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PAN
Discussion Group Wednesday June 29th
2005
Subject: Religion
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Location: Loop
RSVP for
details
Time : 7pm to 10pm ish
RSVP for directions
Bring drinks and snacks to share
Hallelujah! PAN has finally
evolved from its original design by the Great Creator to the point where we can tackle the subject of Religion. Thanks to everyone for their articles and suggestions. Sorry for the lateness of the articles. Cosmic forces beyond my control were in operation :)The documents are
also available at the PAN web site:
https://www.angelfire.com/ult/pan/
General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give
us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we
would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not
intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to
explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum Feel
free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or
on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND
RULES: ( OFFENDERS WILL BE STONED )
*
Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for
others
*
Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
*
Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
*
Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
*
Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek
Well I guess that's all for now.
Colin
Any problems let me know..
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The
Articles:
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http://www.contextsmagazine.org/content_sample_v1-2.php
Abiding
Faith
Contrary
to the popular impression that Americans have become more secular, in some
ways they are as religious as ever. But organized religion occupies less
of Americans’ time, and exerts less influence on society as a whole than
in the past.
God is dead or God is taking over. Depending on the headlines of the day,
soothsayers pronounce the end of religion or the ascendancy of religious
extremists. What is really going on?
Taking stock of religion is almost as old as religion itself. Tracking
religious trends is difficult, however, when religion means so many
different things. Should we look at belief in the supernatural? Frequency
of formal religious worship? The role of faith in major life decisions?
The power of individual religious movements? These different dimensions of
religion can change in different ways. Whether religion is declining or
not depends on the definition of religion and what signifies a decline.
Perhaps the most basic manifestation of religious observance is piety:
individual belief and participation in formal religious worship. Recent
research on trends in American piety supports neither simple
secularization nor staunch religious resilience in the face of modern
life. Instead, Americans seem to believe as much but practice less.
religious
belief
Conventional Judeo-Christian religious belief remains very high in the
United States, and little evidence suggests it has declined in recent
decades. Gallup polls and other surveys show that more than 90 percent of
Americans believe in a higher power, and more than 60 percent are certain
that God exists. Approximately 80 percent believe in miracles and in life
after death, 70 percent believe in heaven, and 60 percent believe in hell.
Far fewer Americans from two in three in 1963 to one in three todayóbelieve
the Bible is the literal Word of God. The number who say the Bible is
either the inerrant or the inspired Word of God is still impressively
high, howeverófour of every five.
Religious faith in the United States is more broad than deep, and it has
been for as long as it has been tracked. Of Americans who say the Bible is
either the actual or the inspired Word of God, only half can name the
first book in the Bible and only one-third can say who preached the Sermon
on the Mount. More than 90 percent believe in a higher power, but only
one-third say they rely more on that power than on themselves in
overcoming adversity. People who claim to be born-again or evangelical
Christians are no less likely than others to believe in ideas foreign to
traditional Christianity, such as reincarnation (20 percent of all
Americans), channeling (17 percent), or astrology (26 percent), and they
are no less likely to have visited a fortune teller (16 percent).
Despite the superficiality of belief among many, the percentage of
Americans expressing religious faith is still remarkably high. How should
we understand this persistent religious belief? High levels of religious
belief in the United States seem to show that, contrary to widespread
expectations of many scholars, industrialization, urbanization,
bureaucratization, advances in science and other developments associated
with modern life do not automatically undermine religious belief. In part
this is because modernization does not immunize people against the human
experiences that inspire religious sentiment. As anthropologist Mary
Douglas points out, scientific advances do not make us less likely to feel
awe and wonder when we ponder the universe and its workings. For example,
our feelings of deference to physicians, owing to their experience and
somewhat mysterious scientific knowledge, may not be so different from the
way other people feel about traditional healers óeven if the outcomes of
treatment are indeed different. Likewise, bureaucracy does not demystify
our worldóon the contrary, it may make us feel more helpless and confused
in the face of powers beyond our control. When confronted with large and
complex bureaucracies, modern people may not feel any more in control of
the world around them than a South Pacific Islander confronted with the
prospect of deep-sea fishing for shark. Modern people still turn to
religion in part because certain experiencesóanthropologist Clifford
Geertz emphasizes bafflement, pain and moral dilemmasóremain part of the
human condition.,
That condition cannot, however, completely explain the persistence of
religious belief. It is clearly possible to respond in nonreligious ways
to these universal human experiences, and many people do, suggesting that
religiosity is a feature of some responses to these experiences, not an
automatic consequence of the experiences themselves. From this
perspective, attempting to explain religionís persistence by the
persistence of bafflement, pain and moral paradox sidesteps a key
question: Why do so many people continue to respond to these experiences
by turning to religion?
The
news about the environment is not good these days. With an administration
that wants to rewrite the Clean Air and Endangered Species acts and
millions of Americans who literally believe that environmental destruction
will hearken the second coming of Christ, esteemed
journalism Bill Moyers understands the despair many of us
feel. But in this speech, given as he accepted Harvard Medical's
Global Environment Citizen award on Dec. 1, he says the cure for
cynicism is the will to fight so the next generation will not
have to, and the conviction that the future does indeed depend on our
actions.
I
accept this award on behalf
of all the people behind the camera whom you never see. And for all those
scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we
have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects our daily
lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other
people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom.
We tell their stories.
The
journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He
enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic
heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His
bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring left off.
Writing
in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we
journalists routinely cover—conventional, manageable programs like
budget shortfalls and pollution—may be about to convert to chaotic,
unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he
writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment,
creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is
causing the melt of the Arctic to release so much fresh water into the
North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening
Gulf Stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes—the kind of
changes that could radically alter civilizations.
That's
one challenge we journalists face—how to tell such a story without
coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want
to understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.
As
difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable
narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers,
there is an even harder challenge—to pierce the ideology that governs
official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my
lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from
the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in
Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a
monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot
be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being
contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and
theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always
blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to
the facts.
They
are the people who believe the Bible is literally true—one-third of the
American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past
election, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls
believing in the rapture index. That's right—the rapture index. Google
it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12
volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian
fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true
believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th
century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages
from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the
imagination of millions of Americans.
Its
outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for
adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its
'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a
final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been
converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True
believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven,
where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their
political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts,
and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm
not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported
on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They
are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help
bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they
have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed
up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq
for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where
four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released
to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not
something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the
road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at
144—just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing
will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven,
and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So
what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist
to read a remarkable
work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer. Read it and
you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that
environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually
welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist
makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who
hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress
before the recent election—231 legislators in total, more since the
election—are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186
members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings
from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They
include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair
Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy
Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition
was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical
book of Amos on the Senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the
Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be
relishing the thought.
And
why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59
percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible
predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned
to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some
of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time
gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such
potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to
worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts,
floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of
the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change
when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about
converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle
of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude
with a word?"
Because
these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.
One of their texts is a high school history book, America's providential
history. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist has
a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie...that needs to
be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian
knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage
of resources in god's earth......while many secularists view the world as
overpopulated, Christians know that god has made the earth sufficiently
large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." No
wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn,
"Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot
soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a
powerful driving force in modern American politics.
I
can see in the looks on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist
to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a
personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without
expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can
to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I
think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you
think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered.
"Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered:
"Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm
not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian and the
Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the
natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and
to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not
that I don't want to believe that—it's just that I read the news and
connect the dots:
I
read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment.
This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and
animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental
Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions
might damage natural resources. This for an administration:
I
read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection
Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars—$2 million of it from
the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay
poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These
pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but
instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry
were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and
children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I
read all this in the news.
I
read the news just last night and learned that the administration's
friends at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon
Mobile and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate
change is 'a myth,' sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe
catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.'
I
not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides;
language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed
by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I
read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the
computer—pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10;
of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking
back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for
we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought:
"That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing
their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."
And
I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy?
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain
indignation at injustice?
What
has happened to our moral imagination?
On
the heath, Lear asks Gloucester: "'How do you see the world?"
And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly." I
see it feelingly.
The
news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist
I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth
that sets us free—not only to feel but to fight for the future we want.
And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism,
and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on
my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the
ancient Israelites called 'hocma' —the science of the heart.....the
capacity to see....to feel....and then to act...as if the future depended
on you. Believe me, it does.
********************************************************************************************************************************************
[
For some additional quotes from the old daddies check out:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6177
]
It
is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George
Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts.
