Conventional wisdom holds that, when you’ve dug yourself into a hole, you should stop digging. But, then again, if your religious beliefs require you to keep digging, and to hell with the rest of the world, far be it for me to stop you.
Intelligent design suffered a major blow - more major than ID creationists are willing to admit - with the decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which for the first time evaluated ID legally, and unsurprisingly concluded that it was religion in disguise. While ID creationists frame this as losing the battle - not the war - in truth, it was both. ID’s appeal to agents of the culture wars, like the Discovery Institute, rested on its secret connection to religion, and its superficial scientific appearance: it could, in theory, win adherents before anyone even realized that it was religion & creationist talking points in disguise. Kitzmiller essentially blew the lid on ID creationism during its maiden voyage; by revealing its true nature too soon, its transformative potential was completely lost.
From there, the ID movement completely lost control of the message, as zealous but under-strategized culture warriors claimed ID as their own, new, special brand of creationism, without attempting to hide the religious message, and without even making an effort to appear scientific (except in a “teach the controversy” sort of way). Exemplum gratis, Ben Stein - although it made an attempt to be scientific about ID, Expelled was overtly religious in its message. The strange part, though, comes with the Discovery Institute’s own newfound openness about their religious message. Just ask “Senior Discovery Institute Fellow” Michael Medved:
The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It’s a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.
Wow. In the rest of the interview, from which the “Panda’s Thumb” excerpt is drawn, Medved keeps on digging, explaining that, “if you’re serious about your religion, as I try to be, then your religion is connected to everything you do - certainly to everything that’s important to you.” Clearly this is not a man, and clearly this is not an institution, capable of separating religion from science. It’s like Medved & the Discovery Insitute have finally given up on ID creationism being taken seriously by legal scholars, or by scientists, ever again. I’m fine with that. Let them keep digging.
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Another extraneous, hilarious point on the Medved interview. He compares Obama’s “national service plan” - i.e., patriots should help build up America - to the Hitler Youth. Yes, because voluntary service to America is the same thing as fanatical forced service to a dictator. This isn’t the first time, though, that the comparison has been made: intellectual lightweight Jonah Goldberg compared the same to slavery. Wow.
Stumble It!
9 responses so far ↓
1 Martin // Aug 10, 2008 at 11:34 am
Hiya
Just so you know, for the post to be aggregated at BPSDB, you need to include those letters in the part of the post that appears in your feed… by putting [bpsdb] in bold at the start of the post for example. The icon isn’t used by the aggregator anymore.
Nice post though, cheers!
2 Ames // Aug 10, 2008 at 11:40 am
Is that okay at the bottom?
3 Progressive Conservative // Aug 10, 2008 at 12:15 pm
“if you’re serious about your religion, as I try to be, then your religion is connected to everything you do - certainly to everything that’s important to you.”
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that attitude per se. I would argue that most people of faith allow their faith to guide them. But there are also eartly rules that are just as important. For example, I may think it is un-Christian to charge my client a 10% mark-up on a service we performed and think 5% is more reasonable, but it doesn’t mean I should subvert our accounting procedures to soothe my concience.
4 Martin // Aug 10, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Yup, that’s working fine:)
5 Gotchaye // Aug 10, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I imagine that, after Kitzmiller, ID has become less a method of convincing the larger world that creationism is scientific and more about keeping existing creationists on the same page. The point now is to provide intellectual cover for those creationists who want creationism in schools - they can argue their point without having to fully grasp what it is they’re doing.
6 Olorin // Aug 10, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Casey Luskin’s post on Evolution News to spin away from Medved’s statement. Wait for it….
5…4…3…2…1…
7 Cephus // Aug 12, 2008 at 12:54 pm
You’re absolutely right, just look at Expelled for a good example. You’ve got Stein on the one side making it very clear that Intelligent Design is religious in nature and the guys from the Discovery Institute on the other going “SHHHH! Don’t tell anyone that!”
8 Contra Anonymous DI Legal Intern: Common Misconceptions About Intelligent Design, Part 1 // Aug 19, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] the legality, and scientific nature, of teaching intelligent design (ID). I have to say, when your own fellows admit that ID isn’t a scientific theory, your credibility becomes a problem… but moving [...]
9 bipolar2 // Aug 20, 2008 at 12:56 pm
** Super-size me Jesus! **
• Fattening the pigs of Animal Farm
Obama wants to reach out to fundies? Casting pearls before the swinish, he’s already carried obligatory politico-religious hypocrisy too far. The “Rev” Rick should be seen for the lying porker that he is. McCain was correct in 2000 about religious rot at the GOP’s core.
• Junk-food faith for a fat-head nation!
A nation overwhelmingly god-fearing also overwhelmingly rejects science. My fellow country-persons lack the critical intelligence to evaluate the garbage they put in their brains.
The US is an aberration among developed nations in its affinity for xian enthusiasms and in its failure to accept now elementary basic truths like evolution via natural selection.
• On the road to internal exile
America the free? Nonsense. I am an atheist, an *anti-supernaturalist* to be precise. Therefore, I belong to the most despised minority in the US. Why according to GHW Bush, I’m not fit to be a citizen.
I’ll tolerate fundies only when everyone’s “freedom of conscience” under the US Constitution is restored and respected. The US is still (barely) a secular state which has the misfortune of selective amnesia towards the political ideology of christo-fascism, dominionism. If you haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” do it before election day.
The US has been a secular state from its inception. It is *not* one nation under a non-existent god. Nor under child molesting priests, nor under fanatical tax-dodging televangelists, nor under cabals of delusional fundies seeking to overthrow the Republic.
The people are sovereign.
bipolar2 © 2008
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