A critical review of the debate between biologists and advocates of intelligent design/creationism,
Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate by Frederick Turner, appeared in the July 14 issue of Tech Central Station. The article, which describes sins committed by both sides in this debate, is quite good, but I think there are major sins on both sides that Turner does not mention. These failures threaten to combine in a way that may have consequences far beyond the confines of the specific debate itself.
On the science side, the most egregious sin has been a failure to make the case for evolution in a coherent and convincing way. That continuing failure seems to be a product of two things. First, scientists are too busy, having their hands full doing their research, writing articles and grant proposals, supervising graduate students, keeping up with the literature, and so on. Second, there has been a tendency to deny that the opposition really deserves to be taken seriously and answered in a serious and sustained way.
The result is an appalling lack of public understanding of even the elementary principles of natural selection, which are not at all difficult to understand. The fact that they are not understood can only be the result of a very poor effort to teach them. In my own experience, if this material is presented carefully and systematically, anyone of normal intelligence can understand it, and once understood it has enormous plausibility. The scientific establishment has shirked a key responsibility here, while the other side has skillfully and continuously sought to shape public opinion. The results are plain to see and highly unfortunate. If scientists want to win this fight, they have to get off the bench and make their case. They have so far failed to do that, and I have frankly grown tired of hearing this or that spokesman for science whine and complain about the ignorance of the public on these matters. Chickens, roosting.
On the religion side, it continues to baffle me why certain religious figures insist on fighting science, as we see in the design/creationism effort. From Galileo onward, the history of such windmill-tilting is plain enough. More generally, a strategy that makes the credibility of a belief system hostage to the next scientific breakthrough does not seem a good one to me. To continue the poultry metaphor, believers should not be trusting their religious eggs to that basket. But the anti-evolution warriors clearly have taken encouragement from the success of their efforts so far, which has been due primarily to the other side's tendency to not show up. As long as the scientific community does not take its public education role seriously, the design/creationism insurgency will continue, and continue to make gains. No one will finally be better off for that, religion least of all.
The more serious aspect of this debate connects directly with the issue raised at the beginning of Turner's piece about evolution's challenge to the transcendental foundations for moral law. We suddenly find ourselves in a civilizational war against an enemy who has a real religion, and an unconditional belief in it. The jihadists are not impeded by doubt. But, as George Orwell once famously noted, Western intellectuals have been unrelenting in questioning whether there is, in fact, any divine agency that stipulates moral law. That often nihilistic skepticism has been corrosive to the non-rational commitments and traditions that may be necessary to maintain a collective moral spine. Whether intellectuals should feel any responsibility for that effect is something that might be argued about, but it does seem that they might honestly recognize how their own lives would be different in an Islamicized society. We may pretend that rational, intellectual systems can inspire belief, or that they can function themselves as beliefs in the crunch, but I think experience may prove us wrong about that. The Europeans will perhaps be the test case.
The fact that none of us will strap on a suicide belt for Presbyterianism or Reform Judaism is both something to be proud of and something to worry about. The basic problem here is that the question about the reality of divine sanction turns out not to be the most important question. The most important question is whether it is necessary for a society's survival that people maintain belief that such things are, in some sense, important and true. The Enlightenment will turn out to be a poison apple if we end up intellectualizing ourselves onto history's ash heap. Religion has a deadly serious responsibility here, one that no other societal institution can fulfill. To squander its credibility by, in effect, waving a chimpanzee femur in a tent on the edge of town is a dangerous and shameful misuse of religion's time and resources.