The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has
been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often
enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current
favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian
principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on
Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player,
and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our
Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too
obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander
Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one
account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign
aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But
as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot
anything important.
In
the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is
mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore
Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the
Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about
men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long
after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on
our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced
into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see
Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In
1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli,
or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of
the treaty contains these words:
As
the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the
Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the
laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said States never
have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan
nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from
religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony
existing between the two countries.
This
document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and
President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the
vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the
339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only
the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of
debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia
Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of
outrage, as one might expect today.
The
Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in
Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and
state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal
measures, Puritans--the fundamentalists of their day--would "whip and
crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these
men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established
priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of
legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as
ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men,
have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own
opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as
such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained
false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all
time."
If
we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus
Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were
not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine
were deists--that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected
revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the
word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John
Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private
correspondence seems more deist than Christian.
George
Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither
took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that
"religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it
for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen
centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What
have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in
the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition,
bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a
public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not
as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like
"Great Author" or "Almighty Being." It is interesting
to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious
nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did
not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own
pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific
rationalism.
Tom
Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly
honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the
tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope
for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed
by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the
Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know
of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age
of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed
against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel
and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old
Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and
brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more
absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for
absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be
found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the
Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance
with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before
it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology
with the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity;
and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and
benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in
every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."
Paine's
rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men
like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that
brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for
continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello.
These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine,
yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how
theirs differed from his.
Franklin
was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most worldly and
sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian principle that if
one aspires to influence the masses, one must at least profess religious
sentiments. By his own definition he was a deist, although one French
acquaintance claimed that "our free-thinkers have adroitly sounded
him on his religion, and they maintain that they have discovered he is one
of their own, that is that he has none at all." If he did have a
religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his biographer Gordon Wood has
said, "He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for
little else." Divine revelation, Franklin freely admitted, had
"no weight with me," and the covenant of grace seemed
"unintelligible" and "not beneficial." As for the
pious hypocrites who have ever controlled nations, "A man compounded
of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and
then destroy them under color of law"--a comment we should carefully
consider at this turning point in the history of our Republic.
Here
is Franklin's considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to a
query by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six weeks
before his death at the age of 84.
Here
is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he
governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the
most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other
children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with
justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be
the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do
in whatever sect I meet with them.
As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you
particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he
left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I
apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with
most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity;
though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an
opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm,
however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence,
as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better
observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss,
by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any
particular marks of his displeasure.
Jefferson
thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the teachings of Jesus
had undergone. "The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the
maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of
Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and
incomprehensibilities" that it was almost impossible to recapture
"its native simplicity and purity." Like Paine, Jefferson felt
that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain
on credulity. "The day will come," he predicted (wrongly, so
far), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as
his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the
generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of St.
John he dismissed as "the ravings of a maniac."
Jefferson
edited his own version of the New Testament, "The Life and Morals of
Jesus of Nazareth," in which he carefully deleted all the miraculous
passages from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it, he said, as
"a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a
disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." This was clearly a defense
against his many enemies, who hoped to blacken his reputation by comparing
him with the vile atheist Paine. His biographer Joseph Ellis is
undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing disingenuousness here: "If
[Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous, he would have described
himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man
rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular
humanist.)" In short, not a Christian at all.
The
three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of--those that he requested
be put on his tombstone--were the founding of the University of Virginia
and the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia
Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document
that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the
US Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786,
Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally "freedom for the Jew and
the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of
every denomination"--note his respect, still unusual today, for the
sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of Virginia was
notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no
religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of
theology at the school.
If
we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we would
have to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in other
matters. His real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of Jesus
Christ is plain from a famous throwaway comment he made: "It does me
no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This raised plenty of
hackles when it got about, and Jefferson had to go to some pains to
restore his reputation as a good Christian. But one can only conclude,
with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.
John
Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the
fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He
personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not
share Jefferson's optimism about its future, writing to him, "I wish
that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks...may
never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations,"
but that "the History of all Ages is against you." As an old man
he observed, "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I
been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all
possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" Speaking ex
cathedra, as a relic of the founding generation, he expressed his
admiration for the Roman system whereby every man could worship whom, what
and how he pleased. When his young listeners objected that this was
paganism, Adams replied that it was indeed, and laughed.
In
their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams and
Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by Jefferson to
define his personal creed, Adams replied that it was "contained in
four short words, 'Be just and good.'" Jefferson replied, "The
result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the four
words, 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our inquiries must end; as
the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more, 'ubi panis, ibi deus.'
What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most probably
wrong."
This
was a clear reference to Voltaire's Reflections on Religion. As
Voltaire put it:
There
are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an
Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and
factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the
worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who
have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one
must be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in
all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is
therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore
false.
Of
course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates know,
that to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide. During
Jefferson's presidency a friend observed him on his way to church,
carrying a large prayer book. "You going to church, Mr. J,"
remarked the friend. "You do not believe a word in it."
Jefferson didn't exactly deny the charge. "Sir," he replied,
"no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion.
Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been
given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it
the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."
Like
Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of at least
paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of our
leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very
sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering
this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and
pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian
extremists. Though for public consumption the Founding Fathers identified
themselves as Christians, they were, at least by today's standards,
remarkably honest about their misgivings when it came to theological
doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list of their
concerns and priorities--always excepting, that is, their determination to
keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.
**************************************************************************************************************************************************************
http://www.family.org/fofmag/pp/a0021018.cfm
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact
MASTER
PLANNED by
H. ALLEN ORR
Why
intelligent design isn’t.
New
Yorker Issue of 2005-05-30
If
you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning
things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers
just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that
Darwin’s theory of evolution provides just one possible explanation of
life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design.
You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some
scientist’s laboratory but because the Dover Area School District’s
board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that “students
will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other
theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent
design.”
While
the events in Dover have received a good deal of attention as a sign of
the political times, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the
science that’s said to underlie the theory of intelligent design, often
called I.D. Many scientists avoid discussing I.D. for strategic reasons.
If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take
seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement
on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition
that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.
Meanwhile,
proposals hostile to evolution are being considered in more than twenty
states; earlier this month, a bill was introduced into the New York State
Assembly calling for instruction in intelligent design for all
public-school students. The Kansas State Board of Education is weighing
new standards, drafted by supporters of intelligent design, that would
encourage schoolteachers to challenge Darwinism. Senator Rick Santorum, a
Pennsylvania Republican, has argued that “intelligent design is a
legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.”
An I.D.-friendly amendment that he sponsored to the No Child Left Behind
Act—requiring public schools to help students understand why evolution
“generates so much continuing controversy”—was overwhelmingly
approved in the Senate. (The amendment was not included in the version of
the bill that was signed into law, but similar language did appear in a
conference report that accompanied it.) In the past few years, college
students across the country have formed Intelligent Design and Evolution
Awareness chapters. Clearly, a policy of limited scientific engagement has
failed. So just what is this movement?
First
of all, intelligent design is not what people often assume it is. For one
thing, I.D. is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of
creationists—the so-called Young Earthers and scientific
creationists—proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the
universe was created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or
that the fossil record was deposited during Noah’s flood. (Indeed, they
shun the label “creationism” altogether.) Nor does I.D. flatly reject
evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary change occurred
during the history of life on Earth. Although the movement is loosely
allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian
groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is
generally silent about the identity of the creator.
The
movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world,
most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes
and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to
intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any
natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the
design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a
designer, and one who is very, very smart.
All
of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin. Darwin’s theory of
evolution was meant to show how the fantastically complex features of
organisms—eyes, beaks, brains—could arise without the intervention of
a designing mind. According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the
combined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random
mutation in an organism, like a random change in any finely tuned machine,
is almost always bad. That’s why you don’t, screwdriver in hand, make
arbitrary changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great
while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organism’s genes
slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the survival of the
organism. In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive
patch of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold
into a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of
organism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the direction
of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators,
that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of organism will,
therefore, be more common in the next generation. That’s natural
selection. Repeated over billions of years, this process of incremental
improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are
exquisitely adapted to their environments and that look for all the world
as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after “The Origin
of Species” was published, nearly all biologists agreed that life had
evolved, and by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key
force driving this evolution.
Advocates
of intelligent design point to two developments that in their view
undermine Darwinism. The first is the molecular revolution in biology.
Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, molecular biologists revealed a
staggering and unsuspected degree of complexity within the cells that make
up all life. This complexity, I.D.’s defenders argue, lies beyond the
abilities of Darwinism to explain. Second, they claim that new
mathematical findings cast doubt on the power of natural selection.
Selection may play a role in evolution, but it cannot accomplish what
biologists suppose it can.
These
claims have been championed by a tireless group of writers, most of them
associated with the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery
Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that sponsors projects in science,
religion, and national defense, among other areas. The center’s fellows
and advisers—including the emeritus law professor Phillip E. Johnson,
the philosopher Stephen C. Meyer, and the biologist Jonathan Wells—have
published an astonishing number of articles and books that decry the
ostensibly sad state of Darwinism and extoll the virtues of the design
alternative. But Johnson, Meyer, and Wells, while highly visible, are
mainly strategists and popularizers. The scientific leaders of the design
movement are two scholars, one a biochemist and the other a mathematician.
To assess intelligent design is to assess their arguments.
Michael
J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a
senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who writes
technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the
small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his
arguments are by far the best known. His book “Darwin’s Black Box”
(1996) was a surprise best-seller and was named by National
Review as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the
twentieth century. (A little calibration may be useful here; “The Starr
Report” also made the list.)
Not
surprisingly, Behe’s doubts about Darwinism begin with biochemistry.
Fifty years ago, he says, any biologist could tell stories like the one
about the eye’s evolution. But such stories, Behe notes, invariably
began with cells, whose own evolutionary origins were essentially left
unexplained. This was harmless enough as long as cells weren’t
qualitatively more complex than the larger, more visible aspects of the
eye. Yet when biochemists began to dissect the inner workings of the cell,
what they found floored them. A cell is packed full of exceedingly complex
structures—hundreds of microscopic machines, each performing a specific
job. The “Give me a cell and I’ll give you an eye” story told by
Darwinists, he says, began to seem suspect: starting with a cell was
starting ninety per cent of the way to the finish line.
Behe’s
main claim is that cells are complex not just in degree but in kind. Cells
contain structures that are “irreducibly complex.” This means that if
you remove any single part from such a structure, the structure no longer
functions. Behe offers a simple, nonbiological example of an irreducibly
complex object: the mousetrap. A mousetrap has several parts—platform,
spring, catch, hammer, and hold-down bar—and all of them have to be in
place for the trap to work. If you remove the spring from a mousetrap, it
isn’t slightly worse at killing mice; it doesn’t kill them at all. So,
too, with the bacterial flagellum, Behe argues. This flagellum is a tiny
propeller attached to the back of some bacteria. Spinning at more than
twenty thousand r.p.m.s, it motors the bacterium through its aquatic
world. The flagellum comprises roughly thirty different proteins, all
precisely arranged, and if any one of them is removed the flagellum stops
spinning.
In
“Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe maintained that irreducible complexity
presents Darwinism with “unbridgeable chasms.” How, after all, could a
gradual process of incremental improvement build something like a
flagellum, which needs all its parts
in order to work? Scientists, he argued, must face up to the fact that
“many biochemical systems cannot be built by natural selection working
on mutations.” In the end, Behe concluded that irreducibly complex cells
arise the same way as irreducibly complex mousetraps—someone designs
them. As he put it in a recent Times
Op-Ed piece: “If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, then, absent
compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it’s a
duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it’s so obvious.”
In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe speculated that the designer might
have assembled the first cell, essentially solving the problem of
irreducible complexity, after which evolution might well have proceeded by
more or less conventional means. Under Behe’s brand of creationism, you
might still be an ape that evolved on the African savanna; it’s just
that your cells harbor micro-machines engineered by an unnamed
intelligence some four billion years ago.
But
Behe’s principal argument soon ran into trouble. As biologists pointed
out, there are several different ways that Darwinian evolution can build
irreducibly complex systems. In one, elaborate structures may evolve for
one reason and then get co-opted for some entirely different, irreducibly
complex function. Who says those thirty flagellar proteins weren’t
present in bacteria long before bacteria sported flagella? They may have
been performing other jobs in the cell and only later got drafted into
flagellum-building. Indeed, there’s now strong evidence that several
flagellar proteins once played roles in a type of molecular pump found in
the membranes of bacterial cells.
Behe
doesn’t consider this sort of “indirect” path to irreducible
complexity—in which parts perform one function and then switch to
another—terribly plausible. And he essentially rules out the alternative
possibility of a direct Darwinian path: a path, that is, in which
Darwinism builds an irreducibly complex structure while selecting all
along for the same biological function. But biologists have shown that
direct paths to irreducible complexity are possible, too. Suppose a part
gets added to a system merely because the part improves the system’s
performance; the part is not, at this stage, essential for function. But,
because subsequent evolution builds on this addition, a part that was at
first just advantageous might become
essential. As this process is repeated through evolutionary time, more and
more parts that were once merely beneficial become necessary. This idea
was first set forth by H. J. Muller, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist,
in 1939, but it’s a familiar process in the development of human
technologies. We add new parts like global-positioning systems to cars not
because they’re necessary but because they’re nice. But no one would
be surprised if, in fifty years, computers that rely on G.P.S. actually
drove our cars. At that point, G.P.S. would no longer be an attractive
option; it would be an essential piece of automotive technology. It’s
important to see that this process is thoroughly Darwinian: each change
might well be small and each represents an improvement.
Design
theorists have made some concessions to these criticisms. Behe has
confessed to “sloppy prose” and said he hadn’t meant to imply that
irreducibly complex systems “by definition” cannot evolve gradually.
“I quite agree that my argument against Darwinism does not add up to a
logical proof,” he says—though he continues to believe that Darwinian
paths to irreducible complexity are exceedingly unlikely. Behe and his
followers now emphasize that, while irreducibly complex systems can in
principle evolve, biologists can’t reconstruct in convincing detail just
how any such system did evolve.
What
counts as a sufficiently detailed historical narrative, though, is
altogether subjective. Biologists actually know a great deal about the
evolution of biochemical systems, irreducibly complex or not. It’s
significant, for instance, that the proteins that typically make up the
parts of these systems are often similar to one another. (Blood
clotting—another of Behe’s examples of irreducible
complexity—involves at least twenty proteins, several of which are
similar, and all of which are needed to make clots, to localize or remove
clots, or to prevent the runaway clotting of all blood.) And biologists
understand why these proteins are so similar. Each gene in an organism’s
genome encodes a particular protein. Occasionally, the stretch of DNA that
makes up a particular gene will get accidentally copied, yielding a genome
that includes two versions of the gene. Over many generations, one version
of the gene will often keep its original function while the other one
slowly changes by mutation and natural selection, picking up a new, though
usually related, function. This process of “gene duplication” has
given rise to entire families of proteins that have similar functions;
they often act in the same biochemical pathway or sit in the same cellular
structure. There’s no doubt that gene duplication plays an extremely
important role in the evolution of biological complexity.
It’s
true that when you confront biologists with a particular complex structure
like the flagellum they sometimes have a hard time saying which part
appeared before which other parts. But then it can be hard, with any
complex historical process, to reconstruct the exact order in which events
occurred, especially when, as in evolution, the addition of new parts
encourages the modification of old ones. When you’re looking at a
bustling urban street, for example, you probably can’t tell which shop
went into business first. This is partly because many businesses now
depend on each other and partly because new shops trigger changes in old
ones (the new sushi place draws twenty-somethings who demand wireless
Internet at the café next door). But it would be a little rash to
conclude that all the shops must have begun business on the same day or
that some Unseen Urban Planner had carefully determined just which
business went where.
The
other leading theorist of the new creationism, William A. Dembski, holds a
Ph.D. in mathematics, another in philosophy, and a master of divinity in
theology. He has been a research professor in the conceptual foundations
of science at Baylor University, and was recently appointed to the new
Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
(He is a longtime senior fellow at the Discovery Institute as well.)
Dembski publishes at a staggering pace. His books—including “The
Design Inference,” “Intelligent Design,” “No Free
Lunch,” and “The Design Revolution”—are generally well written and
packed with provocative ideas.
