The trouble is that around 40% of Americans don't believe in evolution. People
want
to believe that there is "something out there", "something more".
Materialism threatens people until/unless they realise how liberating
and beautiful it can be.
Here's a great little article on that topic:
Nothing but or anything but.....
But to continue ....I worry about coming down too hard on the intelligent design (ID)
movement - I think it needs to be defeated rather than suppressed.
I read the article by Dawkins and Coine and I agree with them
that it's wrong to present the conflict between ID and neo-darwinism as
a
scientific controversy. ID just doesn't meet the
criteria for being a scientific theory. Its proponents mislead people
by saying that the theory of evolution is "just a theory" but not going
on to explain that there's a very big difference between the way
scientists use the word "theory" and its commonsense usage.
This equivocation between the two uses of the word "theory"
enables them to argue that the theory of intelligent design
should be given the same status as the theory of evolution.
However there is clearly a debate which needs to happen - perhaps not
in biology classes, but somewhere in the school curriculum.
Currently science is seen as nerdy and uninteresting and
often dehumanising. This gives pseudo-science, religion and
mysticism many opportunities to take root. If the ID
movement were to lead to a lively public debate about origin and
subsequent development of life on earth I think this would be a good
thing.
Fundamentally, the intelligent design movement is appealing to
people's initial revulsion to the idea that our existence is the result
of a mindless, algorithmic process ( ie natural selection) - that
we don't exist for a purpose, that there's no intrinisc "meaning
of life" , that we haven't been endowed with anything special by a
creator, that we don't have souls etc etc.
Materialists need to engage with people's need to feel at home in the
universe rather than be seen as just trying to suppress opposing ideas.
Phillip Johnson who is one of the most prominent IDers (and a respectable academic) sees the battlelines very clearly:
So the question is: "How to win?" That's
when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy:
"stick with the most important thing," the mechanism and the building up of
information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you
do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument
in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that
tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you
need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing
to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to
do.
I think he's right in posing the question as
"Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and
I don't think this question is directly taken up in high school biology
classes at present. I just looked quickly at two biology texts
and although they provide a detailed account of how natural selection
operates they don't grapple with the issue of what it all means from a
human perspective.
One of the books actually cops out completely and says that the
theory of evolution does not mean we have to reject the existence
of "a supreme being"....it's up to the individual, a private
matter etc etc...
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