Author: Ophelia Benson

John Sutherland interviewed Michael Behe in the Guardian yesterday. (P Z comments on the interview at Pharyngula). He didn’t ask some questions that it seems to me he might have.

JS: It’s no secret that you are a Catholic. But, as I understand it, your scientific theory does not predicate God in any form whatsoever. You’ve suggested that the designer could even be some kind of evil alien. Is that right?

MB: That’s exactly correct. All that the evidence from biochemistry points to is some very intelligent agent. Although I find it congenial to think that it’s God, others might prefer to think it’s an alien – or who knows? An angel, or some satanic force, some new age power. Something we don’t know anything about yet.

What is the difference? What’s the difference between an evil alien, God, an alien, an angel, some satanic force, some new age power? They’re all the same thing, really – just a big X, a big ?, a big ‘who knows’, a big wild card, a Something, a Whatever. A designer.

In other words it’s such an empty category it might as well not be there. It’s just a substitute for ‘I don’t know’. So why not just go with ‘I don’t know’? Because it’s more cuddly to suggest that it might be God, even though ‘God’ could in fact translate to ‘evil alien.’ (Apart from anything else, God is pretty obviously an alien, right? I mean what else is he going to be? A local?)

But the more basic unasked question is closer to the beginning of the interview.

JS: Is there a discourse problem here? Metaphysics can’t engage meaningfully with physics? Does intelligent design belong in science?

MB: I believe it does. I see it as straightforward empirical observation. One analogy I like to use is to Mount Rushmore. If you had never heard of Mount Rushmore, you would see immediately the images of four people and immediately recognise that to be design. There wouldn’t be any question of metaphysics there. You can tell that something was designed from its physical structure.

But then what designed the designer? ‘You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function – like in a hand. And so it’s the appearance of design that everybody’s trying to explain. So that if Darwin’s theory doesn’t explain it we’re left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed.’ But that’s not an explanation, because it leaves you exactly where you were. So who designed the designer? Why do you think saying ‘Intelligent Design’ is explanatory when obviously anything that intentionally designed all the complex things in the universe would have to be a lot more complex than they are? You think those less complex things have to be explained – so why don’t you think the same thing about the more complex thing, only more so?

Is it just because you can’t see it? You see the flagellum under the microscope, and think ‘It looks designed’ – but you don’t see the Designer under the microscope, or through the telescope, or any other way, so, unimaginatively enough, you just forget to wonder who designed that? Don’t you think that’s kind of simple-minded? Because I do.

It’s such an obvious problem, and it’s so fatal – it’s odd that it so seldom gets raised.

Salman Rushdie has a few suggestions. Let’s hope his meet up with Irshad Manji’s and those of other reformers and start to displace the putative ‘leadership’ and ‘representativeness’ of the MCB. Let’s hope the whole project thrives.

Reformed Islam would reject conservative dogmatism and accept that, among other things, women are fully equal to men; that people of other religions, and of no religion, are not inferior to Muslims; that differences in sexual orientation are not to be condemned, but accepted as aspects of human nature; that anti-Semitism is not OK; and that the repression of free speech by the thin-skinned ideology of easily-taken “offence” must be replaced by genuine, robust, anything-goes debate in which there are no forbidden ideas or no-go areas.

Doesn’t that sound blissful? Wouldn’t it just make a huge difference if Islam were like that?

Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes and stop worrying so much about locking up their daughters. It would emerge from the intellectual ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.

Ghettoes, locking up, subservience, shadows. Reform is about emerging from all that. It’s a hopeful vision. Let’s hope people can start to see it that way.

I’m shocked – I went and forgot B&W’s birthday. It was days ago – September 10th. How could I forget?! Well I didn’t exactly forget; I thought it was later – late September or maybe October. But I forgot to check until today, so it comes to the same thing. How could I forget? I never have before. I suppose it’s because one of its progenitors doesn’t like it any more, poor little thing, so perhaps it seems tactless to fuss about birthdays. But anyway, another year older it is. It’s three. Last year it was two. The year before that it was one. The year before that it began. Happy Birthday, B&W.

Madeleine Bunting. What does she mean by it.

