Intelligent Design

In Pandagon, Jesse Taylor comments on some responses to an article that appeared on so-called "intelligent design," which is the latest attempt by the religious right to retard the teaching of evolution to schoolchildren. One no doubt world-class scientist wrote:

How is it that scientists can examine a rock specimen from Mars and "affirm" that there was once water on Mars (which has no water), and look at our planet, which is 70 percent water, and declare that there is no evidence of a worldwide flood?
Scientists and religious authorities are, indeed, fallible.

To which Mr. Taylor replies:

It's called "science". You see, massive flooding leaves evidence. You do know what evidence is, don't you? It's that stuff that convicts the B-list celebrities on Law & Order. Think about that...but on a big, global scale.
You see, one thing has nothing to do with the other - whether or not there was ever water on Mars has no bearing on if the entire planet flooded several thousand years ago. It's not like Noah built an intergalactic starship and bumped his ass to Mars to dump off the extra water, all the while bringing the pure power of funk to benighted Martians.

I'm linking to this for two reasons. One is because I know, I just know, that somewhere, right now, some sci-fi novelist or b-movie producer is preparing a story with precisely that premise. The other is that it gives me a chance to use one of my all-time favorite quotes:

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mothers' milk. The theologians, with no such dualism addling their wits, are smart enough to see that the two things are implacably and eternally antagonistic, and that any attempt to thrust them into one bag is bound to result in one swallowing the other.

The scientists who undertake this miscegenation always end by succumbing to religion; after a Millikan has been discoursing five minutes it becomes apparent that he is speaking in the character of a Christian Sunday-school scholar, not of a scientist. The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event. So far as I am aware even the most liberal theologian of today still gags at scientific concepts that were already commonplaces in my schooldays.--H. L. Mencken