Frederick Turner considers evolution to be proved. Nevertheless, he seems to wish "a pox on both your houses". He considers both sides of the debate to have sinned.
On the sins of the creationist contingent, he notes:
...the sin is intellectual dishonesty. It begins innocently as a wise recognition that faith must precede reason, even if the faith is only in reason itself. But under pressure from a contemptuous academic elite the appeal to faith rapidly becomes anti-intellectualism and what Socrates identified as a great sin, "misologic" or treason against the Logos, against reason itself – in religious terms, a sin against the Holy Spirit. Under further pressure it resorts to rhetorical dishonesty and hypocrisy, to an attempt to appropriate the garments of science and reason, and so we get "creation science", the misuse of the term "intelligent design", the whole grotesque solemn sham of pseudoscientific periodicals and conferences on creation science, and a lame parade of scientific titles and degrees. A lie repeated often enough convinces the liar, and many creationists may now have forgotten that they are lying at all.
Indeed, it seems as if creationists believe that science behaves like a religious order. The way to do battle with it is to adopt the trappings of the order, use the vocabulary, cite "proof texts" that support your point of view, and if you convince enough of the masses, the church will slowly move to align with the view you've been pushing. At the very least, you can provoke a schism, and your side of the schism can wage war against the infidels.
In a way, this argument seems to be that creationism has taken to lying about science, but it's an understandable reaction to the way academia has treated religion. I hope he's not making that argument – as I see it, this may explain, but it does not excuse, the falsehoods spread by creationists.
And indeed, he comes down more heavily against the evolutionists.
The polemical evolutionists are right about the truth of evolution. But the rightness of their cause has been deeply compromised by their own version of the creationists' sin. The evolutionists' sin, as I see it, is even greater, because it is three sins rolled into one. The first is a profound failure of the imagination, which comes from a certain laziness and complacency. Somehow people, who should, because of their studies in biology, have been brought to a state of profound wonder and awe at the astonishing beauty and intricacy and generosity of nature, can think of nothing better to say than to gloomily pronounce it all meaningless and valueless. Even if one is an atheist, nature surely has a meaning, that is, an abstract and volitional and mental implication: the human world and its ideas and arts and loves, including our appreciation for the beauty of nature itself. The second sin is a profound moral failure -- the failure of gratitude. If one found out that one had a billion dollars free and clear in one's bank account, whose source was unknown, one should want to find out who put it there, or if the donor were not a person but a thing or a system, what it was that has so benefited us. And one would want to thank whoever or whatever put it in our account. Our lives and experiences are surely worth more than a billion dollars to us, and yet we did not earn them and we owe it to someone or something to give thanks. And to despise and ridicule those who rightly or wrongly do want to give thanks and identify their benefactor as "God" is to compound the sin. The third sin is again dishonesty. In many cases it is clear that the beautiful and hard-won theory of evolution, now proved beyond reasonable doubt, is being cynically used by some -- who do not much care about it as such -- to support an ulterior purpose: a program of atheist indoctrination, and an assault on the moral and spiritual goals of religion. A truth used for unworthy purposes is quite as bad as a lie used for ends believed to be worthy. If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people, then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state's well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions. If creationists cannot be trusted to give a fair hearing to evidence and logic because of their prior commitment to religious doctrine, some evolutionary partisans cannot be trusted because they would use a general social acceptance of the truth of evolution as a way to set in place a system of helpless moral license in the population and an intellectual elite to take care of them.Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate http://www.techcentralstation.com/071305B.html By Frederick Turner Published 07/14/2005 Does the theory of evolution make God unnecessary to the very existence of the world? If there is no God, what authority, if any, guarantees the moral law of humankind? These questions are crucial in the current controversies that are dividing the nation. For just as our laws must be not for religious believers alone, they must also be not for unbelievers alone either. Here, though, I would like to deal not with the answers, which would require a much larger work than a brief essay, but with some aspects of the controversy over evolution itself. The battle between the evolutionists and the creationists is a peculiarly tragic one, because it is amplifying the worst tendencies of both sides, and making it more and more difficult for most people to find a resolution. On the polemical creationist side, the sin is intellectual dishonesty. It begins innocently as a wise recognition that faith must precede reason, even if the faith is only in reason itself (as Gödel showed, reason cannot prove its own validity). But under pressure from a contemptuous academic elite the appeal to faith rapidly becomes anti-intellectualism and what Socrates identified as a great sin, "misologic" or treason against the Logos, against reason itself -- in religious terms, a sin against the Holy Spirit. Under further pressure it resorts to rhetorical dishonesty and hypocrisy, to an attempt to appropriate the garments