Intelligent Design

I know there are more important issues at the moment, but I had a dream about a watch last night. I think it was my subconscious getting mired in the debate over intelligent design.

Intelligent design represents the kind of science once propounded by the Catholic Church (see Galileo). It's science for those afraid of science, afraid that certain facts might force yet another tactical retreat, like the one we all had to make when weather satellites revealed that raindrops were not, in fact, the tears of God.

My scientific training consists of three undergraduate astronomy courses, an anthropology course, and a genetics course. From these I learned there was a good possibility of life existing on other planets and their not contacting us was likely a sign of high intelligence, that our genes have 99% in common with apes but that 1% is the difference between "OOH, OOH, OOH!" and Shakespeare, and that it's highly unlikely my male ancestors had extremely large penises. Apart from that and what I read, I'm a layman. Big time. But as another layman, the late, great Bill Hicks used to say, I've got one word for those who accept the biblical account of creation: DINOSAURS! If all the earth's creatures were created at the same time in their present form, then why doesn't the Bible mention the dinosaurs?

To dinosaurs, I would add another word: carbon dating. OK, that's two words. Polls show nearly half of Americans believe the world was created sometime in the last 6-10,000 years. Most of us have rocks in our yard older than that (especially if you live in the Southwest) and carbon dating proves it. What do the anti-evolutionists believe? That all those finely tuned scientific instruments are part of a wily, reality-based plot? Or that God is using fossils AND rocks to fuck with us? Do they hear the voice of God saying, Who are you gonna believe: Me or your own eyes? Here's a hint: the eyes don't have it. Or else.

Deep down I think Intelligent Design is a movement of faithless, frightened Christians. If you need evolution to be a lie for God to be true, then your God is weak, and your faith is a house of cards. The existence of God will not be proved by denying verifiable facts, no matter how inconvenient. Just ask the Catholic Church. They got burned (or did the burning) to keep dogma's flag flying high above the facts, and it worked, for a few centuries. But in the end faith proved less immune to facts than the Church had hoped, and their influence in Europe collapsed. Before you mention Poland, see Ireland. The church as an intellectual and political force in Europe is dead. People still go to church, yes, but it doesn't influence policy. It barely influences policy here, and no one goes to church more than Americans. Case in point: if Jesus wielded any real political influence you might expect American tax policy to favor the poor, but he doesn't, and it doesn't. I digress. Centuries ago, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant, but you can't recant the laws of physics. The Catholic Church has come to terms with that and today accepts the theory of evolution as proven fact. When will evangelicals come around? I'm not holding my breath.

Christians and Conservatives (not always the same thing) have railed against moral relativism for years, yet now they race to prove Nietzsche, its avatar, correct. "There are no facts, only interpretations," the German horse-lover famously asserted. "Precisely!" the theocrats respond. Were they not the ones who insisted, You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts! That was then, I guess. This is now. Now you can have your own facts. And if there's a mountain of evidence against you? Don't offer an alternate set of facts. Force people to turn away from the facts we've got, on pain of being called a God hater. The world has turned upside down. Belief is proof. Faith is fact. The poets and post-structuralists must be rolling their graves. What have we wrought?

Yet, this is not your parent's relativism. The relativism of the right is brave and new. It turns out people can't believe anything they want. Not if their belief, their faith, is in the power of human reason, empirical evidence, the scientific method, the effulgent reality of the phenomenal world and the necessity of answering questions on its terms, which would mean accepting that rocks are old, creatures evolve, and George Bush is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER. OK, that last one I just threw in for fun. Such a faith does not exclude God (it didn't for Einstein) but don't tell any of that to the Intelligent Design crowd.

America may be brimming with her own modern-day Galileos, sleepwalking through their days, muttering to themselves, "Yet it turns," cowed not by the Church, but by market forces and a cowardly desire not to rock a boat in which one group seems to control all the ideological ballast.