Why is it that a significant section of liberal and left-leaning opinion has signed up with such relish to the “clash of civilisations” argument? Its champions in the media may not phrase it as such, but you can hear the creak of the drawbridge being pulled up: they believe they are surrounded by enemies – Muslims and their dastardly non-Muslim apologists – and must defend to the last man the checklist of universal Enlightenment values that sustain their mission.

That’s quite a high proportion of rhetoric to argument or straightforward factual claim. That bit about not phrasing it as such – what that means is that the argument she’s talking about is not in fact a “clash of civilisations” argument, it’s just that she chooses to call it that because it’s a pejorative. And the silly use of ‘Muslims’ as if a significant section of liberal and left-leaning opinion thinks of all Muslims as enemies. And the remarkable sneer at universal Enlightenment values – yeah, like the ones that allow her to leave the house, and that allow her to have a job, and that encourage the existence of newspapers to have jobs on, and that create large literate audiences for newspaper columns, and that forbid the government or the churches or mosques to censor her columns. Those universal Enlightenment values. What kind of life does Madeleine Bunting think she would have without them, exactly? I’ll tell you what kind of life she would have: she would be married (whether she wanted to be or not), she would have a lot of children (whether she wanted them or not), she would spoil the boys and deprive the girls, she would would go nowhere without permission, she would do nothing but tend her husband and children (boy children especially), she would have no job and no one would know or care anything whatever about her opinion on any subject. The idea that Enlightenment values should be universal simply means thinking that if other women would like to try to live the way Bunting and millions of women all around her live, they ought to be able to. I don’t think that is anything to sneer at.

How do British values look to an African? Perhaps they might see through our illusions quicker than we can, and see the brittle, episodic relationships which constitute many lonely lives; the disconnectedness whereby strangers live together as neighbours, colleagues, even friends and lovers, with little knowledge and less commitment to each other; our preoccupation with things; our ever more desperate dependence on stimulants from alcohol to porn.

Which ‘African’? Which African do you mean, Madders? Do you mean for instance the women of that corner of northern Niger where the men control the food storehouse, even when they have left home during a famine and their wife or wives and children are starving? Hmm? Or the children in Congo and Angola accused of witchcraft and tortured to death by way of exorcism? Do you think they would ‘see through’ our ‘illusions’? How about the children conscripted into armies? How about the children desperate for an education who can’t get one? How about the vast numbers of people dying of Aids? How about the people whose market stalls and homes and lives were smashed in Mugabe’s ‘urban renewal’ program? How about the lucky, lucky people of Darfur? What about their neighbours and their commitments, eh? Do you really – really, seriously – prefer whatever values cause those dire situations to flourish to the ones around you? Really?

So an elite squabbles about Islam’s take on gay rights and gender equality in a charade of moralistic grandstanding.

A charade of moralistic grandstanding – unlike, for instance, speculating on how British values would look to ‘an African’. That’s not moralistic grandstanding at all, while thinking women and gays should have rights everywhere in the world and not just in our own privileged section of it – that’s mere showing off.

Here is a quick list of some of the Enlightenment legacy that we need to keep working on: the relationship of reason to emotion and faith (of all kinds, not just religious, most particularly our faith in humanity); a broader account of human nature beyond the bankrupted belief in the perfectibility of man; more meanings of freedom than the freedom to shop…

The perfectibility of man? Is there a liberal in the universe, whether muscular or flabby, who believes in that? I’ve certainly never met one. (It’s also amusing that that jibe follows immediately on the plea for faith in humanity. Well which is it, Cookie?) And more meanings of freedom than the freedom to shop – oh, the hell with it, that’s too stupid even to bother contradicting.

Bunting could do with some enlightenment herself.

Simon Schama comes up with a great many zingers on the devout slacker of the free world.

