A Baton For God Bashing

Amit links to a devilishly well-written Guardian essay by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne that sets out to demolish the arguments for Intelligent Design.

They close by asking: Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes?

The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognized as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

This debate over whether ID should be introduced as an idea -- not in substitution of, but in very limited conjunction with evolutionary theories -- has thus become, in the hands of some arrogant scientists and atheists, a baton for God-bashing.

The authors here blithely dismiss even the possibility of God as supernaturalism, a false and highly pernicious idea. Mr. Rushdie calls God an antique idea.

If a believer of one faith were to similarly attack the different faith of another, he would be correctly branded a bigot and intolerant. Somehow, we've allowed atheists to use enormously bigoted language against the faith of virtually the entire humanity without challenge.

This, therefore, is no more a reasoned debate of ideas. In fact, the hot-under-the-collar evolutionists don't merely want to teach their theories in class (which, incidentally, we accept humbly as being the mechanisms of nature), they arrogantly want to eradicate the very notion of God from our science-based society.

If secularism was about tolerance, this is surely kryptonite for secularism.