Creationism as Intelligent Design

Just before Christmas, John Jones, a Federal Court Judge in Pennsylvania, reached an historic judgement. In response to a claim by parents of students at Dover High School, to the effect that a decision by the since ousted School Board to include intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution in the curriculum was unconstitutional, Judge Jones agreed.

The parents had argued that the proposal to raise intelligent design to the level of a scientific theory was a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution which prohibits the state establishment of religion. The Judge’s decision demonstrated beyond question that what its advocates refer to as ‘intelligent design’ is in fact a supernatural explanation of the natural world which relies on religious faith and asserts that the hand of God created our world. It is ultimately an attempt by creationists to obscure the religious basis of their intentions and to dress their religious convictions in the clothes of scientific theory.

Thirty other States are lining up to include intelligent design into the school curriculum so one suspects that Judge Jones’s ruling may not be the last word on the matter. His judgement nevertheless contributes an element of common sense to a debate which is not of interest to America alone, but to many other countries as well. Thus the debate about science and creationism has become a major issue for New Zealand, and it was significant that the New Zealand Herald’s sole editorial for Boxing Day addressed the US judgement and was headed “Intelligent Ruling on Creationism”. Like the USA, New Zealand was founded as a secular state in which religion has no official status, but New Zealand has on the one hand been far more strict in maintaining the separation of Church and State in the legislative process while on the other being far more liberal in allowing for example, schools to include prayers at morning assembly if that is consistent with the school’s ethos.

While Christian fundamentalists make a lot of noise in New Zealand, unless they elect a Christian fundamentalist party to power, they have no significant voice in government. At the last election under New Zealand’s system of proportional representation in which governments are frequently coalitions of parties, their representation in Parliament went from tiny to miniscule after the leader of the major Christian party was jailed for sexual offences. So the current situation that pertains in the United States, where there is ostensibly a separation between Church and State, yet through the Christian fundamentalist ascendancy within the Republican Party there has developed during the Bush presidency a virtual Christian fundamentalist State, is simply not possible in New Zealand.

The Herald editorial took the view that a victory for the creationists “would limit the horizons of Western civilization”. I imagine their argument is that the Enlightenment project with its gift of rational enquiry which has prompted the diminution of superstitious explanations for reality, would become fatally flawed, and human experience and progress retarded should the creationists have their way. Their long campaign through the US court system from the 1920’s onwards has revealed the objective of placing curbs on human knowledge and turning science into a religion. In the Pennsylvania case their submission was that intelligent design is a science even though it fundamentally contradicts scientific method. The Herald is encouraged that while the creationists may have had the better of the earlier court battles, the recent trends has been for the courts to have taken the view that creationism violates the constitution.

I have also followed the debate about evolution and creation within the UK closely. There it is a focus for serious academic debate and I have enjoyed reading books by one of the leading Oxford Darwinists, Richard Dawkins. His works can be at the same time compelling and irritating and in respect to one of his recent books, The Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Holloway, the retired Primus (Archbishop) of the Scottish Episcopal Church, declared that it ought to be required theological reading. There are extraordinarily poetic passages in Dawkins’ works, and I read him in the same way as I read the Bible, not as literally true, but as appealing to the human spirit, to our imagination, and to the power to transform our lives. But his Darwinian theories are no more ultimate explanations than the Genesis view that the world was created in six days. Paradoxically both are also ‘true’ in that they are true to the human quest for meaning in the world we inhabit.

I am encouraged by the Pennsylvania court case not because I believe that science can provide all the answers, for science has in my view significantly failed to provide for example, solutions to world poverty. Nor do I wish to deny genuine creationists the opportunity to freely propagate their views as there is no reason that high school students should not be encouraged to discuss the relative merits and disadvantages of creationism in their classes. But I am committed to an open society in which theories can be created, debated and tested, while as an anarchist I cannot ultimately subject myself to a theory. Such an act of subjugation would cede authority to something which may be fallible. Rather I affirm the words of Bukanin who said that he was a lover of liberty which is the only condition under which all latent human talents and attributes may be developed in their most complete form. And if you were to press me further I would offer an essentially religious allusion: that we have a model of humanity in its most mature form in the personality, intentions and actions of the man Jesus.

The Spoils of War

In pre-modern society wars were frequently small-scale affairs in which one tribe or clan would do battle with another and the victor would ritually humiliate the vanquished, often by raping the loser’s women, and then march home with as much of the loser’s wealth and possessions as they could carry, the spoils of war. While the scale of warfare in our day has altered dramatically, the other features seem to have remained pretty much the same.

For those of us opposed to the war in Iraq, the catalogue of deceit and disaster seems endless: the faulty intelligence on which the US and its coalition partners justified going to war; the arrogance of their not bothering to secure United Nations support for the venture; the adoption of the moral high ground by morally bankrupt people; the failure to find amongst Saddam Hussein’s armaments a single weapon of mass destruction; the inordinate number of civilian casualties among the Iraqi population; the large-scale abandonment of the principles of the Geneva Convention; the dehumanising and violent cultures of US managed prisoner facilities in occupied territories at Abu Ghraid in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; the use of white phosphorus gas against a predominantly civilian population in northern Iraq; the practice of ‘rendition’ – flying suspects via European communities without the latter’s knowledge, to foreign prisons where torture is permissible; the imposition of US instruments of democratic government upon a region and culture to which these are alien; and many, many more.

