The Banality of Ignorance
Comments on a Harper's
magazine account of the "Dover Monkey Trial"
(February 6, 2006)
During the century and a half since the publication
of Charles Darwin's The Origin of
Species,
we have witnessed the waging of a great struggle between history and
myth, between knowledge and superstition. In recent decades it has come
to focus on a pitched battle between creationism and evolution, and
what should be taught in the schools. There have been many attempts by
Christian fundamentalists in the United States to introduce the
teaching of creationism into the science classroom; most have failed,
or succeeded only temporarily. But in their relentless
determination and never-ending inventiveness, creationists have lately
come up with "Intelligent Design." Never mind that ID amounts to
nothing more than claiming flaws or gaps in evolutionary theory and
then introducing ID as the default victor, with no evidentiary support
or scientific basis of its own. The same tired old strategy is being
repeated yet again. Get fundamentalist supporters onto school boards,
force ID and its 'textbooks' onto the curriculum, and proceed to
undermine the scientific education of the nation.
Fortunately, at each such sally onto the
battlefield
by fundamentalist forces, it is met by an equally determined force of
concerned citizens and organizations like the ACLU. The latest battle
lines were drawn inside a courtroom in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a
lawsuit was brought against the Dover Area School District before a
judge by eleven Dover parents represented by the ACLU and Americans
United for Separation of Church and State.
The latest issue of Harper's, February
2006, contains an entertaining account of the proceedings ("God or
Gorilla: A Darwin descendant at the Dover monkey trial," by Matthew
Chapman, whose great-great-grandfather was none other than Charles
Darwin himself). By way of background, accompanied by a bit of
tongue-in-cheek, Chapman provides some disturbing data:
According to a
recent U.S. poll, 54 percent of American adults now dispute that man
developed from earlier species, which is a 10 percent increase since
the last poll, in 1994. Scientists must bear some responsibility for
this: they just don't seem able to provide entertainment the way the
other side can. When did you last hear a scientist come up with
anything as fun or contentious as man of God Pat Robertson calling for
the assassination of Hugo Chavez? Why haven't we seen a man of science
on TV asking Bush to explain why God, being such a great pal, gave him
such lousy intelligence on the WMDs, or demanding an explanation for
all the gaps and contradictions in the biblical record?
The main 'heavy' in the Dover school board
affair was Bill Buckingham, chair of
the curriculum committee, an "ex-cop and corrections officer," who at a
board meeting in 2004, rejected purchase of a textbook on
biology because it was "laced with Darwinism," and "it's inexcusable to
teach from a book that says man descended from apes and monkeys." He
wanted to substitute an intelligent design tome called Of Pandas and People. Even though
voted down, various bullying tactics were used to make sure the
ninth-grade students got to hear about the latter, which was made
available in school libraries. Discrediting comments, over the
protests of teachers, were delivered to students about the "theory" of
evolution.
At the hearing which took place in late 2005, after
witnesses for evolution had their say, defenders of Intelligent Design
gave testimony and underwent cross-examination. Before I was finished
Chapman's account of such testimony, I was struck by a comparison with
another, quite different trial. When the Israelis captured Adolf
Eichmann in Argentina in 1961 and brought him to Israel to stand trial
for his role in the murder of millions of Jews during the Second World
War,
Hannah Arendt, covering that trial, coined the now-famous phrase: "the
banality of evil." As it happens, I recently saw a documentary on
the Eichmann trial, and I could see her point. The chief architect of
the Holocaust, the organizer of its transport and the designer of its
death camps, came across as nothing so much as a cipher, an overblown
bureaucrat. He was no fiery demagogue like Hitler, nor seemingly filled
with great hatred and zealotry against the Jews. His bland demeanor and
lack of sophistication was numbing. Indeed, he claimed to
be doing nothing so much as following orders, working to the best of
his bureaucratic abilities in the spirit of obedience to his superiors.
(This was greeted with skepticism, and certain evidence in his own
words recorded during the War compromised the picture he sought to
convey; but such
a picture may not have been that far wrong, prompting Arendt's
evaluation. It did not, however, prevent him from being sent to the
gallows the following year.)
