|
 Editors Note: Dr. Kime penned this worthy insight before the Dover case
verdict had been rendered. Regardless of the court’s decision, the
issue has been joined and suggests a hint of things to come.
The Creationist
Curmudgeon has tried to follow the Dover, Pa, trial, Kitzmiller vs.
Dover, K vs. D, actually Evo vs. Intelligent Design. In our dotage, we
expected it to be like an old Perry Mason or Rumpole TV episode, or even
the Darrow Scopes Show--mighty ripostes, touchés, a dénouement, a
satisfactory outcome. Maybe it was. We weren’t there and have only
scanned the online transcripts. Ours was a virtual venue, our flat PC
screen, and by the time the blogs and columnists had spun it into cotton
candy, it all seemed more like the OJ trial, a recent Presidential
impeachment, or the various laugh-in litigations against high
Republicans; not Kitzmiller vs. Dover but the Katzenjammer
Kids. Or red state v. blue state politics, just politics. Or
Saturday Night Live or Moppets Amok. The Oscars (and the winner is---!)
We hoped for logic precisely vectored, we got spin, slam, and bunk.
It’s all over but the
verdict. Bemused if nonplused, especially by the antics of Evoeans in
court, column, and blog, and their online hawking of souvenir gear (KvD
mugs, steins, dog t-shirts), we are left trying to put it all together.
Mostly we just shake our head.
Really stumped at first,
we began to catch the drift: Evo isn’t just science, or it could
be challenged. Evo is science, Evo defines science, and
so Evo cannot be challenged, and ID is bogus--gotcha! The Creationist
Curmudgeon, no stranger to how science works and how to use it, but
alien to all this science identity-theft phishing, reckons that if
science is either raw data or any hypothesis advanced to explain raw
data, or both, ID is no less or more scientific than Evo, and that’s
that. We sensed, however, that KvD was never really about science
however defined – it was about mutating the definition of science to fit
the unfit--Evo.
But there is indeed such
a thing as bogus science, we know that. When we were practicing
internal medicine, that was years ago, we saw a man nearly bled to death
by enemas to extract what an alternative practitioner thought were
toxins (it was really altered blood). Having seen it in action, we have
strong feelings about alternative medicine--always bogus, usually
harmless (thanks to the body’s defenses, not the therapy, which could
also be said of traditional medicine), sometimes dangerous.
But--appalling to us--bogus medicine insists it’s the only genuine kind,
but “they don’t want you to know.” So when Evoeans point at ID and warn
of fraud, and danger, we hear ourselves talking, and we hear bogus
medicine talking, and we wince.
Now about God hovering in
the background, ironic because Evoans, who insist there is no such
being, insisted on having Him there. But they did, thereby obliging
Designists to be at pains never to utter the word, or sound remotely
religious, whereupon the Darrow-minded Evoeans insisted Designists had
really meant God whatever they actually said, and that they
reeked religion even when spieling science. For a moment or two we
thought we had tuned in on “Jeopardy,” where the contestants must word
their answers just so, and if they slip they are out, even if the answer
is correct.
As the Creationist
Curmudgeon we admit to saying “God” a lot. As an Intelligent Designist,
we try not to. As a Creationist we go by the Bible. As an Intelligent
Designist, we don’t need it to cope with scientific intricacies. This
arrangement works fine for us and seems natural and scientific, but out
in public it gets tricky, in court, tense. It’s rather like having a
teen age love, or adult affair, and trying to pretend you don’t know
your beloved when you meet her in public. Evolution should feel as
embarrassed about being seen together with atheism, but is better at
moveOn.org-ing out of reach.
But in fact it’s easier
to take God out of Intelligent Design than atheism out of Evolution. If
Evoeans are so appalled by the kind of fearsome God that expects
something of the creatures He created (as Darwin himself confided in his
autobiography, not the Origin of Species), and so hellbent on
getting rid of Him at all costs, scientific or otherwise, ID offers a
slicker way. God is a designer, but a designer is not necessarily God.
Franklin, Jefferson, Voltaire divined that, but Evoeans haven’t, being
self-cornered by bizarre principles of science of their own design. We
saw that as ironic and chuckled.
We had our chuckles, but
our main reaction to the whole business isn’t something a curmudgeon
normally expresses--sadness. Even old curmudgeons, not just Liberals,
can be, as they say, deeply troubled. Somehow sad is the idea that,
however commendable their missions may be, Big Think Tanks, Big
Activism, Big PACs (like the ACLU and the CSC, Center for Science and
Culture) took over the court, the headlines and TV talk shows, even the
blogs. Sitting alone in our den, we still like to think of the lone
amicus curiae, the lone Jimmy Stewart in Washington, the lone Clarence
Darrow, the lone blogger, and, well, the lone curmudgeon. Hollywood
will surely rewrite KvD as indeed the battle of just one lone hero,
maybe mama Kitzmiller (the parent who nominally brought the suit to
court) or single out some ACLU functionary, against the monster, evil,
impersonal CSC, painted as the Radical Religious Right ID machine--the
same sad old scenario. Especially sad is how the origin of life now
devolves on such spin, not just chance. To us saddest of all, sadly
unscientific, sadly unAmerican, is that a court must decide what
must and must not be taught in any school, and what is and isn’t
scientific. We await the verdict, but whichever way it goes will be
sad. But as it has turned out, the verdict itself will be anticlimax.
Without waiting for the it, the Dover voters went ahead and voted out
the school board that had the gall to allow the mention of ID.
*
Dr. Wesley Kime, distinguished physician, retired in Ohio, paints with
oils, creates line drawings, and writes literary prose for pleasure. His
skilled portraiture, along with a take-off on Michelangelo's depiction of
the creation of man, were featured in an earlier, 2001 edition of Creation
Digest.
|
