by Peter Dawson Buckland
The Discovery Institute's (DI) Center for Science and
Culture (CSC) formerly the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
deeply displeased with the “cultural legacies of materialism,”
(Center “Wedge”) have collectively assumed the objective
reality of the Christian God. Phillip Johnson, the lawyer who heads
the Intelligent Design Creationist (IDC) movement has distilled theistic
realism, stating that God is “objectively real as Creator, and
that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible
to science, particularly in biology.
I will show that the narrow theological, philosophical,
and pseudoscientific idea of “theistic realism” or “mere
creation” (Johnson “Starting”) eerily mirrors Stalin's
“socialist realism.” Art, and specifically music for the
purposes of this paper, were seriously proscribed under Stalin. Theistic
realism, like its Soviet predecessor, bulges with so much confused conjecture
and inconsistency that no effective social, legal, educational, moral,
scientific, or artistic policy can arise from it.
It follows from the premises of theistic realism that
all non-theistically real attempts to understand phenomena fail if they
ignore God's reality. Pay no mind that many endeavors implicitly operate
sans God as Robert Pennock illustrates, “Science is godless in the same way that plumbing is godless. Evolutionary
biology is no more or less based on a 'dogmatic philosophy' of naturalism
than are medical science and farming (205).” We might add bicycle repair, cooking, brewing,
theatre set design, stringing guitars, and analyzing images from an
fMRI.
As we know this is not really a scientific debate but
a contrived controversy built on a contrived dualism. The scientific
debate died 100 years ago. The IDC advocates do not rage against plumbing
and bicycle repair because they are not linked to our special place
in the universe; when the theistic realists' senses of self as God's
creations – created separately from the rest of nature but with
dominion over it – and lash out against the boogey man of philosophical
naturalism or secular humanism.
Thus it has followed that DI fellows have foisted their
nonsense onto the American public. William Dembski, the so-called “Newton
of information theory” (Design Inference “Intelligent...”)
has concocted the “nebulous dream[s]” of the explanatory
filter and Complex Specified Information (Perakh 63). Perhaps when they
call him “Newton” they mean to refer to the fruity cookie.
Michael Behe proposed “irreducible complexity” which has
been threshed into millet by so many scientists and engineers that the
lawyers in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial made flour out of it
and Judge Jones III baked his decision's delicious cake. We have arguments
from ignorance and shady peer-review in Stephen Meyer's “The Origin
of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories”
in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol.
117 (Weitzel 66-69). The bloggers at Uncommon Descent and Telic
Thoughts are busy bees spinning honey for the ignorant masses while
DI lawyers Casey Luskin, Dick DeWolfe, and John Calvert defend the nest
and launch barrages of Johnsonian nonsense redefining science as an
enterprise capacious enough to permit supernatural explanations. They
are mightily hammering that Wedge into our culture.
Consider Calvert's and William Harris' writing from a
2001 legal memorandum for the Kansas school board wherein they attack
science's naturalistic groundwork and perform a bait and switch: “It
is not logical or scientific to limit scientific explanation to only
'natural explanations' in order to censor inquiry, evidence and inference
that supports the design hypothesis (4).” Scientists since the
16th and 17th centuries' scientific revolution
have used “natural explanations” not to censor, but because
natural explanations explain natural events. Calvert and Harris invoke
censorship's specter to shift our focus away from our logical understanding
of the scientific method to our sense of fairness. They, like Dick DeWolf,
believe that “scientists, teachers, and students should have the
right to reach the answer that each finds most satisfying” regarding
the appearance of design in nature (A11). Fortunately for us, science
is not an issue of emotional satisfaction and wish fulfillment. It demands,
as good legal and journalistic investigations do, that we jeopardize
hypotheses and follow the data as far as we can, no matter how distressing
or satisfying.
While Calvert and DeWolf have veiled their theistically
real positions, Johnson let the cat out of the bag in his 1995 book,
Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Education,
and Law. Repeatedly, he states something like the following from
the Introduction: “If God really does exist, then to lead a rational
life a person has take account of God and his purposes. A person or
a society that ignores the Creator of the universe is ignoring the most
important part of reality, and to ignore reality is irrational.”
Later, in chapter 4, “The Established Religious Philosophy of
America,” Johnson states,
Of
course science likes to assume that the cosmos is rationally understandable
and not arbitrary, but how better to guarantee a rational cosmos than
to recognize that it was created by a rational mind? If such a Creator
really does exist, then science itself is ignoring the most important
aspect of reality.