According
to Dembski, a complex object must be the result of intelligence if it was
the product neither of chance nor of necessity. The novel “Moby Dick,”
for example, didn’t arise by chance (Melville didn’t scribble random
letters), and it wasn’t the necessary consequence of a physical law
(unlike, say, the fall of an apple). It was, instead, the result of
Melville’s intelligence. Dembski argues that there is a reliable way to
recognize such products of intelligence in the natural world. We can
conclude that an object was intelligently designed, he says, if it shows
“specified complexity”—complexity that matches an “independently
given pattern.” The sequence of letters “jkxvcjudoplvm”
is certainly complex: if you randomly type thirteen letters, you are very
unlikely to arrive at this particular sequence. But it isn’t specified:
it doesn’t match any independently given sequence of letters. If, on the
other hand, I ask you for the first sentence of “Moby Dick” and you
type the letters “callmeishmael,”
you have produced something that is both complex and specified. The
sequence you typed is unlikely to arise by chance alone, and it matches an
independent target sequence (the one written by Melville). Dembski argues
that specified complexity, when expressed mathematically, provides an
unmistakable signature of intelligence. Things like “callmeishmael,”
he points out, just don’t arise in the real world without acts of
intelligence. If organisms show specified complexity, therefore, we can
conclude that they are the handiwork of an intelligent agent.
For
Dembski, it’s telling that the sophisticated machines we find in
organisms match up in astonishingly precise ways with recognizable human
technologies. The eye, for example, has a familiar, cameralike design,
with recognizable parts—a pinhole opening for light, a lens, and a
surface on which to project an image—all arranged just as a human
engineer would arrange them. And the flagellum has a motor design, one
that features recognizable O-rings, a rotor, and a drive shaft. Specified
complexity, he says, is there for all to see.
Dembski’s
second major claim is that certain mathematical results cast doubt on
Darwinism at the most basic conceptual level. In 2002, he focussed on
so-called No Free Lunch, or N.F.L., theorems, which were derived in the
late nineties by the physicists David H. Wolpert and William G. Macready.
These theorems relate to the efficiency of different “search
algorithms.” Consider a search for high ground on some unfamiliar, hilly
terrain. You’re on foot and it’s a moonless night; you’ve got two
hours to reach the highest place you can. How to proceed? One sensible
search algorithm might say, “Walk uphill in the steepest possible
direction; if no direction uphill is available, take a couple of steps to
the left and try again.” This algorithm insures that you’re generally
moving upward. Another search algorithm—a so-called blind search
algorithm—might say, “Walk in a random direction.” This would
sometimes take you uphill but sometimes down. Roughly, the N.F.L. theorems
prove the surprising fact that, averaged over all possible terrains, no
search algorithm is better than any other. In some landscapes, moving
uphill gets you to higher ground in the allotted time, while in other
landscapes moving randomly does, but on average neither outperforms the
other.
Now,
Darwinism can be thought of as a search algorithm. Given a
problem—adapting to a new disease, for instance—a population uses the
Darwinian algorithm of random mutation plus natural selection to search
for a solution (in this case, disease resistance). But, according to
Dembski, the N.F.L. theorems prove that this Darwinian algorithm is no
better than any other when confronting all possible problems. It follows
that, over all, Darwinism is no better than blind search, a process of
utterly random change unaided by any guiding force like natural selection.
Since we don’t expect blind change to build elaborate machines showing
an exquisite coördination of parts, we have no right to expect Darwinism
to do so, either. Attempts to sidestep this problem by, say, carefully
constraining the class of challenges faced by organisms inevitably involve
sneaking in the very kind of order that we’re trying to
explain—something Dembski calls the displacement problem. In the end, he
argues, the N.F.L. theorems and the displacement problem mean that
there’s only one plausible source for the design we find in organisms:
intelligence. Although Dembski is somewhat noncommittal, he seems to favor
a design theory in which an intelligent agent programmed design into early
life, or even into the early universe. This design then unfolded through
the long course of evolutionary time, as microbes slowly morphed into man.
Dembski’s
arguments have been met with tremendous enthusiasm in the I.D. movement.
In part, that’s because an innumerate public is easily impressed by a
bit of mathematics. Also, when Dembski is wielding his equations, he gets
to play the part of the hard scientist busily correcting the errors of
those soft-headed biologists. (Evolutionary biology actually features an
extraordinarily sophisticated body of mathematical theory, a fact not
widely known because neither of evolution’s great popularizers—Richard
Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould—did much math.) Despite all the
attention, Dembski’s mathematical claims about design and Darwin are
almost entirely beside the point.
The
most serious problem in Dembski’s account involves specified complexity.
Organisms aren’t trying to match any “independently given pattern”:
evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn’t trying to get
anywhere. If building a sophisticated structure like an eye increases the
number of children produced, evolution may well build an eye. But if
destroying a sophisticated structure like the eye increases the number of
children produced, evolution will just as happily destroy the eye. Species
of fish and crustaceans that have moved into the total darkness of caves,
where eyes are both unnecessary and costly, often have degenerate eyes, or
eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin—crazy contraptions
that no intelligent agent would design. Despite all the loose talk about
design and machines, organisms aren’t striving to realize some
engineer’s blueprint; they’re striving (if they can be said to strive
at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.
Another
problem with Dembski’s arguments concerns the N.F.L. theorems. Recent
work shows that these theorems don’t hold in the case of co-evolution,
when two or more species evolve in response to one another. And most
evolution is surely co-evolution. Organisms do not spend most of their
time adapting to rocks; they are perpetually challenged by, and adapting
to, a rapidly changing suite of viruses, parasites, predators, and prey. A
theorem that doesn’t apply to these situations is a theorem whose
relevance to biology is unclear. As it happens, David Wolpert, one of the
authors of the N.F.L. theorems, recently denounced Dembski’s use of
those theorems as “fatally informal and imprecise.” Dembski’s
apparent response has been a tactical retreat. In 2002, Dembski
triumphantly proclaimed, “The No Free Lunch theorems dash any hope of
generating specified complexity via evolutionary algorithms.” Now he
says, “I certainly never argued that the N.F.L. theorems provide a
direct refutation of Darwinism.”
Those
of us who have argued with I.D. in the past are used to such shifts of
emphasis. But it’s striking that Dembski’s views on the history of
life contradict Behe’s. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of
building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell,
Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D.
routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary
biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against
birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often
major differences of opinion. In the end, it’s hard to view intelligent
design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.
It’s
also hard to view it as a real research program. Though people often
picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are
generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that
inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar
phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the
history of science: it has produced countless important experiments
(let’s re-create a natural species in the lab—yes, that’s been done)
and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that’s
why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly
ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has
inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights
into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less
like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended
exercise in polemics.
In
1999, a document from the Discovery Institute was posted, anonymously, on
the Internet. This Wedge Document, as it came to be called, described not
only the institute’s long-term goals but its strategies for
accomplishing them. The document begins by labelling the idea that human
beings are created in the image of God “one of the bedrock principles on
which Western civilization was built.” It goes on to decry the
catastrophic legacy of Darwin, Marx, and Freud—the alleged fathers of a
“materialistic conception of reality” that eventually “infected
virtually every area of our culture.” The mission of the Discovery
Institute’s scientific wing is then spelled out: “nothing less than
the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” It seems fair
to conclude that the Discovery Institute has set its sights a bit higher
than, say, reconstructing the origins of the bacterial flagellum.
The
intelligent-design community is usually far more circumspect in its
pronouncements. This is not to say that it eschews discussion of religion;
indeed, the intelligent-design literature regularly insists that Darwinism
represents a thinly veiled attempt to foist a secular religion—godless
materialism—on Western culture. As it happens, the idea that Darwinism
is yoked to atheism, though popular, is also wrong. Of the five founding
fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology—Ronald Fisher, Sewall
Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky—one was
a devout Anglican who preached sermons and published articles in church
magazines, one a practicing Unitarian, one a dabbler in Eastern mysticism,
one an apparent atheist, and one a member of the Russian Orthodox Church
and the author of a book on religion and science. Pope John Paul II
himself acknowledged, in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences, that new research “leads to the recognition of the theory of
evolution as more than a hypothesis.” Whatever larger conclusions one
thinks should follow from Darwinism,
the historical fact is that evolution and religion have often coexisted.
As the philosopher Michael Ruse observes, “It is simply not the case
that people take up evolution in the morning, and become atheists as an
encore in the afternoon.”
Biologists
aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere
because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re
alarmed because intelligent design is junk science. Meanwhile, more than
eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in
their present form or guided their development. As a succession of
intelligent-design proponents appeared before the Kansas State Board of
Education earlier this month, it was possible to wonder whether the
movement’s scientific coherence was beside the point. Intelligent design
has come this far by faith.
***********************************************************************************************************************************************
And
finally a piece from our other furry friends, the UUs, on what it is to be
them,
http://www.meadville.edu/murry_1_2.html
Thats All Folks!
