December 28, 2005
Darwin's Pyrrhic Victory
By Pat
Buchanan
"Intelligent
Design Derailed," exulted the headline.
"By
now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school
board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing
biology classes to hear about 'intelligent design' as an alternative
to the theory of evolution," declared The New York Times,
which added its own caning to the Christians who dared challenge
the revealed truths of Darwinian scripture.
Noting that
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III is a Bush appointee, The
Washington Post called his decision "a scathing opinion
that criticized local school board members for lying under oath
and for their 'breathtaking inanity' in trying to inject religion
into science classes."
But is it
really game, set, match, Darwin?
Have these
fellows forgotten that John Scopes, the teacher in that 1925 "Monkey
Trial," lost in court, and was convicted of violating Tennessee
law against the teaching of evolution and fined $100? Yet Darwin
went on to conquer public education, and ACLU atheists went on
to purge Christianity and the Bible from our public schools.
The Dover
defeat notwithstanding, the pendulum is clearly swinging back.
Darwinism is on the defensive. For, as Tom Bethell, author of
"The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," reminds
us, there is no better way to make kids curious about "intelligent
design" than to have some Neanderthal forbid its being mentioned
in biology class.
In ideological
politics, winning by losing is textbook stuff. The Goldwater defeat
of 1964, which a triumphant left said would bury the right forever,
turned out to be liberalism's last hurrah. Like Marxism and Freudianism,
Darwinism appears destined for the graveyard of discredited ideas,
no matter the breathtaking inanity of the trial judge. In his
opinion, Judge Jones the Third declared:
"The
overwhelming evidence is that (intelligent design) is a religious
view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific
theory. ... It is an extension of the fundamentalists' view
that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis
or else believe in the godless system of evolution."
But if intelligent
design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge
Jones explain how that greatest of ancient thinkers, Aristotle,
who died 300 years before Christ, concluded that the physical
universe points directly to an unmoved First Mover?
As Aristotle
wrote in his "Physics": "Since everything that
is in motion must be moved by something, let us suppose there
is a thing in motion which was moved by something else in motion,
and that by something else, and so on. But this series cannot
go on to infinity, so there must be some First Mover."
A man of
science and reason, Aristotle used his observations of the physical
universe to reach conclusions about how it came about. Where is
the evidence he channeled the Torah and creation story of Genesis
before positing his theory about a prime mover?
Darwinism
is in trouble today for the reason creationism was in trouble
80 years ago. It makes claims that are beyond the capacity of
science to prove.
Darwinism
claims, for example, that matter evolved from non-matter -- i.e.,
something from nothing -- that life evolved from non-life; that,
through natural selection, rudimentary forms evolved into more
complex forms; and that men are descended from animals or apes.
Now, all
of this is unproven theory. And as the Darwinists have never been
able to create matter out of non-matter or life out of non-life,
or extract from the fossil record the "missing links"
between species, what they are asking is that we accept it all
on faith. And the response they are getting in the classroom and
public forum is: "Prove it," and, "Where is your
evidence?"
And while
Darwinism suggests our physical universe and its operations happened
by chance and accident, intelligent design seems to comport more
with what men can observe and reason to.
If, for
example, we are all atop the Grand Canyon being told by a tour
guide that nature, in the form of a surging river over eons of
time, carved out the canyon, we might all nod in agreement. But
if we ask how "Kilroy was here!" got painted on the
opposite wall of the canyon, and the tour guide says the river
did it, we would all howl.
A retreating
glacier may have created the mountain, but the glacier didn't
build the cabin on top of it. Reason tells us the cabin came about
through intelligent design.
Darwinism
is headed for the compost pile of discarded ideas because it cannot
back up its claims. It must be taken on faith. It contains dogmas
men may believe, but cannot stand the burden of proof, the acid
of attack or the demands of science.
Where science
says, "No miracles allowed," Darwinism asks us to believe
in miracles.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