The
statements beg the question. Johnson's
message in Reason in the Balance resounds loud and clear: theistic
realism must be an a priori position to all activities inquiring about phenomena
or that act upon knowledge. Without the assumption, inquiry fails and
knowledge is an illusion. Behe gave the assumption away on the stand
at Kitzmiller when he admitted that you are more likely to accept
ID if you believe in God (Middle).
In what might be the masterstroke of irony the DI fellows
have cried that today it is the Darwinists who act as the Soviet apparatchiks.
Darwinists are the Lysenkos of today by refusing the astronomer Guillermo
Gonzalez tenure at Iowa State, by backing away from Behe at Lehigh University,
by investigating Richard Sternberg's review process at Proceedings,
and by publicly wondering why they have avoided peer-reviewed research
in general. These accusations of Lysenkoism have already been well-addressed
in Wesley Elsberry's and Mark Perakh's “How Intelligent Design
advocates turn the sordid lessons from Soviet and Nazi history upside
down,” noting that the costs of politics and ideology in science
are gravely high.
Scientists and philosophers of science gutted the scientific
validity of ID stating, as Eugenie Scott has, that there “is no
there there.” Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross recently criticized
the potential social and moral doctrines well:
Given
ID's thoroughly religious foundation, ID's Wedge Strategy goal “to
see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political
life” translates to enacting ID leaders' religious preferences
as public policy. The theological framework from within which they operate
is so rigid that they cannot separate their views on either science
or public policy from their theology. Indeed, doing so would be sacrilegious.
Dembski affirms that science without God is idolatry – a religious
offense, a sin. By his own logic, then, the secular government protecting
science and education is also a sin. Consequently, just as the only
restorative measure for naturalistic science is an infusion of supernaturalism,
so the only expiation of the sin of secular government is desecularization.
What the Wedge envisions amounts to theocracy, and Americans need to
know this (196).
Given
that the CSC hopes to “renew” our culture by returning it
to some Christian Arcadia, how would they enforce such a thing? Johnson
and his malcontents have developed their arguments in the moral and
practical realms.
But
what of the realm of aesthetics? Literature? Art? Music? For this endeavor
we need to look to history for precedents. Here is where the charges
of neo-Lysenkoism may well trap theistic realists.
Soviet ministers regulated art through a doctrine of
socialist realism in the U.S.S.R. and its satellite countries. According
to the 1934 Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers, “socialist
realism demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation
of reality in its revolutionary development, [that] must be linked with
the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the
spirit of socialism.” Art, then, must reflect the “objective”
truth of the socialist perspective and eschew the decadence of bourgeois
life and art. Stalin had already realized the statute in his 1932 decree,
“On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations (Bartlett).”
To put it mildly, its enforcement was cruel.
Consider Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1977). On January
22, 1934, Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District
premiered in Leningrad at the Maly Operny Theater. It followed the enormous
success of his Symphony No. 1, instantly garnering accolades
that launched the young composer into the Soviet and international limelight.
In the following two years, the opera was performed 200 times, a remarkable
success for a man not yet 30.
But on January 26, 1936 Stalin and other Soviet elites
attended a performance at the Bolshoi. They didn't stay for the last
act. Two days later, an unsigned editorial in Pravda titled “Muddle
Instead of Music” attacked Lady Macbeth. Noted Shostakovich
scholar David Fanning wrote that the editorial distorted the realistic
character of the people's true art.
It
was the opening salvo in a campaign that resulted in the explicit subjugation
of the individual creative freedom of Soviet artists to the repressive
control of the Communist Party and State, through their obligatory adherence
to the aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism.
Shostakovich
was blacklisted for years. He was not alone. Prokofiev, Khatchaturian
and Miaskovsky were scorned as well. In Poland, Witold Lutoslawski was
censured for his First Symphony whose use of aggregate harmony
set off the apparatchiks' alarms. The doctrine that had started with
theater extended to “absolute” music devoid of any program.
Bureaucrats could read political agenda into anything they liked.