Colin
Bring drinks and snacks to share
Hallelujah! PAN has finally
evolved from its original design by the Great Creator to the point where we can tackle the subject of Religion. Thanks to everyone for their articles and suggestions. Sorry for the lateness of the articles. Cosmic forces beyond my control were in operation :)The documents are
also available at the PAN web site:
https://www.angelfire.com/ult/pan/
General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give
us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we
would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not
intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to
explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum Feel
free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or
on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND
RULES: ( OFFENDERS WILL BE STONED )
*
Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for
others
*
Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
*
Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
*
Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
*
Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek
Well I guess that's all for now.
Colin
Any problems let me know..
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The
Articles:
***************************************************************************
http://www.contextsmagazine.org/content_sample_v1-2.php
Abiding
Faith
Contrary
to the popular impression that Americans have become more secular, in some
ways they are as religious as ever. But organized religion occupies less
of Americans’ time, and exerts less influence on society as a whole than
in the past.
God is dead or God is taking over. Depending on the headlines of the day,
soothsayers pronounce the end of religion or the ascendancy of religious
extremists. What is really going on?
Taking stock of religion is almost as old as religion itself. Tracking
religious trends is difficult, however, when religion means so many
different things. Should we look at belief in the supernatural? Frequency
of formal religious worship? The role of faith in major life decisions?
The power of individual religious movements? These different dimensions of
religion can change in different ways. Whether religion is declining or
not depends on the definition of religion and what signifies a decline.
Perhaps the most basic manifestation of religious observance is piety:
individual belief and participation in formal religious worship. Recent
research on trends in American piety supports neither simple
secularization nor staunch religious resilience in the face of modern
life. Instead, Americans seem to believe as much but practice less.
religious
belief
Conventional Judeo-Christian religious belief remains very high in the
United States, and little evidence suggests it has declined in recent
decades. Gallup polls and other surveys show that more than 90 percent of
Americans believe in a higher power, and more than 60 percent are certain
that God exists. Approximately 80 percent believe in miracles and in life
after death, 70 percent believe in heaven, and 60 percent believe in hell.
Far fewer Americans from two in three in 1963 to one in three todayóbelieve
the Bible is the literal Word of God. The number who say the Bible is
either the inerrant or the inspired Word of God is still impressively
high, howeverófour of every five.
Religious faith in the United States is more broad than deep, and it has
been for as long as it has been tracked. Of Americans who say the Bible is
either the actual or the inspired Word of God, only half can name the
first book in the Bible and only one-third can say who preached the Sermon
on the Mount. More than 90 percent believe in a higher power, but only
one-third say they rely more on that power than on themselves in
overcoming adversity. People who claim to be born-again or evangelical
Christians are no less likely than others to believe in ideas foreign to
traditional Christianity, such as reincarnation (20 percent of all
Americans), channeling (17 percent), or astrology (26 percent), and they
are no less likely to have visited a fortune teller (16 percent).
Despite the superficiality of belief among many, the percentage of
Americans expressing religious faith is still remarkably high. How should
we understand this persistent religious belief? High levels of religious
belief in the United States seem to show that, contrary to widespread
expectations of many scholars, industrialization, urbanization,
bureaucratization, advances in science and other developments associated
with modern life do not automatically undermine religious belief. In part
this is because modernization does not immunize people against the human
experiences that inspire religious sentiment. As anthropologist Mary
Douglas points out, scientific advances do not make us less likely to feel
awe and wonder when we ponder the universe and its workings. For example,
our feelings of deference to physicians, owing to their experience and
somewhat mysterious scientific knowledge, may not be so different from the
way other people feel about traditional healers óeven if the outcomes of
treatment are indeed different. Likewise, bureaucracy does not demystify
our worldóon the contrary, it may make us feel more helpless and confused
in the face of powers beyond our control. When confronted with large and
complex bureaucracies, modern people may not feel any more in control of
the world around them than a South Pacific Islander confronted with the
prospect of deep-sea fishing for shark. Modern people still turn to
religion in part because certain experiencesóanthropologist Clifford
Geertz emphasizes bafflement, pain and moral dilemmasóremain part of the
human condition.,
That condition cannot, however, completely explain the persistence of
religious belief. It is clearly possible to respond in nonreligious ways
to these universal human experiences, and many people do, suggesting that
religiosity is a feature of some responses to these experiences, not an
automatic consequence of the experiences themselves. From this
perspective, attempting to explain religionís persistence by the
persistence of bafflement, pain and moral paradox sidesteps a key
question: Why do so many people continue to respond to these experiences
by turning to religion?
The
news about the environment is not good these days. With an administration
that wants to rewrite the Clean Air and Endangered Species acts and
millions of Americans who literally believe that environmental destruction
will hearken the second coming of Christ, esteemed
journalism Bill Moyers understands the despair many of us
feel. But in this speech, given as he accepted Harvard Medical's
Global Environment Citizen award on Dec. 1, he says the cure for
cynicism is the will to fight so the next generation will not
have to, and the conviction that the future does indeed depend on our
actions.
I
accept this award on behalf
of all the people behind the camera whom you never see. And for all those
scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we
have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects our daily
lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other
people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom.
We tell their stories.
The
journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He
enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic
heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His
bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring left off.
Writing
in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we
journalists routinely cover—conventional, manageable programs like
budget shortfalls and pollution—may be about to convert to chaotic,
unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he
writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment,
creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is
causing the melt of the Arctic to release so much fresh water into the
North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening
Gulf Stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes—the kind of
changes that could radically alter civilizations.
That's
one challenge we journalists face—how to tell such a story without
coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want
to understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.
As
difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable
narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers,
there is an even harder challenge—to pierce the ideology that governs
official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my
lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from
the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in
Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a
monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot
be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being
contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and
theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always
blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to
the facts.
They
are the people who believe the Bible is literally true—one-third of the
American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past
election, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls
believing in the rapture index. That's right—the rapture index. Google
it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12
volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian
fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true
believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th
century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages
from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the
imagination of millions of Americans.
Its
outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for
adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its
'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a
final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been
converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True
believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven,
where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their
political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts,
and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm
not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported
on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They
are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help
bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they
have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed
up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq
for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where
four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released
to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not
something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the
road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at
144—just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing
will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven,
and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So
what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist
to read a remarkable
work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer. Read it and
you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that
environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually
welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist
makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who
hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress
before the recent election—231 legislators in total, more since the
election—are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186
members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings
from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They
include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair
Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy
Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition
was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical
book of Amos on the Senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the
Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be
relishing the thought.
And
why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59
percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible
predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned
to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some
of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time
gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such
potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to
worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts,
floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of
the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change
when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about
converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle
of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude
with a word?"
Because
these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.
One of their texts is a high school history book, America's providential
history. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist has
a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie...that needs to
be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian
knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage
of resources in god's earth......while many secularists view the world as
overpopulated, Christians know that god has made the earth sufficiently
large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." No
wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn,
"Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot
soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a
powerful driving force in modern American politics.
I
can see in the looks on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist
to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a
personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without
expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can
to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I
think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you
think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered.
"Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered:
"Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm
not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian and the
Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the
natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and
to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not
that I don't want to believe that—it's just that I read the news and
connect the dots:
I
read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment.
This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and
animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental
Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions
might damage natural resources. This for an administration:
I
read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection
Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars—$2 million of it from
the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay
poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These
pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but
instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry
were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and
children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I
read all this in the news.
I
read the news just last night and learned that the administration's
friends at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon
Mobile and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate
change is 'a myth,' sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe
catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.'
I
not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides;
language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed
by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I
read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the
computer—pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10;
of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking
back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for
we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought:
"That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing
their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."
And
I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy?
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain
indignation at injustice?
What
has happened to our moral imagination?
On
the heath, Lear asks Gloucester: "'How do you see the world?"
And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly." I
see it feelingly.
The
news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist
I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth
that sets us free—not only to feel but to fight for the future we want.
And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism,
and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on
my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the
ancient Israelites called 'hocma' —the science of the heart.....the
capacity to see....to feel....and then to act...as if the future depended
on you. Believe me, it does.
********************************************************************************************************************************************
[
For some additional quotes from the old daddies check out:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6177
]
It
is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George
Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts.
