THE GREAT FINALE:
Re: John Derbyshire’s letter (under “Conservative ID”) in Reader
Mail’s Derbyshire
and Darwin:
I don’t suppose your readers want these exchanges to go on
forever, so I shall limit myself here to Tom Bethell’s point about
creationism and Intelligent Design, and then sign off. The
exchanges we should otherwise inevitably descend into can be found
all over the Internet, and don’t need duplicating in your letters
columns.
Intelligent Design is creationism. This has been proved
to courtroom standards of evidence. It is, in any case,
transparently obvious a priori.
If a group of creationists were to hire me as an independent
consultant, and say to me: “Look, we’ve got a problem with getting
our doctrines taught in public schools. Every time we try it,
there’s a court case, and we lose on church-state grounds. Can you
give our doctrines a makeover, stripping out all references to God
and the Bible, giving it all a scientific-sounding gloss, so that
just one time, somewhere, we might have a shot at winning one of
those cases?” Given that commission, Intelligent Design is
exactly what I would come up with. It is what the
creationists did come up with.
Who is the designer? If he’s part of the natural world, he needs
to be more intelligent than the things he’s designing. But then who
designed him? You get an infinite regress. The only way
out of that infinite regress is to invoke some force outside the
natural world. Ergo, Intelligent Design is supernaturalist.
Q.E.D.
And I can’t see why the makeover was necessary. Personally, I
consider myself sentimentally well-disposed towards Christianity,
and by no means ill-disposed towards pseudoscience, as a form of
entertainment. Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name
of Science has been a favorite on my bookshelf for decades,
going back to my schooldays in Britain (where it stood next to
Patrick Moore’s Can You Speak Venusian? another favorite
compendium of quackery). I often browse in it for idle
amusement.
Not only do I not object to pseudoscience, I don’t even object
if people want to teach it to kids. Heck, it’s a free country. What
I object to, and what a great many other citizens — including many
conservatives — object to, is creationists trying to get
pseudoscience taught on the taxpayer’s dollar.
As a conservative myself, I have issues with the public school
system, though they are not the same issues as yours. I favor
educational diversity. Go set up your own schools and teach
Intelligent Design, or the Hollow Earth Theory, or Homeopathic
Medicine. Heaven knows, you have enough money. Or get behind the
home-schooling movement, where you might make real progress in
promoting your cult. (I think in fact you have.) Good luck to you!
Just keep your hands off my wallet.
The science taught in public schools should be consensus
science, the science most working scientists believe in. What’s the
alternative? To teach everything that has a following
somewhere? Public-school parents don’t want that; and in any case,
such a program could not be fitted into a school curriculum. Don’t
you understand? Even a parent who knew or cared nothing about
creationism could validly object to its being taught in the public
schools for fear of what might follow in through the door thus
opened. If creationism can be taught, why not Astrology? Why not
phrenology? Why not 19th-century race science? Why not, Mr.
Bethell?
And what is the case against teaching consensus
science? That it might turn out to be wrong? So it might; but if we
are to teach any science at all, let it be the science that is most
widely accepted among actual scientists, who presumably know
something about their disciplines. At the AEI conference
you mentioned, someone from the audience asked me whether, had I
been around in the 12th century, I would have wanted Ptolemaic
astronomy taught. I replied that of course I would, since it was
the best theory available; and added, as gently as I could, that it
would have been somewhat impractical to teach Newtonian astronomy
since Newton had not yet been born.
I actually think Intelligent Design has been a disaster for
creationism. You have tied yourselves in knots with the effort to
promote creationism while never mentioning those lawsuit-losing
essentials of creationism. I can’t pretend to wish you well, but if
I did, I think I would say: “For goodness’ sake dump all this
gibberish about ‘complexity’ — specified, irreducible, or whatever
— and get back to basic Bible creationism. It has far more appeal,
and you will speak more plainly, with more authority.”
(Though what I think will actually happen — I see signs of it
already — is that the creationists will soon dump paleontology
altogether and head over to Consciousness Studies, where the
pickings are richer.)
As to Bethell’s assurances that “Darwinism” will be overthrown
any day now, and that working biologists, botanists, zoologists,
geneticists, paleontologists, paleoanthropologists,
neuroscientists, and medical researchers all around the world will
all simultaneously smack themselves on their foreheads and shout
out in unison: “Of course! How blind we have been! Those folk at
the Discovery Institute have been right all along!” — well, I have
been hearing that for close to twenty years. Is there the faintest
sign that any such thing is about to happen? Really, Mr. Bethell?
Of the thousands of research departments in the above-mentioned
disciplines around the world, has even one swung into the
creationist camp, or shown any sign whatever of doing so? Names,
please.
I mingle with working scientists a fair amount, and the main
difference I have noticed in their attitudes to creationism this
past few years has been that their amused indifference is now
tinged with disgust at the underhand tactics of the creationists,
illustrated for example in the story of the 1999 Kunming conference
(told in Creationism’s Trojan Horse, p. 61 ff.)
Creationists need to drop the pseudoscientific flapdoodle and
get back to the Bible. They won’t win any court cases that way; but
then, they aren’t winning any anyway, and their souls will be much
cleaner, and their brows less furrowed, if they just go back to
Genesis and preach the Word. Which is what, in any case, most of
their follows have supposed them to be doing all along.
Yours faithfully,
— John Derbyshire
Huntington, New York
