American Vision Eric Rauch
Liberal politics is at a crossroads. Humanism is being attacked by way of the Intelligent Design movement. If biological Darwinism can be shown to be nothing more than a philosophy that gives meaning to the facts, then, by implication, humanists are left in the lake without a paddle. The Darwinists hold fast to their “first principles” as tenaciously as most Christians, and yet we are the ones who get ridiculed for having a “silly, wishful-thinking faith.” Two recent articles by British authors exemplify this point forcefully.
Olivia Judson, writing an editorial for the New York Times entitled “Why I’m Happy I Evolved,”1 shows the sheer ignorance that passes as “science” on both sides of the Atlantic. After spending several paragraphs fawning over little-known “facts” about creatures and organisms in our ecosystem, she lets a huge admission fly. “It’s not that I have a fetish for obscure facts. It’s that small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature’s infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable.” She then goes on to tell of some of her “predictions,” which are not predictions but generalizations based on previous observed events. Her evolutionary paradigm is so strong that she actually believes that the following situation is a prediction. “If you were to discover a new species and you told me that the male is much bigger than the female, I would tell you what the mating system is likely to be: males fight each other for access to females.” If this is a prediction, then I can equally claim that if you bring me a child that I have never met, I would be able to predict that this child has two parents, one male and one female. If hers is a “prediction,” then so is mine.