The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has
been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often
enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current
favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian
principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on
Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player,
and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our
Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too
obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander
Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one
account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign
aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But
as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot
anything important.
In
the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is
mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore
Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the
Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about
men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long
after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on
our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced
into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see
Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In
1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli,
or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of
the treaty contains these words:
As
the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the
Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the
laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said States never
have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan
nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from
religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony
existing between the two countries.
This
document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and
President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the
vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the
339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only
the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of
debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia
Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of
outrage, as one might expect today.
The
Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in
Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and
state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal
measures, Puritans--the fundamentalists of their day--would "whip and
crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these
men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established
priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of
legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as
ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men,
have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own
opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as
such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained
false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all
time."
If
we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus
Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were
not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine
were deists--that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected
revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the
word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John
Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private
correspondence seems more deist than Christian.
George
Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither
took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that
"religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it
for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen
centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What
have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in
the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition,
bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a
public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not
as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like
"Great Author" or "Almighty Being." It is interesting
to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious
nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did
not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own
pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific
rationalism.
Tom
Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly
honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the
tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope
for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed
by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the
Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know
of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age
of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed
against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel
and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old
Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and
brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more
absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for
absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be
found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the
Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance
with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before
it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology
with the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity;
and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and
benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in
every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."
Paine's
rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men
like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that
brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for
continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello.
These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine,
yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how
theirs differed from his.
Franklin
was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most worldly and
sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian principle that if
one aspires to influence the masses, one must at least profess religious
sentiments. By his own definition he was a deist, although one French
acquaintance claimed that "our free-thinkers have adroitly sounded
him on his religion, and they maintain that they have discovered he is one
of their own, that is that he has none at all." If he did have a
religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his biographer Gordon Wood has
said, "He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for
little else." Divine revelation, Franklin freely admitted, had
"no weight with me," and the covenant of grace seemed
"unintelligible" and "not beneficial." As for the
pious hypocrites who have ever controlled nations, "A man compounded
of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and
then destroy them under color of law"--a comment we should carefully
consider at this turning point in the history of our Republic.
Here
is Franklin's considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to a
query by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six weeks
before his death at the age of 84.
Here
is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he
governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the
most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other
children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with
justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be
the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do
in whatever sect I meet with them.
As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you
particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he
left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I
apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with
most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity;
though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an
opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm,
however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence,
as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better
observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss,
by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any
particular marks of his displeasure.
Jefferson
thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the teachings of Jesus
had undergone. "The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the
maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of
Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and
incomprehensibilities" that it was almost impossible to recapture
"its native simplicity and purity." Like Paine, Jefferson felt
that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain
on credulity. "The day will come," he predicted (wrongly, so
far), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as
his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the
generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of St.
John he dismissed as "the ravings of a maniac."
Jefferson
edited his own version of the New Testament, "The Life and Morals of
Jesus of Nazareth," in which he carefully deleted all the miraculous
passages from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it, he said, as
"a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a
disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." This was clearly a defense
against his many enemies, who hoped to blacken his reputation by comparing
him with the vile atheist Paine. His biographer Joseph Ellis is
undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing disingenuousness here: "If
[Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous, he would have described
himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man
rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular
humanist.)" In short, not a Christian at all.
The
three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of--those that he requested
be put on his tombstone--were the founding of the University of Virginia
and the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia
Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document
that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the
US Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786,
Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally "freedom for the Jew and
the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of
every denomination"--note his respect, still unusual today, for the
sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of Virginia was
notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no
religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of
theology at the school.
If
we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we would
have to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in other
matters. His real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of Jesus
Christ is plain from a famous throwaway comment he made: "It does me
no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This raised plenty of
hackles when it got about, and Jefferson had to go to some pains to
restore his reputation as a good Christian. But one can only conclude,
with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.
John
Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the
fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He
personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not
share Jefferson's optimism about its future, writing to him, "I wish
that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks...may
never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations,"
but that "the History of all Ages is against you." As an old man
he observed, "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I
been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all
possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" Speaking ex
cathedra, as a relic of the founding generation, he expressed his
admiration for the Roman system whereby every man could worship whom, what
and how he pleased. When his young listeners objected that this was
paganism, Adams replied that it was indeed, and laughed.
In
their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams and
Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by Jefferson to
define his personal creed, Adams replied that it was "contained in
four short words, 'Be just and good.'" Jefferson replied, "The
result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the four
words, 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our inquiries must end; as
the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more, 'ubi panis, ibi deus.'
What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most probably
wrong."
This
was a clear reference to Voltaire's Reflections on Religion. As
Voltaire put it:
There
are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an
Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and
factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the
worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who
have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one
must be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in
all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is
therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore
false.
Of
course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates know,
that to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide. During
Jefferson's presidency a friend observed him on his way to church,
carrying a large prayer book. "You going to church, Mr. J,"
remarked the friend. "You do not believe a word in it."
Jefferson didn't exactly deny the charge. "Sir," he replied,
"no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion.
Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been
given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it
the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."
Like
Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of at least
paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of our
leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very
sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering
this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and
pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian
extremists. Though for public consumption the Founding Fathers identified
themselves as Christians, they were, at least by today's standards,
remarkably honest about their misgivings when it came to theological
doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list of their
concerns and priorities--always excepting, that is, their determination to
keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.
**************************************************************************************************************************************************************
http://www.family.org/fofmag/pp/a0021018.cfm
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact
MASTER
PLANNED by
H. ALLEN ORR
Why
intelligent design isn’t.
New
Yorker Issue of 2005-05-30
If
you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning
things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers
just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that
Darwin’s theory of evolution provides just one possible explanation of
life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design.
You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some
scientist’s laboratory but because the Dover Area School District’s
board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that “students
will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other
theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent
design.”
While
the events in Dover have received a good deal of attention as a sign of
the political times, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the
science that’s said to underlie the theory of intelligent design, often
called I.D. Many scientists avoid discussing I.D. for strategic reasons.
If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take
seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement
on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition
that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.
Meanwhile,
proposals hostile to evolution are being considered in more than twenty
states; earlier this month, a bill was introduced into the New York State
Assembly calling for instruction in intelligent design for all
public-school students. The Kansas State Board of Education is weighing
new standards, drafted by supporters of intelligent design, that would
encourage schoolteachers to challenge Darwinism. Senator Rick Santorum, a
Pennsylvania Republican, has argued that “intelligent design is a
legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.”
An I.D.-friendly amendment that he sponsored to the No Child Left Behind
Act—requiring public schools to help students understand why evolution
“generates so much continuing controversy”—was overwhelmingly
approved in the Senate. (The amendment was not included in the version of
the bill that was signed into law, but similar language did appear in a
conference report that accompanied it.) In the past few years, college
students across the country have formed Intelligent Design and Evolution
Awareness chapters. Clearly, a policy of limited scientific engagement has
failed. So just what is this movement?
First
of all, intelligent design is not what people often assume it is. For one
thing, I.D. is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of
creationists—the so-called Young Earthers and scientific
creationists—proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the
universe was created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or
that the fossil record was deposited during Noah’s flood. (Indeed, they
shun the label “creationism” altogether.) Nor does I.D. flatly reject
evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary change occurred
during the history of life on Earth. Although the movement is loosely
allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian
groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is
generally silent about the identity of the creator.
The
movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world,
most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes
and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to
intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any
natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the
design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a
designer, and one who is very, very smart.
All
of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin. Darwin’s theory of
evolution was meant to show how the fantastically complex features of
organisms—eyes, beaks, brains—could arise without the intervention of
a designing mind. According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the
combined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random
mutation in an organism, like a random change in any finely tuned machine,
is almost always bad. That’s why you don’t, screwdriver in hand, make
arbitrary changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great
while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organism’s genes
slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the survival of the
organism. In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive
patch of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold
into a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of
organism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the direction
of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators,
that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of organism will,
therefore, be more common in the next generation. That’s natural
selection. Repeated over billions of years, this process of incremental
improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are
exquisitely adapted to their environments and that look for all the world
as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after “The Origin
of Species” was published, nearly all biologists agreed that life had
evolved, and by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key
force driving this evolution.
Advocates
of intelligent design point to two developments that in their view
undermine Darwinism. The first is the molecular revolution in biology.
Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, molecular biologists revealed a
staggering and unsuspected degree of complexity within the cells that make
up all life. This complexity, I.D.’s defenders argue, lies beyond the
abilities of Darwinism to explain. Second, they claim that new
mathematical findings cast doubt on the power of natural selection.