George W Bush has decreed that…there is to be a further day of solemnities on which the nation will pray for the unnumbered victims of Hurricane Katrina. Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command. If you feel the prickly heat of politics, summon a hymn to make it go away; make accountability seem a blasphemy. Thus has George Bush become the Archbishop of Washington even as his aura as lord protector slides into the putrid black lagoon, bobbing with cadavers and slick with oil, that has swallowed New Orleans

Zing! Exactly. He knows how to chuckle and how to bow the head, and nothing else. Not much of a repertoire. And the blasphemy bit is exactly right: that is just what he is doing with the piety schtick: he’s wrapping himself in the deity so that anyone who argues will look like one of them there values-free atheists. It’s creepy, it’s bogus, and it’s coercive. And people are finally calling him on it! It’s about time…

So this weekend it was predictable that the president would shamelessly invoke the spirit of 9/11 to cover his shamefully exposed rear end…But comparisons with 9/11…will only serve now to reinforce the differences between what the two calamities said about America, and especially about those entrusted with its government. The carnage of 9/11 generated an intense surge of patriotic solidarity, even with America’s Babylon, a city scandalously and notoriously indifferent to Heartland values…Blood and food donations piled up and a mayor disregarded his personal safety to be where he had to be, in the thick of the inferno; his daily press conferences astoundingly bullshit-free, unafraid of bearing bad news; treating his fellow-citizens, mirabile dictu, like grown-ups.

Zing, again. Oh, man, how I long – how I crave – to be treated like a grown-up, how I crave for all of us to be treated like grown-ups. How I loathe and despise and detest this regimen in which we are all treated like soppy weak-minded children. This permanent on-going insult to every one of us, in which we’re constantly talked to as if we believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

It was this redeeming sense of national community that protected the president from any kind of serious political scrutiny whenever he invoked 9/11 as the overwhelming reason for launching the invasion of Iraq. As John Kerry found to his cost, unexamined passion triumphed over reasoned argument. Bush won re-election simply by making debate a kind of treason; an offence against the entombed.

Zing again. Unexamined passion whups reasoned argument, over and over and over again, and the infantilization proceeds apace.

And what they saw, as so many of them have said, was the brutality, destitution, desperation and chaos of the Third World. Instead of instinctive solidarity and compassion, they have witnessed a descent into a Hobbesian state of nature; with Leviathan offering fly-by compassion, 30,000ft up, and then, once returned to the White House, broadcasting a defensive laundry list of deliveries, few of which showed up when and where they were needed. Instead of acts of mutual succour, there was the police force of Gretna, south of New Orleans, sealing off a bridge against incoming evacuees, and turning them back under threats of gunfire…And instead of an urban community of every conceivable race, religion and even class brought together by trauma, another kind of city, startlingly divided by race and fortune, has symbolised everything about America that makes its people uneasy, ashamed and, finally, perhaps lethally for the conservative ascendancy and its myths, angry.

Damn right. That’s exactly what it makes us – ashamed, and angry. And so it should. Even David Brooks – as smug a commentator as you’d want to find – last week said that leaving the poor behind in New Orleans was like abandoning the wounded on the battlefield. I for one spent the entire Clinton administration (to say nothing of its predecessors) wondering and whining ‘But what about inequality?’ Katrina did one hell of a job of making it clear why inequality does matter.

Historians ought not to be in the prophecy business but I’ll venture this one: Katrina will be seen as a watershed in the public and political life of the US, because it has put back into play the profound question of American government…Fema, which under Bill Clinton had been a cabinet level agency reporting directly to the president, had under his successor been turned into a hiring opportunity for political hacks and cronies and disappeared into the lumbering behemoth of Homeland Security. It was Fema that failed the Gulf; Fema which failed to secure the delivery of food, water, ice and medical supplies desperately asked for by the Mayor of New Orleans; and it was the president and his government-averse administration that had made Fema a bad joke. In the last election campaign George W Bush asked Americans to vote for him as the man who would best fulfil the most essential obligation of government: the impartial and vigilant protection of its citizens. Now the fraudulence of the claim has come back to haunt him, not in Baghdad but in the drowned counties of Louisiana. In the recoil, disgust and fury felt by millions of Americans at this abdication of responsibility, the president – notwithstanding his comically self-serving promise to lead an inquiry into the fiasco – will assuredly reap the whirlwind.

I think so. Some people think this will fade the way everything else fades – and maybe so, but I don’t think so. I think this one bit too deep – way too deep. I think the shame is real, and will keep the anger from fading. I think it’s another Emmett Till, another Little Rock, another Selma. I think people are going to want something better than small gummint and pious cronyism and greed is good.