get a handle on an otherwise-complex and mysterious world, and it’s not a bad way to look at other kinds of issues either.
In opposition to science is faith-based certainty. A lot of people believe sincerely in the existence of forces beyond the natural world, and this belief shapes their actions and gives them hope. Fine. Faith may be inspirational, but it demonstrably lacks the power to systematically explain or predict common phenomena in the material world. Faith may move metaphorical mountains, but it can’t boil water, it can’t calculate the force of impact of items dropped from a height, and it can’t make a coherent case for the use of one medical treatment over another. For those things, we need a scientific method of thought, not a faith-based one. Confusing the two is a great way to inhibit material progress.
The basic political debate on evolution, therefore, isn’t whether evolution is “true,” but whether a non-scientific theory should be taught in a science curriculum. There are millions of notions we could toss around to explain the whys and hows of the material world. The ones we can test are called scientific theories. The rest are called myths, and people believe them at their peril. It’s been a long 100,000 year crawl up from the darkness of myth-based thinking and into the light of reason. The scientific method is a great achievement of human intellect and a genuine mark of progress for our species. The people who are trying, for whatever motivation, to cast us back down into the pit of ignorance by seducing us away from the discipline of scientific thought, are doing great violence to human civilization. Watching them do this in the plain light of day is, to say the least, annoying.
I say “for whatever motivation” because I think at least a few people on the ID side are sincere in their search for truth, albeit deeply misguided. But to get to the real issue here, you have to follow the power. For the many thousands of years of the “faith-based” era of human history, “faith” was defined by and imposed by the leaders of the tribe, usually to justify the stuff they wanted to do anyway. Even complicated theologies were routinely bent to the purposes of Kings and Emperors. Faith-based thinking discourages inquiry and promotes obedience to authority. It also tends to violence. Differences in interpretation of the articles of faith were (and remain) routinely settled by force, because there is no way for reason to adjudicate between opposing assertions of absolute truth.
Scientific inquiry, on the other hand, provides a dispassionate method of assigning truth to competing claims: experimentation. In the social/political order of a scientific society, the assertion of truth does not require the power of arms or wealth to prevail. It just needs to be provably right in an experimental setting. Scientific thinking – whether applied to “hard sciences” such as physics, chemistry and biology, or “softer” fields like public policy – is indifferent to the status of the person making a claim. It’s no accident that political liberalism followed closely on the heals of the scientific Enlightenment in Europe. Once the framework of scientific thought had stripped the traditional authority structure (royalty, aristocracy, Church) of its privileged claim to define truth and knowledge, it undermined the legitimacy of all arbitrary power structures and almost irresistibly demanded a more democratic social/political order.
Consequently, the destruction of science and the re-establishment of faith has a certain appeal to those nostalgic for the return of arbitrary, hierarchical political authority, the unquestioned privileges of wealth and high birth, and the expectation of obedience from the lower orders of society. Since dispensing with political absolutism was another notable achievement of human progress, trying to undo democracy by tampering with its intellectual foundations is another annoying feature of the other side of the “evolution debate.”
The last aggravating aspect of the debate is what I’ll call the ecological problem. We live in a world deluged with too much information and too many ways to get it. Humans naturally crave certainty, but our lives have become so polluted with facts, factoids, and “fact-esquse” assertions that it’s very difficult for even intelligent people to know what to think and believe. Quite a bit of that confusion is well founded. There are legitimate, important matters where facts really are in dispute and where informed opinion really does differ. What constitutes a balanced diet? Do hormone supplements help or hurt? Will a tax cut stimulate or hurt the economy? To live life responsibly in the modern age, it’s a good idea to pay attention to at least a few of these matters, even though it’s frustrating.
Amid this sea of confusion, it is profoundly reassuring to understand that some things are far less uncertain than others, which I suspect is why fundamentalist faith is enjoying such a resurgence. Science can never fully replace the certainties of faith for those who cannot tolerate even a shred of doubt. It doesn’t give us Truth with a capital “T,” but it does let us grade knowledge on a curve where some propositions can be seen as far more credible, and credit-worthy, than others. And one of the things that biological science invests with a high degree of certainty is the mechanism of evolution as the explanation for the diversity and complexity of nature. It didn’t arrive at this as an article of faith, but by a painstaking process of observation, deduction and experimentation that’s been going on for over 150 years, and has guided demonstrable material progress as a result.
It’s entirely appropriate in many instances to approach genuinely confusing situations with an attitude of intellectual humility. “We don’t know – we are merely searchers for truth.” It’s dishonest to the point of malice to introduce spurious doubts where trust and belief have been hard-earned through intellectual effort.
Attacking one of the pillars of relative certainty in a world full of doubt is an act of intellectual vandalism. Information eco-terror, if you will. The nature of the attack is so flimsy – like throwing an egg at the Statue of Liberty – and yet, taking measure of their work, they conclude that there is no choice but to bring down the entire monument.
The other day, I discovered a graffiti tag on the back door of the building where I live. Now in the grand scheme of urban crime, painting your name on a wall isn’t the most damaging offense. Still, when I saw it, my rage was far in excess of the crime itself. It wasn’t the mischief that bothered me but the gratuitousness of it. There’s enough to worry about living in a city. What kind of dumbass punk makes it worse just for kicks? And that, in a nutshell, is what annoys me about the anti-evolutionists.
9:56:04 AM 
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