Editor,
Two things distinguish human beings from other creatures in nature: a unique ability to think and a general unwillingness to use that ability.
Plato describes Socrates as having at one point to remind his listeners that they should be willing to follow the argument wherever it leads. We need to be urged to do this. We all have the ability to understand where our reasoning is leading us. But it is a matter of character whether we are willing to follow it and figure out how things really are, rather than how we might wish them to be.
Religion is an example of both these human characteristics. A religion is a set of doctrines intended to answer the deepest questions we can ask. What is the nature of reality? Where did life come from? What is the best way to live?
These are profound questions that serious thinkers have been struggling with for centuries and that only human beings can even understand, let alone hope to answer. Yet the very same people who raise these deep questions often turn around and accept the first answers they hear from their religion, without a moment's further thought.
Part of the problem stems from the nature of religion itself. Since religions are whole sets of doctrines, they provide answers to all these deep questions at once, in a sort of package deal.
What's wrong with that? What's wrong with accepting a package deal of doctrines, where all the deepest questions of human life are answered at once?
The answer was given long ago by Bishop Berkeley, who noted that few men think, yet all have opinions. We all want answers to these deep questions - that's an outcome of our human ability to think. But accepting a whole set of doctrines at once is a sign of our unwillingness to use that thinking ability.
You can see this dishonesty in many who advocate teaching intelligent design in schools. They claim that they are just trying to present another theory of the origins of life, as if after careful weighing of all the evidence, they had discovered two equally supported theories and both should get a fair hearing. But of course that is not so.
The theory of evolution is a rich, empirically grounded theory that forms the basis for virtually the whole of contemporary biology. It is as well-supported empirically as the heliocentric theory of the solar system, which is also "just a theory," as they say.
But intelligent design is the theory that, gosh, some things are just so complex they must have been designed by some greater intelligence. This theory has led to no significant empirical research and has no empirical support.
So ask yourself, why do advocates of intelligent design push it so passionately? Is it just a coincidence that virtually all supporters of this allegedly scientific "theory" happen to be religious fundamentalists and almost none have serious scientific training?
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G.F. Schueler
UNM faculty
