#117, December 31, 2006

Clashing Designs

The proponents of Intelligent Design do not seem to recognize what is at stake in the debate over the theory of evolution. This may be because they do not realize that their critique of the theory actually resembles that of people with whom they might consider themselves in competition for religious adherents. From the perspective of many people in the world who do not share the European history of the Enlightenment (though perhaps everyone shares it indirectly), evolution would be considered a quasi-religious theory; they might argue that it interprets the world and its development in accordance with the Christian worldview of the Englishmen who developed and propagated the theory. They would note, indeed, that ideas relating to evolution were proposed at a time when such theories represented expansive Anglo-American empires, and when these Christians were coming into contact with other peoples (their own ancestors), whose religious doctrines they labeled unscientific and so questionable. The secular space was, from this perspective, made effectively Christian through the imperial encounter.

And Charles Darwin, it should be noted, was no atheist. He wrote the Origin of Species as a Christian, and later moved towards agnosticism. Still, in 1879 he considered that the theory of evolution was “quite compatible with the belief in a God;” though he added, “you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God.” That agnosticism was very close to the notion of ID, for if one accepts intelligent design one still does not know the origin or location of that intelligence and one needs to rely on faith and texts that exist beyond science to make claims in this regard.

Darwin spoke to this issue in 1873:

I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty.

In essence, Darwin, inasmuch as he believed in anything with regard to religion, believed in intelligent design, only such design was one of evolution. Scientific evidence was there in abundance to show that the world was not created in accordance with the Book of Genesis. And as a child of the enlightenment, Darwin would have felt that any god that created the world had created one where certain laws of science prevailed and that humans had been placed in a world in which those laws were revealed through the development of human intelligence and understanding.

And yet, what would it matter whether or not the world was created in accordance with Genesis? – a proposition that Darwin would not have endorsed. Even if it had been created precisely as it was written in Genesis, there is still the fall of man to contend with. After that event has “occurred,” either in reality or merely symbolically, what does it really matter about who created what and to whom this design should be attributed. Once one eats of the tree of knowledge one is moving into the realm of inductive and deductive reasoning and the scientific method. Whether or not this is merely a god’s ruse on humans, making them believe that there is some rational order that reveals, by and large, the validity of some form of evolution, we are living the ruse – though some obviously reviews to participate.

The scientific edifice that has been built since the industrial revolution is founded on such reasoning. Committing oneself, therefore, to the notion of Intelligent Design as a form of explanation, as it is proposed by its advocates, is basically saying that one no longer wants to live in accordance with scientific principles. It is to a large extent placing us all at the level of contending and warring beliefs, and any claims that we may have had to being in the wave of modernity go out of the window in the clash of belief and faith. In such a world we become no more than Christians (if that is what we are) with our own peculiar understanding of the cosmos, arguing against believers of other religions who have their own set of fundamental religious principles. And God help us then.

The irony here is that, at a time when many in the West are trying to sell their own vision of the world, selling democracy and western civilization in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Somalia, they are undercutting those same things at home. Democracy becomes no more than the pleadings of an elite group of White Christians, and key aspects of western civilization are cut down so that they are no longer anything more than special interest politics. That is not just the view of the infidel who stands in their way, it is their view also.

Reading Subaltern Studies scholars’ work on India is instructive in this regard. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, suggests (simplistically rendered) that people from the western intellectual tradition have a particular understanding of history that makes it difficult for them to fully appreciate how Indians comprehend the world. Western historians reduce the incomprehensible in peasants’ worldviews to folk myth and mystification, unable to take them at face value. Gyan Prakash, meanwhile, titles one of his works, Another Reason, to speak to a similar issue, about different understandings of the rational. This becomes a difficult issue to deal with if one is a believer in scientific reason and maintain that modernity is tied to the ascendancy of Reason, as many imperialists used to argue. It is perhaps easier to handle if one is a believer in Intelligent Design. But how does one challenge the beliefs of one religious text, if one is merely relying on his or her own. Everything is reduced to prejudice in favor of one’s own set of beliefs and the world witnesses an unceasing clash of godly “designs.”