Selection may play a role in evolution, but it cannot accomplish what
biologists suppose it can.
These
claims have been championed by a tireless group of writers, most of them
associated with the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery
Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that sponsors projects in science,
religion, and national defense, among other areas. The center’s fellows
and advisers—including the emeritus law professor Phillip E. Johnson,
the philosopher Stephen C. Meyer, and the biologist Jonathan Wells—have
published an astonishing number of articles and books that decry the
ostensibly sad state of Darwinism and extoll the virtues of the design
alternative. But Johnson, Meyer, and Wells, while highly visible, are
mainly strategists and popularizers. The scientific leaders of the design
movement are two scholars, one a biochemist and the other a mathematician.
To assess intelligent design is to assess their arguments.
Michael
J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a
senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who writes
technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the
small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his
arguments are by far the best known. His book “Darwin’s Black Box”
(1996) was a surprise best-seller and was named by National
Review as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the
twentieth century. (A little calibration may be useful here; “The Starr
Report” also made the list.)
Not
surprisingly, Behe’s doubts about Darwinism begin with biochemistry.
Fifty years ago, he says, any biologist could tell stories like the one
about the eye’s evolution. But such stories, Behe notes, invariably
began with cells, whose own evolutionary origins were essentially left
unexplained. This was harmless enough as long as cells weren’t
qualitatively more complex than the larger, more visible aspects of the
eye. Yet when biochemists began to dissect the inner workings of the cell,
what they found floored them. A cell is packed full of exceedingly complex
structures—hundreds of microscopic machines, each performing a specific
job. The “Give me a cell and I’ll give you an eye” story told by
Darwinists, he says, began to seem suspect: starting with a cell was
starting ninety per cent of the way to the finish line.
Behe’s
main claim is that cells are complex not just in degree but in kind. Cells
contain structures that are “irreducibly complex.” This means that if
you remove any single part from such a structure, the structure no longer
functions. Behe offers a simple, nonbiological example of an irreducibly
complex object: the mousetrap. A mousetrap has several parts—platform,
spring, catch, hammer, and hold-down bar—and all of them have to be in
place for the trap to work. If you remove the spring from a mousetrap, it
isn’t slightly worse at killing mice; it doesn’t kill them at all. So,
too, with the bacterial flagellum, Behe argues. This flagellum is a tiny
propeller attached to the back of some bacteria. Spinning at more than
twenty thousand r.p.m.s, it motors the bacterium through its aquatic
world. The flagellum comprises roughly thirty different proteins, all
precisely arranged, and if any one of them is removed the flagellum stops
spinning.
In
“Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe maintained that irreducible complexity
presents Darwinism with “unbridgeable chasms.” How, after all, could a
gradual process of incremental improvement build something like a
flagellum, which needs all its parts
in order to work? Scientists, he argued, must face up to the fact that
“many biochemical systems cannot be built by natural selection working
on mutations.” In the end, Behe concluded that irreducibly complex cells
arise the same way as irreducibly complex mousetraps—someone designs
them. As he put it in a recent Times
Op-Ed piece: “If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, then, absent
compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it’s a
duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it’s so obvious.”
In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe speculated that the designer might
have assembled the first cell, essentially solving the problem of
irreducible complexity, after which evolution might well have proceeded by
more or less conventional means. Under Behe’s brand of creationism, you
might still be an ape that evolved on the African savanna; it’s just
that your cells harbor micro-machines engineered by an unnamed
intelligence some four billion years ago.
But
Behe’s principal argument soon ran into trouble. As biologists pointed
out, there are several different ways that Darwinian evolution can build
irreducibly complex systems. In one, elaborate structures may evolve for
one reason and then get co-opted for some entirely different, irreducibly
complex function. Who says those thirty flagellar proteins weren’t
present in bacteria long before bacteria sported flagella? They may have
been performing other jobs in the cell and only later got drafted into
flagellum-building. Indeed, there’s now strong evidence that several
flagellar proteins once played roles in a type of molecular pump found in
the membranes of bacterial cells.
Behe
doesn’t consider this sort of “indirect” path to irreducible
complexity—in which parts perform one function and then switch to
another—terribly plausible. And he essentially rules out the alternative
possibility of a direct Darwinian path: a path, that is, in which
Darwinism builds an irreducibly complex structure while selecting all
along for the same biological function. But biologists have shown that
direct paths to irreducible complexity are possible, too. Suppose a part
gets added to a system merely because the part improves the system’s
performance; the part is not, at this stage, essential for function. But,
because subsequent evolution builds on this addition, a part that was at
first just advantageous might become
essential. As this process is repeated through evolutionary time, more and
more parts that were once merely beneficial become necessary. This idea
was first set forth by H. J. Muller, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist,
in 1939, but it’s a familiar process in the development of human
technologies. We add new parts like global-positioning systems to cars not
because they’re necessary but because they’re nice. But no one would
be surprised if, in fifty years, computers that rely on G.P.S. actually
drove our cars. At that point, G.P.S. would no longer be an attractive
option; it would be an essential piece of automotive technology. It’s
important to see that this process is thoroughly Darwinian: each change
might well be small and each represents an improvement.
Design
theorists have made some concessions to these criticisms. Behe has
confessed to “sloppy prose” and said he hadn’t meant to imply that
irreducibly complex systems “by definition” cannot evolve gradually.
“I quite agree that my argument against Darwinism does not add up to a
logical proof,” he says—though he continues to believe that Darwinian
paths to irreducible complexity are exceedingly unlikely. Behe and his
followers now emphasize that, while irreducibly complex systems can in
principle evolve, biologists can’t reconstruct in convincing detail just
how any such system did evolve.
What
counts as a sufficiently detailed historical narrative, though, is
altogether subjective. Biologists actually know a great deal about the
evolution of biochemical systems, irreducibly complex or not. It’s
significant, for instance, that the proteins that typically make up the
parts of these systems are often similar to one another. (Blood
clotting—another of Behe’s examples of irreducible
complexity—involves at least twenty proteins, several of which are
similar, and all of which are needed to make clots, to localize or remove
clots, or to prevent the runaway clotting of all blood.) And biologists
understand why these proteins are so similar. Each gene in an organism’s
genome encodes a particular protein. Occasionally, the stretch of DNA that
makes up a particular gene will get accidentally copied, yielding a genome
that includes two versions of the gene. Over many generations, one version
of the gene will often keep its original function while the other one
slowly changes by mutation and natural selection, picking up a new, though
usually related, function. This process of “gene duplication” has
given rise to entire families of proteins that have similar functions;
they often act in the same biochemical pathway or sit in the same cellular
structure. There’s no doubt that gene duplication plays an extremely
important role in the evolution of biological complexity.
It’s
true that when you confront biologists with a particular complex structure
like the flagellum they sometimes have a hard time saying which part
appeared before which other parts. But then it can be hard, with any
complex historical process, to reconstruct the exact order in which events
occurred, especially when, as in evolution, the addition of new parts
encourages the modification of old ones. When you’re looking at a
bustling urban street, for example, you probably can’t tell which shop
went into business first. This is partly because many businesses now
depend on each other and partly because new shops trigger changes in old
ones (the new sushi place draws twenty-somethings who demand wireless
Internet at the café next door). But it would be a little rash to
conclude that all the shops must have begun business on the same day or
that some Unseen Urban Planner had carefully determined just which
business went where.
The
other leading theorist of the new creationism, William A. Dembski, holds a
Ph.D. in mathematics, another in philosophy, and a master of divinity in
theology. He has been a research professor in the conceptual foundations
of science at Baylor University, and was recently appointed to the new
Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
(He is a longtime senior fellow at the Discovery Institute as well.)
Dembski publishes at a staggering pace. His books—including “The
Design Inference,” “Intelligent Design,” “No Free
Lunch,” and “The Design Revolution”—are generally well written and
packed with provocative ideas.
