Intelligent Design and Kansas' Image

I'll get to the Praire Peace Park in due course. My friend J(ay), he sent me this link: An Open Letter to the Kansas School Board.

This was something of a jibe on J(ay)'s part, we've had an ongoing debate on the subject, both being essentially sans-faith, though in recent years, my atheism has suffered a crisis of a lack of a lack of faith. More appropriately, from early childhood I was fairly sure there was no such thing as God. They say Santa is the training wheels for God, but way before that, I can remember being told that this God fellow created everything out of some gasses (picturing the stuff Dad poured into the lawnmower as the building block of existence).

And since church attendance became mandatory around the time my curiosity about Sunday School turned to revulsion, I went through the confirmation thing and got baptized, but what can I say? It's not like I had my fingers crossed, but these weren't faith-based decisions. It was more out of a fear that this God fellow might actually be there, and if so, apparently this shuck and jive was what He required of me.

Yes, the idea that I could somehow 'trick' God into redemption is ridiculous. Approximately as ridiculous as the Sunday School teacher who, I'm not exaggerating, told me I should believe the world is flat because the Bible says so. He wasn't really representative of the congregation, he would have fit better at some snake-handling cult in Appalachia.

By my early teens I was in open rebellion against the church attendance, having found some backup that I wasn't alone in my conviction that there just wasn't any such thing as God. So I guess having Santa may be the training wheels for religion, but in my case in a 'Wizard of Oz' kind of way.

Which gets back to what I started off to get at. The fact that it's Kansas that is probably going to be the first state to take a step towards sanity in science curriculum makes it a real North Face situation. People from other parts of the country already assume Kansas translates to backwards. I even grew up thinking that way, even though I grew up in Kansas with evidence to the contrary all around me.

So as I wrote to J(ay):

There's been quite a lot of local news coverage on this stuff, and it probably doesn't help that the Intelligent Design crowd has had such success in Kansas.

Oddly, people I know who grew up in small towns in Kansas (as opposed to in the suburbs of Kansas City where I did), typically grew up in a house that subscribed to whatever local newspaper was available, as well as the Wichita Eagle or Topeka Journal (depending on which was closer) and the Kansas City Star. In more than one case, also the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, in addition to taking at least one news magazine.

Of course most of those publications are left to center-left in their orientation, but the point is, contrary to what I'd been led to believe growing up in a medium size metro, people way out in the sticks are if anything better read in current events than is the norm for city life.

Also, prior to the 1990s, places like Spearville, Tribune, Jetmore, Liberal, etc., didn't have cable or satellite in any significant amount, and depending on proximity to KC, Topeka or Wichita (out West, forget it), very little broadcast TV reached the house. Consequently, a lot more books. I've heard several of these people comment that they got to college and literally couldn't believe how much television their classmates were used to, and how little reading.

So here we are, center of international scrutiny for having a board of education that might introduce science standards that allow for Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Darwinian theory. And because it's Kansas, the hard-core atheists are in an uproar, because they feel it will hurt the image of the state (as if that was possible).

But unlike the Lampoon Henderson is trying, Intelligent Design actually has a body of legit scientists who can make a case in wholly secular terms. The Henderson piece reminds me of the National Lampoon piece from the 70's, made to look like a Time Magazine spread on the population 'explosion,' it showed a diagram that everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on, and thus, we're in a Population Implosion, and if something isn't done, there will soon be no people at all.

Michael Behe's book doesn't even mention God. Behe is one of the guys who testified for the board here in KS, though he teaches in Pennsylvania. He's a legit microbiologist, not a crank. The hearings were boycotted by the doctrinaire Darwinists, with I think one exception.

J(ay)'s a Darwinist, but he's a scientist and his Darwinism is, at it's root, a faith. I probably see this the more clearly as a lapsed atheist. A lot of people think of atheism as the absence of faith, where it's really the faith that there is no such thing as the supernatural.

I continued:

Darwin never even proposed to explain the origin of life, only the way it differentiates. The Intelligent Design argument simply offers irreducible complexity as an argument against what post-Darwin evolutionists have claimed, that life as we know it just happened.

I went through Kansas' public schools, and came out 'knowing' that Darwin had proved that Evolution is how we all got here. And that any one who asserts otherwise is an insane religious zealot.

