150 years of Darwin

January 6, 8:17 AMIndependent ExaminerBrian Trent

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This year is the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the 84th anniversary of the Scopes Trial when a Tennessee teacher was arrested and charged with teaching evolution.

Today, America is one of the only developed countries where the subject is even a debate anymore. Most of the world has accepted evolution as fact, and ironically, the flagging Creationist movement has been forced to edit, evaluate, and yes, even evolve, in presenting their doomed-to-fail cause.

They don’t like to call it Creationism anymore; religious conservatives are well aware of the beating it took in the 1980s, so they’ve bought new wrapping paper, a shiny new ribbon, and a new sales-pitch. Behold, they say. We peddle Intelligent Design!

Under the most basic scrutiny, though, that wrapping paper dissolves to show an absence of anything resembling real science. And this may be why in recent years ID continues getting so many slap-downs. In 2005, religious conservatives in Georgia’s Cobb County abandoned their four-year-long legal battle against Darwin, while voters in Dover Pennsylvania ousted school board members who had also been trying to push religion into scientific classrooms under the ID Jolly Roger. I figure we’re soon due for Kansas to give it the old church try once more.

Why all the failure? Because modern Creationism – call it ID if you wish – is a failure on every level. It fails the most basic of scientific tests. It inputs supernatural claims that rely on blind faith, and rants about how students should be exposed to alternatives to evolution.

Of course, there are lots of alternative explanations to evolution. There is the Nordic tale of how all of humanity sprouted from the maggots of a frost giant. There’s the Chinese egg of chaos, out of which the Earth hatched. The Greeks gave us their “five races of man” fable, which described how various ages of humanity were carved by the gods from gold, silver, bronze, and iron (of which we belong to this latter category.) The Tibetans have a story of the mangases, nasty beaked monsters which hunted humans in the days before there was a sun.

Most Creationists are quick to laugh at these “alternative” explanations, while blissfully ignoring the fact that all of these tales, from Genesis to the Greeks, from Amaterasu to Adam, have the exact same amount of evidence to support them:

None.

This doesn’t mean these stories don’t serve some value. Mythology classes, cultural heritage studies, and even philosophy are perfect stages for these subject matters. But with no evidence other than a tale from a book, it isn’t science. To claim that extraterrestrials helped American colonists win the Revolutionary War is worthless if you have no evidence, no proof, no documentation to support you.

Creationists just don’t get it. Not only do they demonstrate an ignorance of scientific inquiry’s method and nature, but they promote ideology over science. In fact, many Creationist-ID groups like the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center claim upfront that beliefs rooted in blind faith should be considered on even ground with science. Therefore, believing that the world is populated by vampires, unicorns, or aliens; believing that the Earth is balanced on the back of a cosmic tortoise; believing that the world is flat; believing that giant wombats control fashion-trends… each of these beliefs requires no evidence whatsoever. Simply believing it makes it valid.

Scientific evidence isn’t and shouldn’t be concerned by belief. If evidence builds to make a case, if repeated observation and experiment strengthen that case, it is entirely irrelevant if it offends someone’s theological glassware. My fellow examiner Trina Hoaks has made this very point in her newest series on the subject.

Creationists try very hard to manufacture the veneer of science with lots of charts, illustrations, and canned fallacies. But the end-game is that, when you cut through their pages of desperate justifications of “See? We are teaching science!” is that their position relies on raw belief. And that’s not science.

The bottom line is this:

“Intelligent design” is neither.