All I.D. All the Time...

In my cubicle at work I keep a number of pictures and cartoons of apes and monkeys, including a few gorillas I worked with in a previous life as a primate caregiver and behavior researcher. A very well-educated coworker recently stepped in to look at the pictures, and said "so we're descended from them, huh?" Heavens to Murgatroid (as my grandmother would say, to my eternal mystification), I tire of repeating "Darwin did not say we're descended from apes... He proposed a common ancestor..."

On The History Channel this Sunday night is a program on the history of evolution, advertised with the ridiculous tagline "has evolution made a monkey out of you?" I'm not sure what to expect, but I will watch it. And how nice for them that in the week leading up to this broadcast, our reality-averse president advocated teaching "intelligent design" in schools, a Jesuit astronomer finally answered Cardinal Schonborn's essay from the dark ages (via Americablog), and Paul Krugman tied ID to the neocon predilection for fake research, and the dangers it poses. A snippet:

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

Here is the link to the entire response (not just the newspaper summary) by the Jesuit astronomer, George Coyne. It's worth reading in its entirety (if you can get past the abundance of masculine pronouns), but here's just a taste:

It is unfortunate that creationism has come to mean some fundamentalistic, literal, scientific interpretation of Genesis. Judaeo-Christian faith is radically creationist, but in a totally different sense. It is rooted in a belief that everything depends upon God, or better, all is a gift from God. The universe is not God and it cannot exist independently of God. Neither pantheism nor naturalism is true. But, if we confront what we know of our origins scientifically with religious faith in God the Creator – if, that is, we take the results of modern science seriously – it is difficult to believe that God is omnipotent and omniscient in the sense of many of the scholastic philosophers. For the believer, science tells us of a God who must be very different from God as seen by them.

This stress on our scientific knowledge is not to place a limitation upon God. Far from it. It reveals a God who made a universe that has within it a certain dynamism and thus participates in the very creativity of God. Such a view of creation can be found in early Christian writings, especially in those of St Augustine in his comments on Genesis. If they respect the results of modern science and, indeed, the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly. Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words. Scripture is very rich in these thoughts. It presents, indeed anthropomorphically, a God who gets angry, who disciplines, a God who nurtures the universe, who empties himself in Christ the incarnate Word. Thus God’s revelation of himself in the Book of Scripture would be reflected in our knowledge of the universe, so that, as Galileo was fond of stating, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature speak of the same God.

(Update: Chris Mooney draws attention to a point I managed to gloss over; Coyne is the Vatican astronomer, making his very public dissent from Shonborn's statement "unprecedented" in the words of the London Independent; Mooney speculates that the new pope will have to issue a clear statement, now.)