of science and reason, and so we get "creation science", the misuse of the term "intelligent design", the whole grotesque solemn sham of pseudoscientific periodicals and conferences on creation science, and a lame parade of scientific titles and degrees. A lie repeated often enough convinces the liar, and many creationists may now have forgotten that they are lying at all. The polemical evolutionists are right about the truth of evolution. But the rightness of their cause has been deeply compromised by their own version of the creationists' sin. The evolutionists' sin, as I see it, is even greater, because it is three sins rolled into one. The first is a profound failure of the imagination, which comes from a certain laziness and complacency. Somehow people, who should, because of their studies in biology, have been brought to a state of profound wonder and awe at the astonishing beauty and intricacy and generosity of nature, can think of nothing better to say than to gloomily pronounce it all meaningless and valueless. Even if one is an atheist, nature surely has a meaning, that is, an abstract and volitional and mental implication: the human world and its ideas and arts and loves, including our appreciation for the beauty of nature itself. The second sin is a profound moral failure -- the failure of gratitude. If one found out that one had a billion dollars free and clear in one's bank account, whose source was unknown, one should want to find out who put it there, or if the donor were not a person but a thing or a system, what it was that has so benefited us. And one would want to thank whoever or whatever put it in our account. Our lives and experiences are surely worth more than a billion dollars to us, and yet we did not earn them and we owe it to someone or something to give thanks. And to despise and ridicule those who rightly or wrongly do want to give thanks and identify their benefactor as "God" is to compound the sin. The third sin is again dishonesty. In many cases it is clear that the beautiful and hard-won theory of evolution, now proved beyond reasonable doubt, is being cynically used by some -- who do not much care about it as such -- to support an ulterior purpose: a program of atheist indoctrination, and an assault on the moral and spiritual goals of religion. A truth used for unworthy purposes is quite as bad as a lie used for ends believed to be worthy. If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people, then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state's well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions. If creationists cannot be trusted to give a fair hearing to evidence and logic because of their prior commitment to religious doctrine, some evolutionary partisans cannot be trusted because they would use a general social acceptance of the truth of evolution as a way to set in place a system of helpless moral license in the population and an intellectual elite to take care of them. The controversy over intelligent design and evolution is, like many current quarrels, largely artificial, a proxy fight between atheists and biblical literalists over the existence and nature of a divine authority and the desirability of state authority as a replacement for it. Many people not warped in attitude by the exacerbations of the conflict see no contradiction between the idea that the universe, life, and human beings evolved according to natural processes, and the idea that a divine being or beings can be credited with the existence of everything, having set those natural processes going in the first place. The big question is whether nature can give us a moral law that is robust enough to serve a modern democratic free enterprise society -- if it can, that moral law would be acceptable both to believers, who would see it as God's natural revelation, and to unbelievers, who could trust its metaphysical impartiality. The Real Intelligent Designers http://www.techcentralstation.com/060905B.html By James Pinkerton Published 06/09/2005 The evolution vs. creation debate will never stop. But that endless wrangle is destined to take some new turns. How so? Because the evolution side of the debate, which is to say, the science side, is about to beget some serious creationism of its own -- that is, creations by human scientists. No serious scientist believes the literal Biblical creation account, but many earnest and well-credentialed scientists do believe in Intelligent Design (ID), as a perspective on evolution. And ID, of course, is religiously inspired. For instance, there's the Intelligent Design Network (IDN), a non-profit group headquartered in Shawnee Mission, KS. According to the network, ID is simply an approach to evolution which "holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." But that "intelligent cause," which the IDN does not further identify, is by definition some sort of metaphysical -- or, if one prefers, divine -- Creator. And while religion is at the core of ID, its proponents generate lots of science-y arguments. One of the best known ID-ers is Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box. Behe argues that it just isn't possible that random evolution could have produced the flagellum -- the propeller/tail -- on a bacteria. Such an organ, he concludes, is "irreducibly complex," which is to say, only a Master of Complexity could have created it. But it's a fallacy to argue that just because one person -- or even all the people of an era -- can't figure out how something works, therefore such mysterious workings are beyond any human comprehension, ever. To take one humble example, years ago I saw Siegfried and Roy perform their tiger-based magic in Las Vegas, and was frankly astonished at some of the illusions they generated at the aptly named Mirage casino. I had no idea how they did their tricks, but since I knew that they employed mechanics, not metaphysics, to do their show, I was content just to enjoy it, marveling all the while at human ingenuity. And of course, if one waits long enough, he will get a peek behind the conjuring