Now, I would never rush to equate creationists with
Nazis (though Eichmann in more of his own words recorded during the War
said that when confronted with
the unpleasantries of his task, he would distract his mind by reciting
lines from a Christian creed, and U.S. Dominionists have stated that if
they were to gain power they would institute biblical law, such as the
stoning of adulterers and blasphemers). Yet a comparison of sorts did
strike me
as I read some of the
defendants' testimony. Take, for example, that of Heather
Geesey, a Dover school board member who supported Buckingham and the
teaching of ID. Chapman quoted this exchange from the hearing:
[ACLU lawyer Vic
Walczak] asked Geesey if she supported the teaching of intelligent
design. "Yes." "Because it gave a balanced view of evolution?" "Yes."
"It presented an alternative theory?" "Yes." "And the policy talks
about gaps and problems with evolution?" "Yes." "You don't know
what those gaps and problems refer to, do you?" "No." "But it's good to
teach about those gaps and problems?" "That's our mission statement,
yes." "But you have no idea what they are?" "It's not my job, no." "Is
it fair to say that you didn't know much about intelligent design in
October of 2004?" "Yes." "And you didn't know much about the book Of Pandas and People either, did
you?" "Correct." "So you had never participated in any discussions of
the book?" "No." "And you made no effort independently to find out
about the book?" "No."..."And no one ever explained to you what
intelligent design was about." "No." This went on for quite a while,
Geesey grinning throughout as if her ignorance was just the cutest
thing, until finally, still smiling happily, she stated that she had
relied on the curriculum committee—Bill
Buckingham and Alan
Bonsell—to make
the decision. "And do you know whether Mr. Buckingham
has a background in science?" "No, I do not." "Do you know that in fact
he doesn't have a background in science?" "I don't know. He's law
enforcement, so I would assume he had to take something along the way."
So this was the genesis of the whole thing: an auto repairman appointed
an OxyContin-addicted biblical literalist without a shred of knowledge
to decide which books the kids should learn from, and a woman who had
no curiosity about anything, even her own most deeply held beliefs,
seconded the whole idea.
The aforementioned Alan Bonsell, auto repairman and president of the
Dover school board,
had this to say:
"Did I ever think
about it? I think about a lot of things." He admitted that his own
personal views about the universe were based on the first two chapters
of Genesis but said that at no time had he tried to get creationism
into the science class. He believed evolution should be taught, but
"when they don't include, you know, problems with it or gaps in a
theory, I mean, and you teach it, it almost sounds like they're
teaching it as fact."
When asked to come up with an example, he said he'd "seen things on
different subjects of how bears turn into whales, you know, this was a
natural scientific theory, which I just thought was absurd. There's
also statistical things that I've read about how the statistical
probability of life happening by itself was basically impossible."
As for Bill Buckingham, Chapman recounted his appearance before the
court:
Buckingham, a 1973
graduate of the Penn State Police Academy, had attended the FBI
criminal investigation school. Before he retired, he was a supervisor
at York County Prison.
He testified in a low, mildly surly voice, a whine of self-pity always
present underneath. He was unashamedly ignorant and utterly devoid of
curiosity. He believed, he stated, in a literal reading of the Book of
Genesis. He knew almost nothing about evolution except that "it's
happenstance, it just happened," and soon revealed an equal ignorance
of intelligent design. "I just know that it's another scientific theory
that we thought would be good to have presented to the students."
Worse even than his ignorance were his lies. The most important part of
his testimony, and the source of one of the most dramatic moments in
court, was his contention that neither he nor board president Alan
Bonsell had ever used the word "creationism" in the afore-mentioned
school board meetings. They had been fixed on the scientific theory of
intelligent design from the start. Their intent had never been
religious. The reporters had lied....
Harvey [the cross-examining attorney] asked him if he'd mind looking at
exhibit P-145. The Wizard of Oz tapped a few buttons and there was
Buckingham being interviewed by a local TV news reporter outside a
school board meeting at which the current biology book had just been
discussed.
