Krauthammer: Phony Theory, False Conflict

Charles Krauthammer (via Heraldblog) has a good piece on intelligent design.

The [Kansas] school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous 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 interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?

He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions -- arguably, the most important questions in life -- that lie beyond the material.

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How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.

On a tangential note, Krauthammer writes of Isaac Newton, "Newton's religion was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and a member of the Church of England." Not that it matters, but just last week I watched a Nova program on Newton and learned a lot about the man behind the theories. One point is that, while he was a member of the Church of England as required for anyone trying to get ahead in England in those days, he held theological views that would be considered heretical both then and now in traditional Christian thought. He was an anti-Trinitarian among other things. He had to keep this thoughts to himself as they could have gotten him fired and even imprisoned. It is irrelevant to Newton's greatness as a thinker and his towering stature in the history of physics. Just something interesting I recently learned.