curtain, learning how tricks are done and also that like the rest of us, Siegfried and Roy suffer from Murphy's Law, too. And so it is with science: eventually, some scientist will figure out how the "trick" of the bacteria's flagellum is done. But the ID-ers can't wait. They say that they must "study" evolution now, because, in the words of the IDN, "it is a science that unavoidably impacts religion." So to defend their particular religious worldview, they must undercut the work of Charles Darwin. Similarly, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI) presents itself as a serious-minded explorer of possible options. The DI's Center for Science and Culture, for example, presents itself as just another group of think-tankers committed to open inquiry, although clearly stating that it "supports research by scientists and other scholars challenging various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory" even as it "supports research by scientists and other scholars developing the scientific theory known as intelligent design." But the true mission of the DI was fully revealed in a 1999 posting of an internal DI document called "The Wedge Project" -- a document corroborated recently by The New Yorker -- which described not only the DI's anti-Darwinian goal but also its plan for achieving that goal. The paper begins by decrying the "devastating" effect of Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, upon the "bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built." These three fathers of "isms" were the propagators of a "materialistic conception of reality" that has "infected virtually every area of our culture." And so the DI mission is clear: "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies." These heady fighting words certainly put the ID movement in its proper ideological and theological perspective. There won't be much defending of Marx or Freud from me. But Darwin was nothing like Marx or Freud. Indeed, biological Darwinism spawned "Social Darwinism," an extreme form of libertarianism. As TCS's own Nick Schulz, a certified non-leftist free marketer, observes, "There's plenty of room for God in a Darwinian universe. Darwin operates on different plane altogether from theology." Provocatively, Schulz compares Darwin to Friedrich Hayek, the legendary opponent of central planning and proponent of free markets. "Both men, in their nuance," Schulz explains, "demand seriousness of thought, not sentiment; both respect complexity that defies simplistic engineering, biological or social." And that's the problem with ID: it's simplistic. To argue that complex biological phenomena are "irreducibly complex" is to abandon the scientific quest. As Richard Dawkins, who boasts the bold professional title of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, explains in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design,
To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there," and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there," or "Life was always there," and be done with it.So the better mission for the ID-ers, should they choose to undertake it, would be to identify the Intelligent Designer. That's a question that's been wrangled over by theologians for eons, with no firm conclusion yet. But of course, such inquiry has nothing to do with science. As Schulz suggests, religion is simply on a different plane than science. The whole point is that you take it on faith: you either believe or you don't. In fact, the Catholics put Mysterium Fidei, the mystery of faith, at the center of their belief system. Which is fine, but once again, it's not science. For those still interested in the ID debate, there's no shortage of material. And for those Darwinians in need of reinforcement, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City has a special website. Or one could settle for H. Allen Orr's two-word description of ID in The New Yorker: "junk science." So enough on what might be called RID, for Religious Intelligent Design. One can either believe in it, or not, but if one does, it must be taken on faith. But here's something coming that's real, replicatable, and thus inarguable. Let's call it SID, for Scientific Intelligent Design -- that is, designed here on earth by mortal, tangible human beings. There'll be no need to take SID on faith, because it'll be visible -- in your face, even. Indeed, early examples of SID have been visible for a long time. Plant and animal breeding, using mostly proto-scientific empiricism and intuition, reaches back probably 10,000 years. Consider, as one example of early SID in action, our best friend, the dog. Gazing down at a Chihuahua next to a Cocker Spaniel, it's hard to believe that those different breeds are the same species, Canis lupus familiaris. And all dogs, however cute, are descended from the fierce wolf, Canis lupus. Yes, these interconnections are hard to believe at first, but biologists can prove them. But canines and crops, of course, were just an overture. The true SID-aceous Era is just beginning, and it will affect humans, as well as animals. Broadly speaking, scientists are following three distinct paths toward human SID, which we can summarize as "hardware" (prosthetics and robotics), "software" (artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality), and "wetware" (cloning). In most cases, the scientists involved aren't thinking grand thoughts about human evolution. Instead, they are thinking about helping the elderly and others regain motor functions, or about improving computational power, or about curing many wasting, chronic illnesses. In that sense, they are ironically akin to the "proverbial blind watchmaker" of nature; they are not consciously participating in anything so grand as evolution. But a few scientists are "sighted watchmakers." They are, for better or for worse, visionaries. And there's nothing incidental or accidental about their advocacy of "transhumanism." In the words of one such scientist, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, "We will invent our successors." But