Inherit the Baloney

Creationists try to settle a score with Darwin.

Chris Lehmann from the November 2005 issue

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Intelligent Design attacks the Darwin hypothesis because we lack telltale evidence of "missing link" species development preserved in all-but-diagrammed real-time--an absurd standard to introduce for anyone with even passing familiarity with the fossil record, as nearly every reputable scientific authority has noted. More to the point, Intelligent Design enthusiasts smuggle in their preferred conclusion as a research-guiding assumption: All species development must culminate in a purpose. Intelligent Design advocates complain that evolutionists are guilty of using extremely selective use of evidence, but most of their theory is a misguided (if admittedly clever) effort to argue around the evidence.

In what is becoming the standard Intelligent Design rhetorical tactic, Olasky and Perry reverse all the polarities that superficially governed the Scopes debate: The rigid orthodoxy is now the Darwinian establishment, the object of blind faith is now the unproven theory of evolution, and the enemies of open skeptical inquiry are the politically correct enforcers of materialist dogma in the nation's public schools. The great rift in today's debate over human origins, Olasky and Perry write, is not science vs. religion so much as science vs. Darwinism: "The taproot of Darwinism has nothing to do with science and everything to do with subjective repudiation of a traditional Christian worldview."

The authors lavishly praise the work of Phillip Johnson, the Berkeley law professor who is Intelligent Design's leading theorist. (Using much the same logic that led them to cast Charles Darwin as the progenitor of the soulless modern welfare state, the authors argue that Johnson's lack of formal scientific training is an inestimable virtue: "Since he had no scientific reputation or peer standing to worry about, he could pursue his investigation of the evidence in favor of Darwin without worrying about his career.") Olasky and Perry also enthusiastically sign off on the objectives of Johnson's controversial Wedge of Truth project, which targets Darwinism as a "pseudoscience" that is "motivated by the sinful wish to control everything" and "distorts reality to suit our desires." Johnson explains that "materialism is the characteristic concept by which twentieth century pseudoscience has accomplished this."

Olasky and Perry approvingly quote, at mind-numbing length, a singularly unhinged article Johnson published in World, the evangelical weekly Olasky edits, imagining a future America in which Intelligent Design has decisively dispatched Darwinism and its many materialist sins to the dustbin of history. Johnson looks back on the recent scientific past with a blind hubris that would have made Mencken blanch: "Celebrity scientists like [Carl] Sagan freely promoted a dogmatic naturalistic philosophy as if it were a fact that had been discovered by scientific investigation, just as previous generations of celebrities had promoted racism, class warfare, and Freudianism in the name of science....The collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the Soviet myth, just as the scientific collapse of Darwinism, preceded as it was by the discrediting of Marxism and Freudianism, prepared the way for the culture to rediscover the buried treasure that the mythology had been concealing. A hilarious play called Inherit the Baloney enacted a sort of Scopes trial in reverse, with the hero a courageous Christian college professor badgered incessantly by dim-witted colleagues and deans who keep telling him the only way to preserve his faith in a postmodern world is to jettison all the exclusivist truth claims: they wanted him to admit that Jesus was sorely in need of sensitivity training from some wise counselor like Pontius Pilate because 'nobody can surf the web every day and still believe there is such a thing as "truth" or goodness.' Overnight, the tendency of naturalistic rationalism to decay into postmodern irrationalism became a national joke."

Testimonies like Johnson's show how the terms of debate in the evolution controversy have shifted in the eight decades since the Scopes spectacle. In a strictly formal sense, the advocates of the creationist story of the human origins have achieved a revolution: They have inverted the original aims of their forebears Butler and Bryan. Rather than cleaving to the originalist position of biblical literalism, today's creationists have embarked on a misguided romance with true pseudoscience; they even claim, disingenuously, that their explanation of life's beginnings need not rely on an anthropomorphic God as the first mover but could lead dispassionate investigators to discover that we are the handiwork of space aliens.

Most of all, whereas the fundamentalists of the 1920s saw the culture war as a means to preserve moral rectitude and the one true faith, their contemporary counterparts gleefully employ the creationist battle as a means to prosecute the culture wars on any number of outlying fronts. If Olasky and Perry's welfare and pornography sermons didn't make that clear, Phillip Johnson's score-settling cultural fantasias should.

As they squint after the motes in their neighbors' eyes, the new champions of Intelligent Design miss the enormous plank in their own: In the service of their preferred vision of "moral absolutes," they adopt an unfounded, research-free version of life sciences that epitomizes empirical relativism. Inherit the baloney, indeed.