"The book that was presented to me," Buckingham said on the video, "was
laced with Darwinism from beginning to end. It's okay to teach Darwin,
but you have to balance it with something else, such as creationism."...
During this testimony, if you looked to the back of the court you could
see Bonsell, president of the school board, grinning as Buckingham
screwed things up. It hardly seemed to matter to him. Their case could
not be damaged. God was on their side.
Another blatant lie that Buckingham and
Bonsell were caught in
concerned the sixty copies of Of
Pandas and People which were "anonymously donated" to the Dover
High School library. Under oath at his deposition, Bonsell had declared
that he did not know who the donor was. It turned out, and was revealed
during the trial, that Buckingham had solicited donations at his
church,
which were turned over to Bonsell's father, who had bought the books
and given them to the school. Other lies in the various testimonies
were evident, and this was one of the reasons why Judge John E. Jones
III, on December 20, 2005, found in favor of the plaintiffs and
ruled that the defendants' intelligent
design policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
In a withering 139-page opinion, he found that the goal of the
intelligent design movement is religious in nature, that intelligent
design is not science and cannot be taught in Dover schools, and that
the board's claimed reason for including intelligent design in the
curriculum—solely
because it was good science—was a
"sham." In
referring to board members, he used such words as "striking ignorance"
and "breathtaking inanity." Additionally, he wrote that Buckingham and
Bonsell "had either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under
oath on several occasions," and that "It is ironic that several of
these individuals who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious
convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks
and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy."
Chapman also treated us to an account of one evening's visit to a show
put
on at the Dover firehouse by a local preacher named Reverend Groves
that consisted of him showing a DVD
entitled "More Reasons Evolution Is Stupid." The producer and star of
the DVD is a man named Kent Hovind, an ex-science teacher, a.k.a.
Doctor Dino, who owns a creationist theme park down in Pensacola,
Florida. Hovind would throw up an aspect of evolution (that apes and
man share a common ancestor, say), with the addition of enough
complex-sounding science to make himself seem well-informed, and then
dismiss it with the line "That's stupid!" or "I'm sorry, boys and
girls, but that's not common sense, that's just stupid!"...
A few days later I interviewed Reverend Groves
for a documentary film I was shooting.... By this time, it was public
knowledge that I was an offspring of Darwin, and in the course of the
interview it became apparent to me, really for the first time, how
hated the poor old codger is. People such as Groves believe that Darwin
marks a point in history from which materialism sprang, bringing with
it Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, pot, sex, prostitution, abortion,
homosexuality, and everything else nasty in the world....
As Groves had shown no restraint in taking a
whack at my ancestor, I felt no compunction in whacking back and asked
him some of the questions [Clarence] Darrow asked [William Jennings]
Bryan at the end of the Scopes trial [in 1925]. Was Jonah really
swallowed by a whale? Yes. How did Joshua "command the sun to stand
still" when we know that the earth goes around the sun and that
stopping it would be disastrous? That's what a miracle is. Were the six
days of creation literal days, and how old is the earth? Bryan, when
pushed, conceded that perhaps the six days could have been symbolic,
and on the subject of the age of the earth pleaded a pathetic
ignorance. "I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion,"
Bryan said, "That I have spent no time trying to find argument against
it." But Groves was made of sterner stuff. He was unashamed of a
literal reading of Genesis and an earth that was only 6,000 to 10,000
years old. Carbon dating was nonsense. And that was
that.
And these are the sort of people, with this
sort of education, with this sort of argument to back themselves up,
who have managed to turn science education in the United States (and to
some extent in Canada) upside down, to have the very word "evolution"
become virtually extinct in biology and science textbooks, who
infiltrate school boards to interfere with curriculums, who complain to
school principals when teachers dare to speak a range of forbidden
words and concepts to their students, who achieve election to
legislatures and attempt to pass laws and govern society according to
their faith-driven convictions. For the most part, their ignorance is
staggering, their closed-mindedness frightening, their naive and
unquestioning confidence in their holy scripture impenetrable. The lies
in evidence during the Dover hearing were only the tip of the iceberg
in
this field, for creationists of all stripes are notorious for their
misrepresentation not only of their own position, but that of
evolutionary science and scientists. Both the title and the content of
a hard-hitting expose on the matter says it all: "Telling Lies For God"
by Ian Plimer (Random House Australia, 1994), a book I would highly
recommend.
