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Would you look at this man and say he ISN'T monkey-like?
I don’t know why, in spite of almost all evidence to the contrary, I continue to expect an educated press. I read an article this morning in USA Today highlighting an evangelical woman who’s recently published a book about her transformation from creationist to defender of evolution.
The majority of the article, written by Bob Smietana of the Nashville Tennessean, isn’t bad. The woman in question, Rachel Held Evans, is from Dayton, TN, home of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Her message is that one does not have to decide they believe their religion or science, and that she can love her deity while accepting that the world is older than 6000 years. Great. I’m always happy to have religious people accept science, because I’m of the opinion that it’s a more helpful way to examine the world and that the lens of scientific naturalism is the best one for understanding the world around us.
Where Smietana pisses me off is around the middle of his article where he drops this whopper.
Instead of choosing sides, some prefer the middle ground of intelligent design, which claims God designed how life evolved.
My first reaction was the following. “I’m sorry, what does Intelligent Design claim? Because I’m pretty sure that Intelligent Design claims that evolution is impossible due to some MASSIVE misconceptions about how evolution is supposed to work and how it actually works. I was under the impression that ID was rebranded creationism, and that’d been proved in the Dover Trial thanks to the CDesign Proponents discovery, which showed that the text book Of Pandas and People had simply done a global search and replace from ‘Creation Proponents’ to ‘Intelligent Design Proponents.’ If I’d known that ID had rejected all of its bullshit with ‘irreducible complexity,’ a bogus concept bashed into teeny tiny pieces by Ken Miller, and just decided that Intelligent Design was Evolution with the blanket of ‘Well God at least was there for it’ to make the theists feel better, I might not have spent the last few years trying my best to explain to everyone how retarded it was and why it would be the death of American Science education.”
Then I stopped. I thought about it for a second and I came to a realization: Bob Smietana has no idea what Intelligent Design actually is. It’s actually not the first time I’ve come across that. I remember one time going off on one of my bosses when I worked at Showtime about how stupid Intelligent Design was. She told me that was what she’d always learned in church, and then told me that it just meant God had pushed forward Evolution. I had to explain to her that wasn’t what Intelligent Design meant.
The fact is, the people out there who really know what ID is are, almost universally, people in our camp and people who believe in Intelligent Design already. We know it because we actually take time to do the research. They know it because they want reality to function in a way that reality doesn’t function. But everyday Americans don’t seem to actually know what ID is, and I think that douchebag groups like “The Discovery Institute” are banking on American ignorance of their theory to try and make it seem more innocuous. They want to be perceived as saying “We’re just trying to say God had a part. Why are you evil atheists so against religion?” Instead of “We’re just trying to say that your theory is impossible. Why can’t we teach religion in Science class?”
To be clear, even if ID was what Smietana seems to think it is, I still don’t think it should be taught in a science class. But I also don’t find it nearly as offensive as ID. I’m fine with people believing God guided the forces of Evolution, because at the very least they are capable of taking that view and not whole cloth rejecting the fundamental theory of biology. Non-naturalistic ideas have no place in a science class, full stop. But I am of the opinion that people can believe to their heart’s content.
Now, on the part of Smietana, I think it’s completely and totally irresponsible for a journalist like him to talk about something like ID as though it’s not warmed over creationism, having obviously done not one minute of research into it before he tried to claim it was some middle ground between creationism and evolution. A journalist should know better, and it’s inexcusable that he didn’t. Still, I prefer that ignorance be the reason he made such a flub, instead of an agenda against one of the most important scientific realizations of the last millennium. At the very least, it’s a problem we can potentially solve.
Perhaps the first step for defeating ID is letting these morons tell people what they actually believe.