by George Claassen*

Filed under: Uncategorized — prometheusongebonde @ 8:44 am
 The intense and stimulating debate in the South African media on the possibility that an Intelligent Designer or creator god has somewhere or sometime played a role in establishing the Universe, our own solar system and life on Earth, are leading to strange absurdities.  
The strangest aspect of these absurdities is the way in which defenders and propagators of Intelligent Design try to utilise science to strengthen their arguments. Suddenly science is their friend and colleague and that biggest swear word of swear words for faith-driven believers, the capital E-word, Evolution, is used to make Intelligent Design palatable. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, belief in the Biblical creation story has been severely rocked and compromised. And over nearly a century and a half two streams of thought had developed to counter the devastating implications of what Darwin’s theory means for the old fashioned religion of an Earth barely 6 000 years old – despite science’s relentless march to substantiate Darwin’s theory.  
Firstly there are the ever-present Young Earth Creationists (YECs) who literally believe every word in the Bible and who dogmatically cling to bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce’s calculation that the Earth was created at exactly 9 o’clock in 4004 B.C.  South Africa has a myriad of these species: there is the Australian founded group Answers in Genesis (AiG) with its leader, Dr. Johan Kruger, who operates from Brackenfell in the Western Cape near Cape Town; AiG  rejects all scientific evidence that the Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old.  Then there are the supporters of "Dr." Kent Hovind, an American YEC, who nearly succeeded to come to South Africa on a lecture tour to spread his weird unscientific ideas about a young Earth.
Fortunately, the US Revenue Service has saved South Africans from Hovind when he recently was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud and was no longer allowed to leave his country. André Immelman from His Power Ministries who arranged Hovind’s aborted tour, tried to get me and other South African scientists to debate Hovind. He had no takers in the Western Cape, but the people who eventually accepted to "debate" him in Pretoria, Professors Eugene Cloete and Willem Ferguson of the University of Pretoria, can only debate Hovind from their own Intelligent Design platform, as if YECs and ID are not birds of the same feather.  
While still numerous – more than 70% of South Africans believe that a creator God has created life on Earth – the YECs today are even to adherents of Intelligent Design a total embarrassment,  from which sprouts Cloete andFerguson’s willingness to "debate" Hovind. This second group are pure Intelligent Design followers, a new form of YEC that originated in Seattle, USA in the early 1990s where they gather under the umbrella of the Discovery Institute founded by a law professor, Phillip Johnson.
If ever a name was a misnomer, the Discovery Institute’s was; no discovery except looking for a mythical god. This ID group has amidst overwhelming and irrefutable scientific evidence proving evolution, turned to a new "theory" that could include evolution but also a Creator God: Voilà, Intelligent Design was born.  
According to this "theory" adherents of ID accept evolution as the vehicle used by God or an Intelligent Designer to create the world. The big E-swear word is suddenly now acceptable for who can argue with the evidence of science? Talk about "scientific" opportunism! If Mohammed will not come to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Mohammed.   
But does Intelligent Design differ at all from YEC? No, definitely not.  Rightly so theNational Center for Science Education (www.natcenscied.org) describes ID as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo". 
The sudden accommodating attitude of ID supporters towards evolution as scientific theory partly came about because of a loop-hole left to them by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould’s principle of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) says religion and science belong to two different magisteria and will not be in conflict if each of them sticks to its magisterium. Gould believed that through applying the NOMA principle science and religion could be compatible, existing peacefully next to each other.  Unfortunately it does not happen.
The chief propagandists of ID, Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski, have been trying for more than a decade to sell ID as science  in American science class-rooms. Johnson has as legal expert openly proclaimed his wish that ID would get its day in court. Here, he believed, the blind scales of justice would get rid of the science community’s purported conspiracy against ID "scientists" to get their views heard in peer reviewed science publications and which has, according to Johnson and Co., been preventing ID to be accepted as valid science.   
Well, Johnson en ID have had their day in court. The newsmaking Kitzmiller vs. Dover School Board case has finally fulfilled Johnson’s wish – but not in the way he wanted.  In December 2005 Justice John Jones III gave judgment in the trial in which a group of school parents of the Dover School District took their school board to court after the board had decided that ID may be presented as science next to evolution as an alternative theory to explain the development of life on Earth.  Justice Jones said ID is not science and he castigated ID: "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."   An independent court, with a fairly conservative judge on the bench, has decided on the side of science.  There is no conspiracy by scientists against ID; the naked facts are ID cannot withstand the litmus tests of science regarding independent observation, experimentation, verification, and rational evidence before a scientific claim could be made.   
