Evolution: The big question.
In this week's Jewcy feature, How to Raise an Ideological Warrior, Neal Pollack worries that opponents of evolutionary theory will corrupt his son's education. If Neal's nightmare comes to pass, it'll be in large part due to the efforts of The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). ID holds that the diversity of life on earth is "best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection," and it includes among its backers President Bush, parents and school board members across America, and a growing list of dissident academics.
We've asked David Klinghoffer, a Jewcy contributor and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to tell us "What would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?" Here is David's answer:
No thoughtful, feeling person would find it palatable to live a life without meaning. For many Americans, meaning is obtained primarily through religious faith. For others, through family, career, or politics. For lots of people in the Jewish community, but not only there, life’s meaning is supplied by fear.
Some fear the so-called Islamofascist threat. Many liberal Jews, however, are terrified by the scientific critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
My stake in the matter? I work at the Discovery Institute here in Seattle, which almost single-handedly put the issue Darwin v. Design before the public. For the record, I’m a fellow in DI’s program on Religion, Liberty & Public Life, which is not focused on evolutionary or other scientific questions. What exactly would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about intelligent design?
Paranoia has been running high. The Anti-Defamation League calls ID a “challenge to religious freedom in America.” The group warns that, “Many who believe in intelligent design want to teach this idea as science — either alongside the scientific theory of evolution or in place of it.”
Outside the more fevered precincts of the Jewish community, a few of the Republican presidential candidates would not oppose teaching both sides of the Darwin controversy to public school students. Hillary Clinton affirmed her own faith: “I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying….I am grateful that I have the ability to look at dinosaur bones and draw my own conclusions.”
Like The Shroud of Turin, but for Atheists: When Hillary Clinton looks at dinosaur bones, her faith in evolution is reaffirmed Setting aside the question of how Senator Clinton could draw a scientific conclusion from gazing at dinosaur bones, one notes her implication that Republicans sympathetic to ID pose a “shocking” threat to her freedom to “draw her own conclusions” about life’s origins.
There are so many misunderstandings here.
ID theory represents an inference from scientific facts, facts agreed to by all scientists, like the nanotechnology in the living cell and the information-rich software of DNA. This is not Bible-based creationism. No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang. The issue dividing Darwin advocates and Design theorists is a question of the interpretation of universally accepted data for the purpose of describing events in the distant past.
Darwin doubters ask whether a purely mechanical process of natural selection operating on random genetic variation could produce even the first, simplest life in earth’s biological history. ID theorists discern positive evidence of a designer’s hand at work in that history. The identity of the designer, of course, is not a scientific question but a philosophical or theological one.
The list of scientists who identify as Darwin-skeptics continues to grow, even while they remain a minority. The Discovery Institute maintains a registry of admitted doubters from institutions including Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley, 700 in all, which can be found here.
No one on the ID side of the controversy wants to displace Darwin in public school education. Rather, the purpose has always been twofold. First, to encourage states to include more education about evolution in their science curricula, exposing students to the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory.
Monkeys: I don't want to believe that we evolved from this guy, do you?
Second, the Discovery Institute would protect, from legal or other
harassment, teachers who include in their class discussions a review of
the scientific evidence for an intelligent designer.
In short, far from imposing any view about science on anyone, ID advocates only want to see the question of life’s origins opened up for serious discussion. What is there to fear in this?
For Jews and others who find meaning for life in the feeling of being terrified, the identity of the bogeyman is significant. Those who quake at the prospect of exposing students to doubts about Darwin are motivated, I suspect, by their allegiance to an alternative new religion without a deity, Secularism. The paranoid belief that ID insists on shutting down thought on dogmatic grounds masks Secularism’s dogmatic insistence on the very same thing.
Darwinism was understood from its inception as a sword in the heart of religious faith, purportedly explaining how life came to exist without the guidance of a transcendent personal force outside nature. It’s a secular theocracy that, at present, devotes itself to preventing students even from hearing that there might be scientific difficulties with Darwin.
* UPDATE: Jason Rosenhouse, host of Evolution Blog, responds to David Klinghoffer with The Chutzpah of Intelligent Design.
* UPDATE: Computer scientist and civil liberties advocate Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo blogs this exchange, here.
* Want to blog this exchange between an urban hipster parent and the Discovery Institute? Submit a blog post to Jewcy, here.
* Read more of David Klinghoffer's articles for Jewcy, here.