Big fan of Mr. Wolcott, and he needs to get himself on the blogroll over there. He will, someday. But for now, here's a link to his blogging of John Derbyshire's savaging of IDists among us. Here's Derbyshire, who begins by quoting another article:
"A year ago, I asked Kristol after a lecture whether he believed in God or not. He got a twinkle in his eye and responded, 'I don't believe in God, I have faith in God.' Well, faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But at the recent AEI lecture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that 'that is a stupid question,' and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, 'it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.'"
[Derb continues:] Here we have a guy who plainly doesn't believe in God, but who thinks that well-padded intellectual elitists like himself ought to evade the issue in public for fear of demoralizing the proles and perhaps jeopardizing some padding thereby. I can't think of anything nice to say about that; and in fact, the only things I CAN think of to say would not be suitable for a family website...
These are the people who are pushing 'intelligent design' in the conservative movement. Not only am I glad and proud to have spoken out against this preposterous hoax, I wish I had done so more forthrightly. These are people filled up to their meritocratic nose-holes with contempt for ordinary people. That's conservatism? Ptui, I spit.
That strikes me in a most peculiar way, because I have always been Pauline enough to hold back the things I believe, in order to not offend or shake someone's world view.
It happened to me, you see, and it's something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
But I'm also glad I made it through to this side. To consider my current withholding of opinion a noble lie is sobering. Derbyshire's right: it is elitist of me to be that way. I abhor elitism.
I think I've figured something out about myself. A basic confusion, if you will. I'll ruminate on it and perhaps blog on it as well. It's not a subject to approach or blog lightly or spontaneously.
So anyway, back to ID. I don't think that the people pushing ID are intellectual elites keeping the proles ignorant, not most of them, anyway. I think it's more about people intentionally keeping themselves blind. ID is a way to get creationism into the science class, where it doesn't belong. It's an innoculation against the evolution meme. That's why they don't come up with any research possibilities when offered money - it's not about science. It's about clouding the clear path that science is showing, because their overly rigid approach to the holy texts of monotheism is threatened by scientific scrutiny of the physical world.
Parents don't want to think their kids are going to hell. A belief in evolution is something that's going to set their kids down a path of eternal damnation, and who can bear to think of their child being eternally damned? So of course, they're going to look for some way to counter evolution. That's so much easier than confronting the harder questions - after all, who's got time for that? Most people work all day, take care of the kids, and try to get a little sleep. Confronting the deeper questions of reality is something that shakes all that up.
And trying to reconcile a literal belief in Genesis 1-3 and evolution is far too much cognitive dissonance for anybody. You can present a model of God as a fellow playing pool, who strikes the cue ball in such a way that it flies around the table, sinking every single ball on the first shot. What a remarkable shot! It's much more impressive than someone who sinks shot after shot, one by one, until the table is cleared - which is like God spliting up his creative work into days. But if the Bible says days, then by gummy, it means days. And any statement of science that contradicts that is undermining the authority of the Bible. And if the authority of the Bible is undermined, then somebody's kids are going to hell, pool player or no.
ID is a Trojan horse. It has no place in a science class. Innoculate your kids yourself if you have to. But it's the duty of teachers to teach their students he best they can, with the best and most up-to-date knowledge they can. They don't need people throwing stumbling block in front of everyone, just because some irate misguided parent can't be bothered to listen to reason.
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