It would be unfair to say that socialist realist artifacts
were uniformly poor. Shostakovich himself wrote pieces that may well
embody the philosophy's noblest ideals and his genius saved him despite
years on a black list and frequent nights spent sleeping outside of
the front door of his apartment should the KGB have come for him. Too
many artists disappeared in the gulag, too few of whom, Solzhenitsyn
showed us, survived. History holds up Shostakovich as the unquestioned
king of Soviet music but the toll of the socialist realism and its enforcement
burdened him terribly.
Thankfully, the theistic realists have no such obvious
power today. Unquestionably, Phillip Johnson and his cohorts at the
Discovery Institute pine for the day that we, the United States citizens,
assume that God is “objectively real” in all of our endeavors.
But what would that assumption do to art or science? How would they
ensure that we follow the edict?
In art, it seems reasonable to speculate a reformulation
of the Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers excerpted earlier: “Theistic
realism demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation
of reality in its theistic development, [that] must be linked with the
task of ideological transformation and education of citizens in the
spirit of Christianity.” Art, then, should reflect the objective
truth of the Christian perspective and eschew the apostasy of philosophical
naturalism.
In the Soviet Union painting's public face took on a
decidedly unexpressive and reactionary tone. “Lenin with Villagers”
and “Roses for Stalin” each stand as well-crafted tours
de boredom that use impressionistic strokes to romanticize Lenin's and
Stalin's connection to the common folk. And let us not forget the endless
paintings of the proletariat carrying out their revolutionary duties,
grinding away at work in steel mills and farm fields. Will we substitute
Lenin with Yahweh, Stalin with Jesus, and the worker with the pious
worshipper in his Evangelical megachurch?
Looking to IDC, we see the wholesale redefinition of
science opening Pandora's box. If we accept the objective reality of
God into the epistemology of science, we extend a bridge to studies
currently classified as pseudoscience. Michael Behe admitted as much
on the witness stand when Eric Rothschild asked him, "But you are
clear, under your definition, the definition that sweeps in intelligent
design, astrology is also a scientific theory, correct?"
Behe responded, “Under my definition, a scientific
theory is a proposed explanation which focuses or points to physical,
observable data and logical inferences. There are many things throughout
the history of science which we now think to be incorrect which nonetheless
would fit that – which would fit that definition. Yes, astrology
is in fact one, and so is the ether theory of the propagation of light,
and many other – many other theories as well.” Astrology
may have been a science under medieval definitions, but it has been
falsified and turned into dead science.
The supernatural, though still non-testable, may be incorporated
into the explanation of phenomena. But science's inherent demand that
experimental research be subject to replication flies out the window
because experimentation must necessarily allow for the validity of both
revelation and inerrant arguments from authority. Under the current
operating definition of science and three centuries of its practice,
revelation is strictly forbidden because its factuality is inherently
unverifiable by any quantifiable standard.
What could revelations hope to objectively prove to us
anyway? What sort of revelations would count as scientifically valid?
Presumably those espoused by “scientists” who believe a
priori that God is objectively real. We might wonder, though,
if Pat Robertson's proclamations on the causes of natural disasters
might enable the Christian Broadcasting Network to receive National
Science Foundation research funding to determine if recent hurricanes
were actually caused by God's anger with America's decadent life. He
might even be able to get a grant to see how likely Dover, Pa. is to
get hit with a meteorite given his angry proclamations following the
ousting of the school board. This is too much like Lysenko to bear.
Let's not get near this greased precipice.
Theistic realism is a yellow brick road to bizarro world;
a road to medievalism with only the most rudimentary understanding of
nature; a path to beliefs that Jews need fresh blood to cure their alleged
sexual dysfunction; a fall into the oubliette of ignorance.
One would think that Galileo's example would continue
to instruct would-be theocrats. Science cannot and must not recognize
a simple argument from authority. Physicists today gleefully look at
Einstein's incorrect objections to quantum physics. “God does
not throw dice,” he said. Einstein held more political capital
than 99.9 % scientists but his objections proved irrelevant. The data
panned out. Naturalistic methodology carried the day and quantum theory
outshines nearly all discoveries of the twentieth century. Certainly
we mustn't extend even a rhetorical olive branch to those whose arguments
for the reality of their alleged creator demands that they argue from
ignorance, concoct false controversies, misquote, and lie to press their
agenda to overthrow the boogie man of materialism. Isn't there something
about removing the mote from your own eye first? What about bearing
false witness?
