www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html
Phony Theory, False Conflict 'Intelligent Design' Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith By Charles Krauthammer Friday, November 18, 2005; Page A23 Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous: that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert E instein, and they were both religious. He was a staunch believer in Christian ity and a member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the u niverse. "He believe d he was doing God's work," James Gleick wrote in his recent biography o f Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation -- understanding the workings of the universe -- as an attempt to understand the mind of God. Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things accordin g to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed th e sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a plane t was found. The laws of his unive rse were so simple, so elegant, so economical and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine. Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight me mbers of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" -- to day's tarted-up version of creationism -- on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dov er for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school b oard did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evo lution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curricu lum. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" who se only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific k nowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain s uch things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other s uch evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change a nd says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the pro position that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the mo tion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together? In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " nat ural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmi stakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that the supernat ural is an integral part of science. The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "ungu ided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridicu lous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular int eractions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is beh ind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis? But that discussion is the province of religion, no t science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed- over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuit ously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisd om precisely about those questions -- arguably, the most important quest ions in life -- that lie beyond the material. What could be more ele gant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indee d more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and ye t interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a s ingle double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mol lusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas S tate Board of Education, too.
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