Recently, while browsing through another
excellent book on the subject, "Abusing Science: The Case Against
Creationism" by Philip Kitcher (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982), it
suddenly struck me, when reading a
particular argument against an aspect of the creationist case, that the
author, and so many others like him, are simply wasting their breath,
so far as creationists and their like-minded supporters are concerned.
The latter's actual knowledge is so limited, has been so
compromised by religious dogma, that they are impervious to any
argument,
evidence, or science. Kitcher and others are essentially writing to the
converted, demonstrating to us that we are right and that creationism
is wrong. This is not to say that such writings are not valuable and
necessary, if only to wake up—and enlist—those of
the general
population who have retained the capacity to think for themselves. So
much of the intellectual vigor and integrity of our society has been
waylaid by a widespread ignorance that is truly banal, and it is time
that we recognized the full extent of the disaster that threatens to
overtake us.
Addendum: In the
interests of fairness, it should be noted that one of the witnesses for
the defense was the well-known exponent of Intelligent Design (in some
respects, its originator, although ID is essentially the latest
reworking of a creationism argument that goes back two centuries),
Michael Behe. As a biochemist and professor of biology at Lehigh
University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Behe can hardly be labeled
"ignorant," and yet his argument of "irreducible complexity" has been
answered many times by evolutionary biologists. About Behe's appearance
at the hearing, Chapman had these remarks:
Although the
concept of irreducible complexity is sold as "brand new," it is in fact
more "like new." It began with religious philosopher William Paley's
1802 argument about someone finding a watch and inferring that there
had to be a watchmaker. The argument now also includes reaching the
same conclusion while looking at Mount Rushmore or seeing "John Loves
Mary" written in the sand.... [E.D.:
The "watch" argument is also somewhat guilty of begging the question.
We know that watches and
Mount Rushmore are human constructions; there is no possibility within
our experience that they could be naturally evolving phenomena, and
thus our minds are influenced accordingly when considering this
analogy. On the other hand, whether the universe and life are
constructions or natural phenomena is the issue under debate; we do not
know a priori that they are
one or the other, but must decide on the evidence. The watch and Mount
Rushmore comparison is thus misleading.]
My second thought was that if you looked back at the history of
science, you could point to any number of things that, given our
knowledge at the time, seemed possible only through the intervention of
God but that later turned out to have natural explanations even Behe
accepted. I missed the point, he told me—and told
Rothschild later during cross: the bacterial flagellum is not only
complex, it is irreducibly
complex. In other words, if you removed one element of it, none of the
others had function, and so the whole could not have developed by
natural selection but must have been abruptly created with all its
parts in place. In this context, the mousetrap was often cited. [E.D.: This argument has been answered by
evolutionists many times, and in many ways. One very interesting answer
appeared in The Skeptical Inquirer, November / December 2005, "Does
Irreducible Complexity Imply Intelligent Design?" Author Mark Perakh
argues: "In fact, such a conclusion lacks a logical foundation.
Irreducible complexity can even more reasonably be construed as an
argument against Intelligent Design."]
On the stand, Behe sat forward in his chair, earnest and concentrated.
Only once did I see him lose his composure. This was when Rothschild
revealed that Behe's own department at Lehigh had issued a statement
saying it fully supported evolutionary theory and that
The sole dissenter from this position,
Professor Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of intelligent
design. While we respect Professor Behe's right to express his views,
they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is
our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in
science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded
as scientific.
Behe put
his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, smiling
defiantly. He looked like a naughty child who had told his mother he'd
seen a ghost and wouldn't budge from the story no matter what. I
couldn't help wondering what Behe would be without intelligent design.
The scientific community may despise him, but he is beloved on the
other side. He gets invited to talk all over the country, and he has
sold a lot of books.
Earl Doherty
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