Intelligent Design Network, Inc. Bears False Witness

Posted on November 1, 2003 in Evolution & Creation Morals & Ethics

It never ceases to sadden me when people go to the length of lying in order to defend Creationism. The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer discusses an attack by the New Mexico Chapter of Intelligent Design Network, Inc. in an effort to move the state Board of Education to endorse the teaching of their religion in school. In a press release last July, they claimed that scientists at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories overwhelming endorsed teaching “parents and laboratory scientists favored teaching intelligent design by an overwhelming factor of 5-to-1.”

They went on to claim:

The second poll was based on the response to an online survey sent to approximately 16,000 employees of Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs and 500 science and engineering faculty members at the University of New Mexico

Both Sandia and Los Alamos have gone on record to deny that all their employees were surveyed (Intelligent Design later admitted that less than 1% of all employees were included in the poll and would not reveal how they were selected). Though Intelligent Design Network later said that it would not use the poll after its confidence game was revealed, it continued to defend its methodology and has not removed the poll from its website.

I went back to my Bible on this behavior — not to Genesis, but to the Ten Commandments. I suspect Intelligent Design Network knows full well that it is committing an act of fraud. Furthermore, it has employed that favorite tactic of Fundamentalists to advance its cause, a technique of Biblical interpretation called “loopholism”.

What I accuse IDN leaders of doing is knowingly fiddling with the truth (in this case the results of the poll). Furthermore, I suspect that they absolve themselves of fraud by noting that the wording of the Ninth Commandment says “Thou shalt bear false witness against thy neighbor.” In other words, in order to score a victory for their political agenda (which nests not only inside American society but also within the Christian religion) without feeling remorse of conscience, they have selectively read the Bible to their own advantage.

“We’re not bearing false witness against our neighbor,” I can hear them protesting. “No one is harmed by our contentions. Rather, we believe that they are helped.”

I argue that, on the contrary, by promoting this ends justify the means attempt to seize hold of the American mind, Intelligent Design Network, Inc. is setting a hideous moral example for the youth they purport to “protect”. If they can lie, what else can be justified by a selective reading of the Bible? A short list includes genocide, homophobia, blood transfusions, etc. These zealots kill the spirit of fair intellectual exchange by letter by letter.

For the record, I do not hold that “fair intellectual exchange” means having to present “all sides”. It means that when your arguments are defeated by the facts (and the facts for an ancient earth and radical ecological changes over billions of years trump Creationism) you stop making them. We have ceased teaching that the earth is flat even though there are those who hold that the Bible affirms that it is. These lesser lights of the Fundamentalist Heresy continue to churn out literature despite repeated circumnavigations of the planet and dramatic photographs of the earth from space. Science and geography teachers routinely point to globes in class without members of the local Board of Education hammering at their door to stop them. It happens because the public does not allow it to happen, having been educated in better thinking.

The example of the roundness of the Earth speaks to another argument that you hear Creationists sometimes use against Science: that Science keeps changing its mind. Their covert assertion is that Science will come around to acknowledging Creationism again at sometime in the future because, ultimately, Science is untrustworthy. (IDers work very hard to make that assertion a reality.) Ultimately, it’s fashion, not Truth, that leads to people selecting one world view over the other is the core claim. But the flat earth issue betrays the flimsiness of this claim: nearly 500 years after Magellan supposedly proved that the world was round (the evidence had come in well before then), there has not once been a shift in scientific thinking on the issue. The earth remains a warped sphere floating in space because — ahem — it is a warped sphere floating in space. Science has found the best explanation for phenomena we observe here on the planet and stuck to it. Refinements of our knowledge aside, it’s still true and it always will be true that the Earth is not spread on the cosmic table like a two dimensional map.

Likewise, Evolution is here to stay. Because it has not been demonstrated to be economically important, many people persist in fighting the idea. Nevertheless the course of biology and our medicine have been strongly determined by Darwin’s theory. Despite discussions over exactly how evolution occurred, the accepted age of the earth among reputedable scientists continues to be far older than the date of 10 in the morning on a sunny day in 6006 B.C. Paleontologists and biologists continue to hold that species change over time, which is the key defining detail of the Fact of Evolution. And, unless IDers succeed in a world-wide coup and pogrom of the thinking classes, it will continue to be a central tenet of scientific thinking about life on the planet for generations to come.

Because this is true: species change over time on this billions-of-years-old planet.

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David Harris who blogs at Salon.com writes extensively on this subject as well. Both he and SE report that the gambit failed in New Mexico. But be warned: it will be tried elsewhere.