Theistic realism has no place in science and certainly
no place in government. In art, inspiration through revelation is entirely
appropriate. It would be unsurprising to learn that J.S. Bach, Antonio
Vivaldi, Anton Bruckner, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pþrt, John Tavener,
Henryk Gorecki, or Sofia Gubaidulina would identify or would have identified
themselves as theistic realists. All of them are or were deeply devout
theists testifying to their belief in God through music. Messiaen notably
heard the wonder of divinity in the calls of birds that he mimicked
in the bulk of his works perhaps inferring that God had designed them
and their calls. Visions of Mary permeate the music of Gorecki and Tavener.
But these are not the whole and surely the art of composers of the last
century from Metallica to Miles to Messiaen has shown that given the
opportunity to explore their means of subjective expression, artists
flourish.
What might become of the rest of art and much intellectual
activity under theistic realism?
Censored. Proscribed. Straitjacketed.
Poorly premised philosophy yields even poorer policies.
Let's not even allow Johnson and his theocratic cabal to get close.
The Soviet Union, the atheistic institution that it was, teaches us
a good lesson about so-called “realisms.” They demand dishonesty
by forcing conclusions on honest people no matter the evidence or their
inner convictions by demanding that they proclaim a vision that is not
necessarily their own. For the United States to remain the land of the
free, then it must not take one step down the road Johnson and the Discovery
Institute are building for us.
Peter
Dawson Buckland lectures in the English department at Penn State University
Park and in Integrative Arts and Music at Penn State Altoona. He is
also a writer and editor for Voices
of Central Pennsylvania, a monthly newspaper for whom he covered
Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005 and keeps a blog at http://formsmostbeautiful.blogspot.com.
He lives in State College, PA with his wife, infant son, and cat.
Works
Cited:
Bartlett, Rosamunde.
“Russian Federation.” Grove Music Online. 27 September
2007.
<http://www.grovemusic.com/>
Calvert, John and Harris,
William. “Teaching Origins in Public School Science Classes: Memorandum
and Opinion.” Intelligent Design Network. 2001. 24 August
2007.
<http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/legalopinion.htm>
Center for Renewal of
Science and Culture. “The Wedge Strategy.” AntiEvolution.org.
1999. 24 August 2007.
<http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html>
Design Inference. “Intelligent
Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology.” Design Inference.
1999. 24 August 2007.
<http://www.designinference.com/inteldes.htm>
DeWolf, David. “Evolution
and Dissent.” Boston Globe. 11 June 2007: A11. ProQuest.
National Newspapers (27). Pattee Lib., University Park, PA. 24 August
2007.
Elsberry,
Wesley and Perakh Mark. “How
Intelligent Design Advocates Turn the Sordid
Lessons from Soviet and Nazi History Upside Down.”
22 September
2007
<http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/eandp.pdf>
Fanning, David. “Shostakovich,
Dmitry.” Grove Music Online. 27 September 2007.
<http://www.grovemusic.com/>
Forrest, Barbara and
Gross, Paul. “The Wedge of Intelligent Design: Retrograde Science,
Schooling, and Society.” Scientific Values and Civic Virtues.
Ed. Noretta Koertge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 191-214.
Grothe, D.J. “Point
of Inquiry: Eugenie Scott – Evolution versus Religious Belief.”
February 9 2007. Point of Inquiry.org. 24 September 2007.
<http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=47>
Johnson, Phillip. Reason
in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education.
Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1995.
---. “Starting
a Conversation about Evolution.” Access Research Network.
1996. 24 August 2007
<http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/ratzsch.htm>
Middle District Court
of Pennsylvania. Kitzmiller
v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 12 (October 19),
AM Session, Part 1. Harrisburg, Pa. 2005. 22 September 2007
<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day12am.html>
Page, Tim. “His
Master's Voice; The ongoing debate over a musical genius and his controversial role in Soviet history.” Washington
Post. 13 June 2004. T9. ProQuest. National
Newspapers (27). Pattee Lib.,
University Park, PA. 24 August 2007.
Pennock, Robert T. “The
Prospects for a Theistic Science.” Perspectives on Science
and Christian Faith 50: 3 (1998): 205-209.
Perakh, Mark. “The
Dream World of William Dembski's Creationism.” Skeptic
11:4 (2005): 54-65.
Weitzel, Robert. “Creationism's
Holy Grail: The Intelligent Design of a Peer-Reviewed Paper.” Skeptic 11:4 (2005): 66-69.
|