According
to Dembski, a complex object must be the result of intelligence if it was
the product neither of chance nor of necessity. The novel “Moby Dick,”
for example, didn’t arise by chance (Melville didn’t scribble random
letters), and it wasn’t the necessary consequence of a physical law
(unlike, say, the fall of an apple). It was, instead, the result of
Melville’s intelligence. Dembski argues that there is a reliable way to
recognize such products of intelligence in the natural world. We can
conclude that an object was intelligently designed, he says, if it shows
“specified complexity”—complexity that matches an “independently
given pattern.” The sequence of letters “jkxvcjudoplvm”
is certainly complex: if you randomly type thirteen letters, you are very
unlikely to arrive at this particular sequence. But it isn’t specified:
it doesn’t match any independently given sequence of letters. If, on the
other hand, I ask you for the first sentence of “Moby Dick” and you
type the letters “callmeishmael,”
you have produced something that is both complex and specified. The
sequence you typed is unlikely to arise by chance alone, and it matches an
independent target sequence (the one written by Melville). Dembski argues
that specified complexity, when expressed mathematically, provides an
unmistakable signature of intelligence. Things like “callmeishmael,”
he points out, just don’t arise in the real world without acts of
intelligence. If organisms show specified complexity, therefore, we can
conclude that they are the handiwork of an intelligent agent.
For
Dembski, it’s telling that the sophisticated machines we find in
organisms match up in astonishingly precise ways with recognizable human
technologies. The eye, for example, has a familiar, cameralike design,
with recognizable parts—a pinhole opening for light, a lens, and a
surface on which to project an image—all arranged just as a human
engineer would arrange them. And the flagellum has a motor design, one
that features recognizable O-rings, a rotor, and a drive shaft. Specified
complexity, he says, is there for all to see.
Dembski’s
second major claim is that certain mathematical results cast doubt on
Darwinism at the most basic conceptual level. In 2002, he focussed on
so-called No Free Lunch, or N.F.L., theorems, which were derived in the
late nineties by the physicists David H. Wolpert and William G. Macready.
These theorems relate to the efficiency of different “search
algorithms.” Consider a search for high ground on some unfamiliar, hilly
terrain. You’re on foot and it’s a moonless night; you’ve got two
hours to reach the highest place you can. How to proceed? One sensible
search algorithm might say, “Walk uphill in the steepest possible
direction; if no direction uphill is available, take a couple of steps to
the left and try again.” This algorithm insures that you’re generally
moving upward. Another search algorithm—a so-called blind search
algorithm—might say, “Walk in a random direction.” This would
sometimes take you uphill but sometimes down. Roughly, the N.F.L. theorems
prove the surprising fact that, averaged over all possible terrains, no
search algorithm is better than any other. In some landscapes, moving
uphill gets you to higher ground in the allotted time, while in other
landscapes moving randomly does, but on average neither outperforms the
other.
Now,
Darwinism can be thought of as a search algorithm. Given a
problem—adapting to a new disease, for instance—a population uses the
Darwinian algorithm of random mutation plus natural selection to search
for a solution (in this case, disease resistance). But, according to
Dembski, the N.F.L. theorems prove that this Darwinian algorithm is no
better than any other when confronting all possible problems. It follows
that, over all, Darwinism is no better than blind search, a process of
utterly random change unaided by any guiding force like natural selection.
Since we don’t expect blind change to build elaborate machines showing
an exquisite coördination of parts, we have no right to expect Darwinism
to do so, either. Attempts to sidestep this problem by, say, carefully
constraining the class of challenges faced by organisms inevitably involve
sneaking in the very kind of order that we’re trying to
explain—something Dembski calls the displacement problem. In the end, he
argues, the N.F.L. theorems and the displacement problem mean that
there’s only one plausible source for the design we find in organisms:
intelligence. Although Dembski is somewhat noncommittal, he seems to favor
a design theory in which an intelligent agent programmed design into early
life, or even into the early universe. This design then unfolded through
the long course of evolutionary time, as microbes slowly morphed into man.
Dembski’s
arguments have been met with tremendous enthusiasm in the I.D. movement.
In part, that’s because an innumerate public is easily impressed by a
bit of mathematics. Also, when Dembski is wielding his equations, he gets
to play the part of the hard scientist busily correcting the errors of
those soft-headed biologists. (Evolutionary biology actually features an
extraordinarily sophisticated body of mathematical theory, a fact not
widely known because neither of evolution’s great popularizers—Richard
Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould—did much math.) Despite all the
attention, Dembski’s mathematical claims about design and Darwin are
almost entirely beside the point.
The
most serious problem in Dembski’s account involves specified complexity.
Organisms aren’t trying to match any “independently given pattern”:
evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn’t trying to get
anywhere. If building a sophisticated structure like an eye increases the
number of children produced, evolution may well build an eye. But if
destroying a sophisticated structure like the eye increases the number of
children produced, evolution will just as happily destroy the eye. Species
of fish and crustaceans that have moved into the total darkness of caves,
where eyes are both unnecessary and costly, often have degenerate eyes, or
eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin—crazy contraptions
that no intelligent agent would design. Despite all the loose talk about
design and machines, organisms aren’t striving to realize some
engineer’s blueprint; they’re striving (if they can be said to strive
at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.
Another
problem with Dembski’s arguments concerns the N.F.L. theorems. Recent
work shows that these theorems don’t hold in the case of co-evolution,
when two or more species evolve in response to one another. And most
evolution is surely co-evolution. Organisms do not spend most of their
time adapting to rocks; they are perpetually challenged by, and adapting
to, a rapidly changing suite of viruses, parasites, predators, and prey. A
theorem that doesn’t apply to these situations is a theorem whose
relevance to biology is unclear. As it happens, David Wolpert, one of the
authors of the N.F.L. theorems, recently denounced Dembski’s use of
those theorems as “fatally informal and imprecise.” Dembski’s
apparent response has been a tactical retreat. In 2002, Dembski
triumphantly proclaimed, “The No Free Lunch theorems dash any hope of
generating specified complexity via evolutionary algorithms.” Now he
says, “I certainly never argued that the N.F.L. theorems provide a
direct refutation of Darwinism.”
Those
of us who have argued with I.D. in the past are used to such shifts of
emphasis. But it’s striking that Dembski’s views on the history of
life contradict Behe’s. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of
building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell,
Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D.
routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary
biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against
birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often
major differences of opinion. In the end, it’s hard to view intelligent
design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.
It’s
also hard to view it as a real research program. Though people often
picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are
generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that
inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar
phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the
history of science: it has produced countless important experiments
(let’s re-create a natural species in the lab—yes, that’s been done)
and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that’s
why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly
ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has
inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights
into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less
like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended
exercise in polemics.
In
1999, a document from the Discovery Institute was posted, anonymously, on
the Internet. This Wedge Document, as it came to be called, described not
only the institute’s long-term goals but its strategies for
accomplishing them. The document begins by labelling the idea that human
beings are created in the image of God “one of the bedrock principles on
which Western civilization was built.” It goes on to decry the
catastrophic legacy of Darwin, Marx, and Freud—the alleged fathers of a
“materialistic conception of reality” that eventually “infected
virtually every area of our culture.” The mission of the Discovery
Institute’s scientific wing is then spelled out: “nothing less than
the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” It seems fair
to conclude that the Discovery Institute has set its sights a bit higher
than, say, reconstructing the origins of the bacterial flagellum.
The
intelligent-design community is usually far more circumspect in its
pronouncements. This is not to say that it eschews discussion of religion;
indeed, the intelligent-design literature regularly insists that Darwinism
represents a thinly veiled attempt to foist a secular religion—godless
materialism—on Western culture. As it happens, the idea that Darwinism
is yoked to atheism, though popular, is also wrong. Of the five founding
fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology—Ronald Fisher, Sewall
Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky—one was
a devout Anglican who preached sermons and published articles in church
magazines, one a practicing Unitarian, one a dabbler in Eastern mysticism,
one an apparent atheist, and one a member of the Russian Orthodox Church
and the author of a book on religion and science. Pope John Paul II
himself acknowledged, in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences, that new research “leads to the recognition of the theory of
evolution as more than a hypothesis.” Whatever larger conclusions one
thinks should follow from Darwinism,
the historical fact is that evolution and religion have often coexisted.
As the philosopher Michael Ruse observes, “It is simply not the case
that people take up evolution in the morning, and become atheists as an
encore in the afternoon.”
Biologists
aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere
because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re
alarmed because intelligent design is junk science. Meanwhile, more than
eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in
their present form or guided their development. As a succession of
intelligent-design proponents appeared before the Kansas State Board of
Education earlier this month, it was possible to wonder whether the
movement’s scientific coherence was beside the point. Intelligent design
has come this far by faith.
***********************************************************************************************************************************************
And
finally a piece from our other furry friends, the UUs, on what it is to be
them,
http://www.meadville.edu/murry_1_2.html
Thats All Folks!
Colin