whatever the motivations, from all directions, SID is coming. In hardware, it's coming. In software, it's coming. And in wetware -- including the hot-button issue of stem cells from fetal tissue -- it's coming. (For those following the current legislative debate over embryonic stem cells in Washington, one might note that American legal restrictions are already being mooted by the world marketplace; fetal-based heart treatment, apparently effective, was recently dispensed in Ecuador, using embryonic stem cells supplied by an institute in Barbados.) For as long as there are free minds and free markets, these innovations are going to keep on coming. Why? Because to envision things, to build things, to create systems of things -- that's deeply satisfying to many people, and so they keep on doing it, despite all the difficulties and dangers they might face. So, leaving God or gods out of this, let's say it: human beings are the Intelligent Designers. That might seem sacrilegious to some, but it's true to others, and real to the world. And in fact, we can always deal with the fruit of Design that's Intelligent. It's Unintelligent Design that we should be worried about. And oh yes, Malevolent Design. We should fear that. July 19, 2005 Students Deserve to be Taught "a Lot of Science" http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/grummo_20050719.html Gregory Rummo Earlier this year, the issue of teaching alternate theories for the origins of life in the public schools in the state of Kansas bobbed to the surface once again. The crux of the controversy was explained in the school board’s Recommendations for Further Revision to the Second Draft of Kansas Science Education Standards: “…[A] disagreement continues to exist within the Science Writing Committee with respect to very substantive issues relating to the inherently controversial issue of teaching students about the origin of life and its diversity. There is general agreement that standard biological evolutionary theory must be presented. However, Draft 2 continues to implicitly discourages (sic) any critical analysis of the theory that would ‘weaken’ it. This implication is reinforced by the absence of any learning objective that would inform students of important evidence inconsistent with evolution’s critical assumptions and historical narratives. This is in spite of agreed upon standards that explicitly state that students should critically analyze all scientific theories and consider competing alternatives.” The “agreed upon standards” are a part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act which states that “a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.” The uproar from Saint Darwin’s ardent defenders was predictable. None was willing to participate in the public hearings held in early May. Yet a new national survey shows that almost two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) agree with the basic tenet of creationism, that “human beings were created directly by God.” Another 10 percent subscribe to the theory that “human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them” (intelligent design). Moreover, “a majority (55%) believe that all three of these theories [evolution, creationism and intelligent design] should be taught in public schools.” Such open-mindedness is in keeping with the findings of fact that came out of the hearings in Kansas; “An objective approach to teaching origins science is one that reasonably informs students about relevant competing scientific views. State endorsement of an objective approach that favors neither Naturalistic Explanations [n]or the Scientific Criticism of those Explanations will more appropriately inform students about origins, will provide good and liberal science education, will cause the state to not take sides on the issue, and is a formula that is most likely [to] lead to the best and religiously neutral origins science education.” Why does the mere mention of objectivity and a critical examination of Darwinian evolution send shudders of fear through its evangelists? And what exactly is it that so fiercely drives them to defend their theory? It is clear that there is more than science at work here. Darwinism is the core belief under girding philosophical naturalism, expressed in such documents as the Humanist Manifesto III which establishes the Humanist belief system, as “rejecting any ‘supernatural’ influence and rel[ying] on modern science and the view that humans are the product of ‘unguided evolutionary change.’” In a similar vein one could cite George Gaylord Simpson: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind,” or Jacques Monod, “Man has to understand that he is a mere accident.” Monod is typical of the origins exclusionists, writing that Darwinism was “…no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely to be revised.” Nonetheless, most aren’t buying that brand of religion. In large numbers, we remain intractable in our belief that a supreme being was the ultimate cause behind the creation of the universe; that there was a first “unmoved mover,” a creator or an intelligent designer and that all we call reality did not happen by random, naturalistic phenomena. Paul the apostle was just as ardent in his beliefs as modern-day Darwinists. In describing the natural world he explained that belief in an intelligent designer was a priori: “His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made...” The 16th-century scientist Francis Bacon wrote, “A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back.” Clearly, this is what is at the heart of Darwinist’s fears of the teaching of “a lot of science.” This appeared in the Sunday New Jersey Herald on July 17, 2005 ### Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist and the author of two books, "The View from the Grass Roots," published in July 2002 and "The View from the Grass Roots -Another Look," available in June 2004. Visit his website, GregRummo.com to find out how to purchase autographed copies. GJRummo@optonline.net
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