Bill Frist, intellectual embarrassment, needs a wake-up call
Sent August 20, 2005

 
Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, deserves a smack upside the head with a college biology text.

Either he never took a course in evolutionary biology, wasn’t paying attention when it was taught, or has forgotten anything he ever knew about it. Whichever of these three is the reason, any one of them renders him an embarrassment — to the scientifically literate and to the electorate. Mind you, physicians aren’t automatically scientists, although they’d like to think they are; but the ones who don’t do real research (and Frist, a surgeon, is among them) aren’t steeped in scientific method. Perhaps that underlies his latest lapse in judgment: he now touts the ridiculous notion that so-called “intelligent design” should be taught in schools alongside the rather well-documented theory of evolution, as if they were somehow equivalent in scientific value. They are not.

Far from it: evolution has years upon accumulated years of evidence behind it, evidence that has been tested, peer reviewed, and published. The research that has produced that evidence can be readily duplicated, and has been time and again. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a seemingly reasonable sounding cover for creationism, which is not a scientific theory in any sense of that phrase but a mere assertion, a religious claim — and like so many religious assertions, it and its proponents suffer from the conceit that they don’t actually have to produce any evidence for their assertion in order for it to be taken seriously. Real chutzpah, that.

They’re wrong: science isn’t like missionary work — faith alone is meaningless. You have to produce actual data or other evidence to be taken seriously in science. So of course the creationists must produce some before they can expect those who enact public policy to listen — but, sadly for them, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting creationism/intelligent design, merely circular arguments repeated endlessly in the hopes that the repetition will, in time, wear down those demanding actual proof. Not bloody likely. But then, the proponents of creationism/intelligent design don’t even bother with logic, let alone proof: what they hope is to sway people whose own knowledge of biology is weak or nonexistent through emotional arguments (given that they have no evidence to support their claim, emotional sway is the only available resort).

The appropriate place for teaching creationism/intelligent design (if one can actually consider teaching a mere notion appropriate in the first place) is either in Sunday school during religious instruction or in a course on critical thinking as an example of the lack threof. That’s it — nowhere else. Unless and until there is solid, extensive, well-documented, repeatable research that produces solid evidence in favor of intelligent design is at least as solid as, say, that in support of evolution — even suggesting the mention of creationism/intelligent design in any grade school or high school classroom in the U.S. is in and of itself inappropriate, irrational, and unjustifiable.

Given this, why are those who set public policy or legislate (like Frist) bothering to listen to creationists regarding intelligent design? Because elected officials are more interested in the ballot box than in proof — and they think they’re better off paying attention to those who don’t have and don’t require proof of intelligent design so long as those forces represent a significant presence at the polls. Politicians and policymakers who believe this are not only wrong but also have the wrong priorities: they have a duty to our society as a whole, present and future, not to vocal, pushy religious minorities or even to religious majorities. And they can find the correct principle within the First Amendment’s disestablishment clause — the one that says government may not favor any cult or creed, and thus church and state must remain forever separate.

The bottom line here is that people of faith are free to believe whatever they wish to believe, but their rights end where the rights of others begin — which means that none may impose their religious views on anyone else or enact those religious views into civil law in any way whatsoever, because to do so would be at our expense. Making public schools teach creationism/intelligent design is doing exactly that — and as such is automatically unreasonable, unconstitutional, and unforgiveable. Bill Frist should know that.

In fact, he probably does: he just thinks there’s some future advantage at the ballot box in giving grave injury to the U.S. Constitution, and civil liberties for the rest of us be damned. Which is what really clinches that smack upside the head: it just might shake his brains (and whatever good sense he has left) back into place.