While I think this story from the Onion pillories intelligent design nicely, it is distressing to discover that numerous high profile foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, both known for their support of science and education programs, are supporting the Discovery Institute, the think tank that promotes intelligent design and packages creationism as a legitimate science for our nation’s schools. Both foundations stress their donations are strictly for a project analyzing transportation solutions in the Pacific Northwest at the Discovery Institute and not for the promulgation of intelligent design.
You know, the Nazis came up with the autobahn and Volkswagen, both admirable transportation solutions. I wonder if the Gates Foundation would’ve thrown Hitler a few million back 1930’s?
Now granted the Discovery Institute is not about to start gassing Jews and Poles, but the support of these respected institutions lends credibility to the Discovery Institute, their obscurantist agenda, and the pseudo-science they champion. There is a strong tradition of anti-intellectualism in this country, whether it is expressed in conservative Christianity’s right wing politics or namby-pamby New Age crystal rubbers. They are both the enemy of science and rational thought, preferring instead easy, simplified answers to the complexity of nature and the universe.
Much has been made about this ‘war on science‘ in our cultural landscape. It continually amazes me that people refuse to believe in the basic tenets of science, expressing distrust and unease about scientists and how they are going to be the downfall of humanity, yet happily consume plasma tv’s, cellphones, antibiotics and modern medicine. I look around at religion and all I see is millenia of war and suffering, murder and oppression in the name of various gods – violence done is contradiciton to the very beliefs and commandments of religion. In four hundred years science has managed to raise humanity far above the quagmire of disease and violence that centuries of religion imposed on our species. Science isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t claim to be. But science is honest and willing to undergo deep changes in theories of reality – if the evidence supports such a change. This capacity for self discovery and renewal is something that religion, by it’s very nature, will never possess.
Given a choice between religion and science, I choose science.