YECs and ID are both wrong. This brings me to the relationship between science and religion. ID proponents believe science and religion are compatible and in
South Africa they have a strong propagandist in Prof. George Ellis, winner of the Templeton Prize in 2005. The prize is given to someone who has advanced the understanding between science and religion. Ellis, a cosmologist of the University of Cape Town, has strong supporters among the Afrikaans religious community, among them Dr. Louw Alberts, a former scientist, Cloete, Ferguson, the Afrikaans authors Leon Rousseau and Gideon Joubert.
But there is absolutely no compatibility between science and religion. Peter Atkins, Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Niall Shanks and other scientists and philosophers believe it is dishonest to present any conciliatory message between science and religion and that the NOMA principle is invalid. According to Dawkins such a view fails  "on the deniable fact that religions still make claims about the world which, on analysis, turn out to be scientific claims … they make wanton use of miracle stories, which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Raising of Lazarus, the manifestations of Mary and the Saints around the Catholic world, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and very effective they are with an audience of unsophisticates and children" (The Devil’s Chaplain).
Dawkins emphasises that each of these miracles makes the claim of being scientific, "a violation of the normal running of the natural world." To believe in miracles, is to throw away the normal laws of nature and places the one that believes in miracles immediately in the field of science. If theologists want to be honest, they must make a choice, writes Dawkins. "You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science’s, but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles." Believers in miracles such as the rock of Lourdes that can "heal" the ill, cannot expect science and religion to be categorised in two magisteria, and cannot make the claim that science and religion are compatible.
Niall Shanks, professor in philosophy at East Tennessee State University and also extraordinary professor in biological sciences, physics and astronomy, agrees with Dawkins. "… I am someone who does not believe that there is any credible evidence to support belief in the existence of God… I have no particular solution to the problem of reconciling science and religion. Sadly, I very much doubt that the problem has a universally acceptable rational solution. Those most in need of such a solution are the very ones incapable of appreciating any such solution, were it to be discovered and offered. You are more likely to reconcile the Israelis and the Palestinians or the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland than you are to come to a universally agreeable solution to the problem of the reconciliation of science and religion," he writes in God, the Devil, and
Darwin – A Critique of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press).
Shanks says it is a testimony for the power of "science envy in our culture that religious extremists have found it necessary to invent religious versions of science to serve their ends. The supreme irony, of course, is that in passing off their religious views as scientific, intelligent design theorists and creationist fellow travellers seek to ruin the very sciences in whose respectability they try to cloak themselves."
The Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) has devised a strategy known as The Wedge through which they aim for nothing less than the "overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies". The aims of The Wedge are set out by Paul R. Gross en Barbara Forrest in their excellent analysis of Intelligent Design, Creationism’s Trojan Horse – The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press):
      1.  The harmful effects of "scientific materialism" on "politics, medicine, the welfare system, the law and the arts";
      2.  CRCS’s goal of undermining "scientific materialism"; and
      3. CRCS’s desire to "bring about nothing less than a scientific and cultural revolution."
No, there is no compatibility possible between science and religion, just as there is no compatibility between science and pseudoscientific ideas such as a belief that you can talk to the dead, astrology, numerology, and similar flights of the imagination. As Wolpert puts it in his book about the relationship between science and religion, (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast – The Evolutionary Origins of Belief , WW Norton), the only hope lies in science: "Although science can be counterintuitive, it provides the only fundamental explanation of how the world works. It is in constant evolution as knowledge accumulates, it is self-correcting, and it is universally valid without cultural bias," as Prof. Crispin Tickell of Oxford University’s Policy Foresight Programme  summarises Wolpert’s scientific philosophy in his review of the book in Nature (13 July 2006).  
The neuroscientist Sam Harris is totally correct when he compares religions in The End of Faith – Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (WW Norton) with myths: "Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
 * George Claassen is chairman of Sceptic South Africa (SSA) (in Afrikaans Skepties Suid-Afrika (SSA) (www.scepticsa.com). His book, Geloof, Bygeloof en Ander Wensdenkery – Hoe Vrees en Vals Hoop Mense Mislei (Faith, Superstition, and Other Wishful Thoughts: How Fear and False Hope Mislead People) will appear shortly at  Protea Boekhuis. (Enquiries to www.proteaboekhuis.co.za or to scepticsa@gmail.com).