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Some conservatives recognize ID for the crap it is, and aren't afraid to say so. John Derbyshire of National Review frequently expounds on the absurdity of holding ID on the same level as evolution:
The I.D. trial. The "Intelligent Design" trial — the Scopes Monkey trial of our time — rumbles on in Dover, Pa. Hanna Rosin sat through some testimony, and reported on Slate.com.
It is hard to write anything about I.D. without noting the fundamental dishonesty of the I.D. project. (Rosin doesn't even try.) The object of the exercise, from the I.D.-ers point of view, is to get religion into public-school science classes. They know, however, that if they say this out loud, or do anything to give away the secret, their arguments will be tossed out of court on church-state grounds. So their presentations perforce resemble that "Fawlty Towers" sketch where Basil, having taken a party of Germans into his hotel, keeps telling his employees: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war!" Here, is it religious Creationism that the I.D. people have to avoid mentioning. This is really tricky for them, since religious Creationism is precisely the thing they want to promote.
There is another dishonesty, too. The whole I.D. project depends on telling people, people who don't work in science, or understand the way science is done, that there is a raging "controversy" in biology, with Darwinism on one side and I.D. on the other. "Teach both sides of the controversy!" they plead. You are supposed to have the mental image of rooms full of biologists breaking furniture over each other's heads while screaming: "Irreducible complexity!" "Epitasis!" etc. at each other.
That's preposterous. The furniture of the nation's biology faculties is in no danger. To be sure, you can come up with working biologists willing to give the time of day to I.D. The Discovery Institute has even produced a list of names in this context, though the list does not bear very close scrutiny. Similarly, you could probably come up with a fringe few astronomers — around half of one percent (which is about what the I.D.-ers claim for biologists sympathetic to their notions) willing to give the time of day to Steady State cosmology. It does not follow that there is a "controversy" in astronomy about Steady State vs. Big Bang. There isn't, and hasn't been for 40 years. Nor is there any controversy in biology about Darwinism. When the I.D. folk say there is, they are saying something untrue. Zero point five percent versus 99.5 percent is not a controversy. If you tell unscientific people that it is, you are practicing deception. Deception is what most I.D.-ers are practicing.
As for Michael Behe's implication in testimony that he is the Georges Lemaître of modern biology, John Farrell deconstructs that very crisply here. The I.D. people just l-o-v-e the fact that a key figure in modern cosmology, who was right on a point about which Albert Einstein was wrong, was a Roman Catholic priest. What they are not so keen to have you know is that Lemaître kept his physics and his religion very strictly separate, declaring loud and often that his religious beliefs did not motivate his cosmology. Quote: "Hundreds of professional and amateur scientists actually believe the Bible pretends to teach science. This is a good deal like assuming there must be authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorem." If Behe were really a new Lemaître, he would be a wiser man, and a better scientist.
Similarly with Isaac Newton, whose dabbling in scriptural interpretation also fills the I.D.-ers with glee. "Don't you know that Newton was a keen student of the Bible?" they say, as if they were the first ones to find this out. To which the obvious reply is: "Yes, he was. But he didn't put any of that into the Principia!"
(Newton's religious beliefs were in any case so eccentric that I advise sensible Christians to keep them at arm's length. He believed, for example, that God had several sons, not just the one. He probably believed that he himself was one of those extra sons — a belief inspired by the fact that Newton was, according to the calendar of his time, born on Christmas Day...)
Science is science, religion is religion, and it is no insult to either to keep the two firmly and clearly apart. Abbé Lemaître and Sir Isaac both understood that; many I.D.-ers don't.
It is hard to write anything about I.D. without noting the fundamental dishonesty of the I.D. project. (Rosin doesn't even try.) The object of the exercise, from the I.D.-ers point of view, is to get religion into public-school science classes. They know, however, that if they say this out loud, or do anything to give away the secret, their arguments will be tossed out of court on church-state grounds. So their presentations perforce resemble that "Fawlty Towers" sketch where Basil, having taken a party of Germans into his hotel, keeps telling his employees: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war!" Here, is it religious Creationism that the I.D. people have to avoid mentioning. This is really tricky for them, since religious Creationism is precisely the thing they want to promote.
There is another dishonesty, too. The whole I.D. project depends on telling people, people who don't work in science, or understand the way science is done, that there is a raging "controversy" in biology, with Darwinism on one side and I.D. on the other. "Teach both sides of the controversy!" they plead. You are supposed to have the mental image of rooms full of biologists breaking furniture over each other's heads while screaming: "Irreducible complexity!" "Epitasis!" etc. at each other.
That's preposterous. The furniture of the nation's biology faculties is in no danger. To be sure, you can come up with working biologists willing to give the time of day to I.D. The Discovery Institute has even produced a list of names in this context, though the list does not bear very close scrutiny. Similarly, you could probably come up with a fringe few astronomers — around half of one percent (which is about what the I.D.-ers claim for biologists sympathetic to their notions) willing to give the time of day to Steady State cosmology. It does not follow that there is a "controversy" in astronomy about Steady State vs. Big Bang. There isn't, and hasn't been for 40 years. Nor is there any controversy in biology about Darwinism. When the I.D. folk say there is, they are saying something untrue. Zero point five percent versus 99.5 percent is not a controversy. If you tell unscientific people that it is, you are practicing deception. Deception is what most I.D.-ers are practicing.
As for Michael Behe's implication in testimony that he is the Georges Lemaître of modern biology, John Farrell deconstructs that very crisply here. The I.D. people just l-o-v-e the fact that a key figure in modern cosmology, who was right on a point about which Albert Einstein was wrong, was a Roman Catholic priest. What they are not so keen to have you know is that Lemaître kept his physics and his religion very strictly separate, declaring loud and often that his religious beliefs did not motivate his cosmology. Quote: "Hundreds of professional and amateur scientists actually believe the Bible pretends to teach science. This is a good deal like assuming there must be authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorem." If Behe were really a new Lemaître, he would be a wiser man, and a better scientist.
Similarly with Isaac Newton, whose dabbling in scriptural interpretation also fills the I.D.-ers with glee. "Don't you know that Newton was a keen student of the Bible?" they say, as if they were the first ones to find this out. To which the obvious reply is: "Yes, he was. But he didn't put any of that into the Principia!"
(Newton's religious beliefs were in any case so eccentric that I advise sensible Christians to keep them at arm's length. He believed, for example, that God had several sons, not just the one. He probably believed that he himself was one of those extra sons — a belief inspired by the fact that Newton was, according to the calendar of his time, born on Christmas Day...)
Science is science, religion is religion, and it is no insult to either to keep the two firmly and clearly apart. Abbé Lemaître and Sir Isaac both understood that; many I.D.-ers don't.
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