All the religious zealotry I see in the present debate is coming from the hard-core atheists, who are not evolutionists based on science but on the faith that there is no creator, couldn't possibly have been a creator, etc. They can't even tolerate the suggestion that there might have been one. They are the closest analogs to the radical Islamic clerics of the Middle East I can see in plain sight.

In fact, as a lapsed secular humanist myself, I'd say the Intelligent Design advocates should pursue it on the civil rights side: making it the law of the state that no tax supported school can teach anything but strict neo-Darwinist evolution amounts to establishing atheism as the state religion.

But they're not pursuing it that way, the Intelligent Design advocates are simply saying lay it all out. It's the very definition of a liberal education, present all the information that's known and let the student reach and defend their own conclusion using critical thinking.

Of course, critical thinking, and actual debate is not something you'll find much of in public schools, or for that matter American universities these days. It's deemed far more important to safeguard self-esteem, promote multi-cultural mythologies, and catalogue every student as a member of a minority group with grievances to be compensated for.

While I wrote this e-mail to J(ay) personally, I felt it was a fair summary of where I'm at on this. Since being a 'man of faith' is something that militant atheists use as de facto proof of either dishonesty or madness, I'm maybe slightly unique in being able to assert that I believe, on strictly scientific grounds, that life is the result of a creator, one of intelligence and power vastly greater than anything I've encountered directly.

Does that mean 'God?' I don't know. Irreducible complexity is a powerful argument, and I encourage anyone who thinks the Ingelligent Design advocates are trying to inject religion into school at the cost of science, to read Michael Behe's 'Darwin's Black Box' as a primer on the topic.

Basically, if you come across the Pyramids at Giza, does it make more sense to wonder who built them and why, or to marvel at the anomalous wind erosion? And the fascinating stains that almost appear to be paintings on the interior caves of those pyramids, the unusual formations of nearly pure gold that formed themselves around the bodies of dead kings who have been remarkably well preserved...

Every major religion I know of has a creation story. Some divide the duties up, a creator and a perserver, and other duties to be carried out by various aspects of the polytheistic powers that be. Even secular humanism takes the leap of faith that life sprung spontaneously from the primordial goo.

Since the creator didn't leave a maker's mark and serial number, I haven't been able to settle on a particular 'faith.' Call it Analysis Paralysis or agnosticism or whatever, but just as what I know of science has led me to believe in the basic premise of Intelligent Design, some of the other things that I know of science lead me to some decidedly irreligious notions of what that 'creator/creation' relationship might be.

As far as I know, all living things come to an end. It would seem to make since that since I'm no more immortal than a nematode, this creator would be no more immortal than I. Perhaps a longer lifespan, perhaps one so long as to even appear infinite to me if I could perceive it. Just as I might seem endless and eternal to a nematode if I could make my presence known to it.

This brings up the possibility that life as we know it was created by a being that is actually deceased. Francis Crick, of DNA fame, a Nobel Laureate and undisputed genius, believed aliens seeded the earth with life because his atheism was so strong he couldn't accept the implications of what he knew. Which of course begs the question who created these aliens?

Aliens or gods, either way, you can envision an unfathomable set of nesting beings if you like.

Or, what I think is more likely, while blood clotting and cell structure may be irreducibly complex, they may arise from something that is not. The creator, or creators, may very well be simple. Powerful, vastly intelligent, but not complex.

It's not impossible. Look at non-linear mathematics. Unbelievably simple equations, when fed into themselves and calculated many times over can create vastly complex charts. Charts that appear random if you don't have the computing power to render enough permuations that the pattern emerges.

For the sake of simplicity, call this creator George, and let's say he's a simple but powerful being who expresses himself in repeated permutations of nonlinear logic, the result of which is life. Is this George expecting a particular outcome? Does he have an emotional attachment to any particualr outcome, any point on the graph, so to speak? Or does this George create because that's just what he does?

These are unknowable, the province of faith. Irreducible complexity and the limits of Darwinsim, or to address part of Henderson's spoof, the serious questions that actually do exist about the accuracy of carbon dating, that's stuff that DOES belong in the class room. Suffer the little children to learn that science is unanimous about nothing except the scientific method. Let them cleave to whatever theory makes the most sense once they've been exposed to the likely candidates. Make them defend their intellectual stand, don't impose a religous one.

Even if the religion is atheism.