The White House entered one of the country's most politically charged red-and-blue battles last week when Bush was asked at a news conference about his views on evolution and intelligent design - a critique that says Charles Darwin's natural selection theory doesn't explain some features of the natural world.
"I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said. "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
The mere fact that Bush mentioned intelligent design on the same footing as evolutionary teaching is being seen as a huge moral boost for anti-Darwin critics.
The Pentagon is so desperate to attract a new generation of scientists and engineers that it is sending midcareer researchers to screenwriting school, hoping they'll write movies depicting scientists as flashy heroes. [This is kind of disturbing on other grounds; the Pentagon has a systematic program to influence the private movie industry - to an even greater degree than it already does?- Bruce] But that won't help much if President Bush is going to declare war on science.
Just last week, the president poked a sharp stick in the eye of modern biology, telling reporters that high schools should teach "intelligent design." This view challenges evolution by inserting a divine force into scientific theories about the origins of life. ...
Like so many Americans who misunderstand scientific consensus, the president thinks there are two sides to the scientific debate about evolution. There are not. There is a side that teaches science - that which can be tested and re-tested against the evidence at hand. And there is the side that favors teaching religion in high school biology classes. (No matter how much proponents of "intelligent design" try to clothe their views in the apparel of science, it is what it is: religion. Whose intelligence? Whose design?) ...
Never mind that millions of Christians, including me, are quite comfortable with the teaching of evolution, since it neither attempts to confirm or deny the existence of a Creator. Never mind that countless believers support broadening federal research on donated embryos that would otherwise be destroyed. The absolutes of a narrow minority rule the day.
[Bush's] words seem uncontroversial enough - that kids ought to be taught both ID and Darwin (not necessarily in equal amounts, though he wasn't explicit on that point) "so people can understand what the debate is about."
So far, that seems a galaxy or two short of left field. Then, as reported by The New York Times, he clarified: "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."
Atheists, secularists and others whose aversion to religion sometimes borders on fanaticism - there's no dogma like no dogma - see in Bush's remark a subversive move toward replacing Darwin's theory of evolution with a creationist view of man's origin.
Yeah, those fanatical atheists are just running around all over the place, aren't they?
And Skeptic editor Michael Shermer weighs in on the matter: Why God's in a class by himself by Michael Shermer Los Angeles Times 08/07/05.
One magazine reporter asked for my opinion about whether one can believe in God and the theory of evolution.
I replied that, empirically speaking, yes, you can - the proof being that 40% of American scientists profess a belief in God and also accept the theory of evolution, not to mention that most of the world's 1 billion Catholics believe in God and accept the theory of evolution. But then this reporter wanted to know if it is logically consistent to believe in God and the theory of evolution. That is, does the theory of evolution -carried out to its logical conclusion - preclude belief in God? This is a different question. Here is my answer.
You can believe in God and evolution as long as you keep the two in separate, logic-tight compartments. Belief in God depends on religious faith. Belief in evolution depends on empirical evidence.
This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity because for any question about nature - the origins of the universe, life, humans, whatever - if your answer is "God did it," a scientist will ask: "How did God do it? What forces did God use? What forms of matter and energy were employed in the creation process?" and so forth. The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena. What place, then, for God?
