The New Republic

In 1993, the journalist Jonathan Rauch published a book called
Kindly Inquisitors, in which he catalogued contemporary threats to
the Enlightenment tradition of seeking truth through logical or
empirical discourse. One of Rauch's points was that, while this
(classical) liberal system for amassing knowledge appeared to be
under attack from both the religious right and the multicultural
left, in fact the two groups were making a version of the same
argument: Mainstream science didn't accord their beliefs the respect
they deserved, whether it was creation science on the one hand or
feminist or Afro- centric science on the other.Rauch's book has held up remarkably well in the twelve years since
it was published. This is particularly so in light of the current
debate over intelligent design (ID)--the idea, popular on the
right, that life is too complex to have resulted from random
variation. Even President Bush has suggested, as the creation
scientists (and multiculturalists) of the 1980s and 1990s did
before him, that both sides of the supposed debate be treated as
legitimate in public school curricula.

But there was one thing Rauch didn't anticipate. At the time, he
suggested that, even though creationists had adopted the tactics of
the academic left-- the demand for equal time--they still believed
in objective truths. They just didn't think all of these truths
were discoverable by science. By contrast, today's IDers have gone
further and adopted the epistemology of the left--the idea that
ostensibly scientific truths may be relative.

The animating principle of the postmodern left is the notion that
truth follows from power and not from its intrinsic rightness. It's
a conceit that began in the humanities but eventually spread to
hard sciences like physics. "The point is that neither logic nor
mathematics escapes the contamination of the social," as postmodern
pooh-bah Stanley Aronowitz has put it. What makes this approach so
radical is its implication that the way to win intellectually is to
win politically.

In making their arguments, the postmodernists rely heavily on the
work of historians of science like Thomas Kuhn. It was Kuhn who
famously argued that scientific knowledge proceeds as a sequence of
"paradigm shifts"--revolutions in the way we understand the
world--and that the shifts occur not simply when the evidence in
favor of the new paradigm becomes overwhelming, but when the people
invested in the old paradigm are in some sense defeated (which may
not occur until long after they're proved wrong). Mainstream
science has taken from Kuhn the belief that evidence and logic are
necessary, if not quite sufficient, conditions for a paradigm shift
and that, in the long run, successive shifts bring society closer
to objective truth. Where the postmodernists go awry is in their
emphasis on Kuhn's relativism.

Unfortunately, these postmodernist ideas have become a staple of the
ID movement. As laid out in a strategic memo produced by the
Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading backer of
intelligent design, "Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud
portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals
or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal
forces." There was nothing particularly objective about this view,
according to the IDers. Instead, applying the same reading of Kuhn
that the postmodernists embrace, they argue that it was simply the
result of a political struggle between insurgents and the
establishment. (In fact, the IDers frequently cite Kuhn to this
effect.) Probably the clearest example of this comes courtesy of
Bruce K. Chapman, the Discovery Institute's president. "All ideas
that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart,
whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics, after a few
people keep knocking away at it, " he recently told The New York
Times. But that's nuts. Germ theory, relativity, the idea that the
earth is round--with apologies to Tom Friedman, the fact that all
have withstood the occasional challenge suggests that truth counts
for something.

Chapman might protest that he's simply proposing a more accurate
alternative to evolution, the same way Darwin proposed a more
accurate alternative to creationism. But ID isn't a new theory,
just a new attempt to advance an old one, with some new empirical
claims thrown in for good measure. As Jerry Coyne has pointed out
("The Faith that Dare Not Speak Its Name," August 22 %amp% 29),
scientists can discredit ID using the exact same evidence they used
to debunk creationism. Once you realize this, it's no longer
possible to interpret Chapman as echoing the belief in a steady
progression toward truth.

Like all conservatives, of course, the IDers claim to decry
relativism and to embrace absolutes. But, for them, the claim is
logically incoherent in a way it wasn't when it came from their
creationist predecessors. When a proposition is empirically false,
as both creationism and ID (to the extent that it makes empirical
claims) are, you're free to assert its truth; you just can't call
it science. The creationists had no problem with this; they just
rejected any science that contradicted the Bible. But the IDers
aspire to scientific truth. Unfortunately, the only way to claim
that something empirically false is scientifically true is to
question science's capacity for sorting out truth from falsehood,
the same way postmodernists do.

Conservatives were quick to point out the danger of this view in the
'80s and '90s. They argued that a science that rejected the idea of
truth was vulnerable to the most inane forms of intellectual
hucksterism. And they were right. It's not hard to imagine scams
like cold fusion or the Scientologist critique of psychiatric drugs
gaining ground in a world where science's ability to identify
knowledge has been undermined. (Among other monuments to postmodern
thought was the idea that E=mc might be a "sexed equation" that
"privileges the speed of light over other speeds," as
Belgian-French theorist Luce Irigaray once asserted.)

Americans don't like thinking of themselves as backward. As a
result, the risk from science-rejecting creationists hasn't been
particularly acute in recent decades. But most people don't have
very strong views on the philosophy of science. If, unlike the
postmodern left, the ID movement can enlist mainstream
conservatives in questioning science's capacity to produce
objective truth, then it's by no means clear the effort won't
succeed. In that case, it will end up threatening a whole lot more
than just evolution.

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