"The Scotsman"
Mon 11 Mar 2002
George Kerevan: Fundamentalist religion
IN THE six months since the calamitous events of 11 September, I ve come to
feel a member of an embattled minority: I m an atheist. Or rather a
non-theist. Since the universe is perfectly explicable without invoking
some supernatural creator, there s no point in wasting time hypothesising
about one. Unfortunately, the rest of the world increasingly feels otherwise.
I understand what is happening. My baby-boomer generation lived with the
comfortable assurances of the Cold War and the military doctrine of
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It was spine-chilling, but you knew
where you were politically, culturally and technologically.
But today we have something much worse than worrying about the Bomb:
seeming uncertainty in every direction. And 11 September just made it worse.
The great Marxist utopia which sustained a century of youthful revolt has
gone up in smoke. Kids have so much choice of career they often end up
choosing none. The world is suddenly a lot smaller but all the institutions
of global governance created after the Second World War have become
obsolete overnight. Once invulnerable America, beneath its new-found
patriotism, feels open to direct attack for the first time. No wonder there
is a personal retreat into the cocoon of fundamentalist religion.
This trend is coming from the educated West as well as the culturally
demoralised East. One very dear member of my immediate family, who took an
excellent degree, is utterly convinced she has a personal guardian angel.
According to a survey by the journal Scientific American, some 45 per cent
of Americans think God created Adam 6,000 years ago.
This new mystical and irrational trend is now poised to enter the
mainstream. Fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the face of
overwhelming scientific evidence that their God created human beings only
6,000 years ago, are now in control of a state-funded secondary school in
Gateshead. This is Emmanuel City Technology College, one of Tony Blair s
much-lauded faith schools. The school was built with a £2 million donation
from Sir Peter Vardy, an evangelical Christian behind the Reg Vardy car
dealerships. Mr Vardy is sponsoring another such school in Middlesbrough.
It is not my purpose to be snide or disrespectful of the religious beliefs
of others. But a fundamentalist takeover of a state school such as Emmanuel
is a disturbing precedent, despite the fact the college produces excellent
academic results.
For once you step away from the precious inheritance of the Scottish
Enlightenment that we base belief on proof not revelation, then you close
the door on progress - economic, scientific and social. And you open the
door to intolerance: the 11 September kamikazes believed in the literal
interpretation of the Koran, which includes the Genesis account of creation.
The new western fundamentalism has launched a frontal assault on
Enlightenment values in the shape of a modern brand of pseudo-scientific
creationism. This has appeared recently from America and been taken up by
places like Emmanuel College. To give it a veneer of scientific
respectability, it is termed Intelligent Design Theory. Among its chief
exponents is William Dembski, an American mathematical philosopher.
Dembski s approach is to deploy modern information science that has emerged
out of the computer revolution. In essence he claims that organic systems
such as the DNA, which encodes the blueprint to grow a human being, exhibit
too much "information content" to be the product of mere chance.
Everyday objects with a high information content - books, computer disks,
musical scores - are products of human design. Says Dembski says no known
physical laws randomly produce this complex ordered structure. It is
reasonable to conclude, by analogy, that the DNA molecule is likewise the
product of an intelligent designer - God.
Dembski and fellow Intelligent Designers often quote the work of the
maverick English atheist astronomer, the late Fred Hoyle. Hoyle attempted
to measure the probability of one simple enzyme - a basic chemical building
block of living organisms - coming into existence by chance. He calculated
a 1 in 1020 (a 1 with 20 zeros behind it) probability of it occurring by
random chance.
However, even the simplest life form requires literally thousands of
different enzymes with each one tailor-made to perform a specific function.
That ups the probability to 1 in 1040,000 (1 followed by 40,000 zeros) -
close to impossibility.
Hoyle concluded: "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a
super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and
biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in
nature." Hoyle, by the way, did not believe this intelligent agency was
God. He thought we were an alien experiment.
References to Intelligent Design sound very mathematical and avoid
embarrassing references to Genesis, but it is still scientifically
misleading. Evolution is not a random process. It does not try every
combination. Evolution by natural selection involves systematic weeding out
of failures.
A monkey hitting typewriter keys at random could not accidentally write
Hamlet as the number of possible combinations would take longer than the
lifetime of the universe to work through. But add a programme routine that
automatically eliminates misspelled words, wrong grammar and bad sentences,
and you get a script. Eliminating organisms that fail to adapt to a
changing environment is Mother Nature s spelling routine.
Another spurious argument proposed by Intelligent Design theorists is the
concept of "irreducible complexity". This term was invented by the
molecular biologist Michael Behe in his book, Darwin s Black Box.
Irreducible complexity arises whenever all the parts of a structure have to
be present and functional simultaneously for it to work, indicating that
the structure could not possibly have been gradually built by natural
selection. Behe s favourite example of an irreducibly complex object is a
mousetrap. If you take away any of the elements that make the trap work it
will lose its function. On the other hand, there is no way to assemble a
mousetrap gradually from a natural phenomenon, because it won t work until
the last piece is assembled.
Only one problem with this argument: unlike a mouse trap, natural
organisms, including the recently decoded human genome, are full of
redundant parts left over by evolution. They even serve a purpose. If a
gene (our biological software) gets duplicated by mutation, one copy is
freed from immediate constraints and can slowly diverge in structure from
the original, eventually taking over new functions.
I am not in favour of closing Emmanuel College for its rejection of
evolutionary science. As long as we have a genuine free market in ideas,
the creationists will be defeated ultimately by scientific truth. That s
why we should support the forthcoming National Science Week and the
upcoming Edinburgh International Science Festival.
And I understand the post Cold War, post 11 September world seems a more
complex and dangerous place and therefore people need the reassurance of
new creation myths to explain their place in the universe. But the truth,
as Hamlet noted, lies not in the heavens but in ourselves. Only if we don t
have the courage to realise we are the masters of our own fate, and not the
pawns of some "Creator" and His rulebook, will today s uncertainties become
tomorrow s disasters.
Oryginal: http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/opinion.cfm?id=271042002
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