The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching

The Dyspepsia of Intelligent Design

122 Over the ensuing days I found myself wondering what becomes of such students. Where do they go? How do they prosper ? How do they come to grips with a world that is increasingly technological? I have never learned the answers to these questions . Maybe because there are things that I, too, do not want to know. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p thedyspepsiaofintelligentdesign The student was respectful, soft-spoken, and bright. After my first evolution lecture he approached my desk and laid a typewritten paper on it. “You might be interested in this,” he said. “It’s something my father wrote.” Then he left. I didn’t look at that paper until later in the day. And when I did begin to read it I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Full of scientific references to Darwin, natural selection, and genetics , it read like a scientific article but also had the feel of clouds gathering in preparation for rain. And, sure enough, the storm broke on page five with a metaphor about a rhetorical individual ’s finding a watch, noting its complex workings, and concluding that some intelligent being had constructed it. Ipso facto, thus it is with the natural world: so complex that some higher intelligence must have laid it all out on a celestial drafting table. The student came to my office several days later and asked me what I thought. “It was an interesting paper,” I told him. “Is your father a scientist?” “No,” he said. “He trucks wood.” “He writes well.” The student pressed me. “But what did you think?” The Dyspepsia of Intelligent Design p 123 I didn’t want to be coy with someone so bright, so I decided to respect his intelligence by stating my appraisal without elaboration . “I can’t agree with his analogy. Nature is not a watch. A watch is a man-made device that will always be a watch, no matter how the environment around it changes. But the environment is critical to evolution. It’s the engine that drives natural selection.” As was his nature, the student listened attentively and said little. After I had concluded, he nodded and left. He never raised the subject again. The subject, by the way, is the semantic successor to creationism called “intelligent design” (id)—the idea that living things are the products not of natural forces acting around us but of a superior intelligence. The word “God” is never mentioned. Of course, proponents of id are not suggesting that life on earth was initiated and diversified by aliens. There is an unspoken understanding that God, indeed, is the locomotive force, but that by not invoking the deity, id will have more cachet with the scientific community and will be able to insert itself seamlessly into the science classroom, to coexist on an equal footing with evolution. I think I prefer the blunt onslaught of good, old-fashioned creationism to the stealth and feinting maneuvers of intelligent design , if only because creationism is bold and straightforward and I know where I stand with it. I’m very uncomfortable with ideas like id that have aspects that are not enunciated, the same way that Harry Potter is impatient when someone refers to Voldemort as “He who must not be named.” Intelligent design may have gained traction when President George W. Bush was asked if it should be taught in the schools. He responded, “. . . both sides ought to be properly taught.” Unwittingly , the president had put his finger squarely on the problem . While intelligent design is indeed a “side” of what is really a social issue, and not at all scientific, evolution is a scientific concept that rests upon mountains of evidence garnered by the 124 p f o r b i d d e n f r u i t s sweat of generations of researchers all over the world. In short, the two ideas are not equals, any more than astronomy and astrology are equally legitimate approaches to understanding the workings of the cosmos. This, then, is intelligent design’s first problem: it harbors an ulterior motive. Science is, by necessity, dispassionate, generating data that is thrown into the crucible of the scientific community ’s critical appraisal. If the data withstands the onslaught of attempts to disprove it, great. If not, then that is also...