In our day, the concept of dividing up the spoils of war is equally complex. We witnessed the spectacle of governments supporting the Coalition bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts, and we saw those governments jockeying to secure favourable positions in respect to the ‘safeguarding’, for which we should read ‘control of’ Iraq’s vast oil reserves. We learnt that one of the biggest players and beneficiaries in this field was the American firm Halliburton, long associated with Vice-President Cheney, another morally bankrupt action which confirmed for many that the primary motivation of the war was less the removal of one tyrant amongst many for the sake of world peace and prosperity, than the energy requirements to fuel the American industrial economy. And probably the most lucrative contracts of all will prove to be the re-arming of the new Iraqi forces, many of the weapons previously sold to the Saddam regime by the Americans having been destroyed by the Americans. When in the eighteenth century, at a time when the shape of warfare in Europe was shifting from private militias to national armies, William Blake declared that ‘war is the health of the state’, he was pointing out the political and economic benefits of warfare. Four centuries later it can be justifiably be argued that the economies of a significant number of industrialised nations are dependent upon the manufacture and sale of increasingly sophisticated weaponry – another aspect of the spoils of war.

Is there no crumb of comfort to be gleaned from this disastrous venture? Perhaps there is. We know that modern warfare is a complex phenomenon, with the battle being as much ideological as it is physical, and that in these circumstances the tools of propaganda become crucial. We are equally aware that in order to discover the truth of what is really happening on the ground, we need to look beyond the statist media which peddles official press releases and statistics, to alternative media organisations. Initially for many of us this proved to be al-Jazeera , the Qatar based Arabic organisation, which beamed to the world images of the war which the US and European media were not permitted to show us. This service, exposing the contrived nature of the Coalition’s propaganda, became such a thorn in the side of the Americans that as soon as the initial democratic Iraqi puppet government was set up, they had Al-Jazeera excluded from filming or reporting from Iraq. And it is now being reported in the media that President Bush even had plans to bomb al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, notwithstanding the fact that Qatar is an American ally, and notwithstanding the oft-proclaimed democratic principle of the freedom of the press.

It is often said that the Internet has democratised information. Anybody can say anything they like, and anyone can have access to it. This is perhaps less true than it was five years ago in that autocratic regimes are discovering ways of limiting or inhibiting citizen access to the World Wide Web. But certainly I am free to express my views about the war and to consult the numberless websites, personal and corporate, which also do so. Amongst these are the two hundred or so websites which US serving soldiers have set up as blogs or internet diaries and which they update directly from the battlefield via the Internet cafes which have been provided in virtually every American military camp. Whereas in previous wars soldiers would have their letters home censored and families would have to wait many months to receive them, now soldiers can address us directly and speak about their experiences and their hopes and fears for the war. Some of the soldiers record the details of incidents when they were under fire, others speak of a growing resistance in some quarters to the US operation.

Independent journalists are now able to scour these sources for stories. In fact the journalist who first aired claims that the US had used white phosphorus in the attack against insurgents in Fallujah is said to have discovered this information on a serviceman’s blog. The journalist also recorded that subsequently his source had been ordered to close his blog and not to send or reply to e-mails, and the army is becoming more strict in insisting on compliance with its policy memorandum on websites which requires soldiers to have official approval before starting internet postings. But such is the anarchic nature and the power of the Internet that some are willing to risk punishment in order to tell their truth.

So one good thing to emerge from this war may be the fact that war propaganda and media control can no longer prevent us from learning immediately and at first hand what is happening on the ground. This has to be good for humanity and for democracy in that propagandists can no longer treat us as if we do not deserve to know the truth, and we now have access to accounts of human experience which can usefully inform our personal and political views and actions. And one of the ironies of this must surely be that one of the side-effects of the development of ever more sophisticated computers to control our weaponry has been the increasing ability of our desktops and laptops to allow us to freely access information and to network with one another in creating and maintaining an opposition movement.

Dreaming of a New World

One of my nieces, knowing that I enjoy reading, and that my first degree was in history and politics, gave me a very large book this Christmas. Called Frontier of Dreams it is a volume published to accompany a Television New Zealand thirteen-part documentary of the same name. The particular name was chosen for the series because every shipload of colonists and each subsequent generation of New Zealanders has articulated its own vision for the country. I embarked on a journey through the lavishly illustrated work, mindful that all four of my grandparents were amongst those early settlers who came from Scotland, Ireland and England, to forge a new and better life for their families.

All went well until I reached the final chapter ‘Breaking Free, 1984-2005’ which focuses on the social and economic restructuring, largely at the hands of the Labour Party’s ‘libertarian young things’, which amongst many other advances provided new freedoms for Maori and gays. These freedoms which had long been sought by both communities were welcomed enthusiastically by both – or so I thought. And then I came across the caption accompanying a photo of the annual gay Hero Parade in Auckland, which says that the Maori Bishop Whakahuihui Vercoe, deeply respected within the Maori community and now Archbishop, Primate and Metropolitan of the whole Anglican Church in New Zealand “dreams of a world without gays”.

You could say that I was gobsmacked. As a person who knows Archbishop Vercoe reasonably well, and aware of his history of championing the rights of the poor and dispossessed, this utterance was unexpected. My immediate thought as a person who has been a long-time supporter of Maori rights was that if I were a racist and publicly stated that I dream of a world without Maoris, I would immediately be hauled before Joris de Bres, a former colleague who is now Race Relations Conciliator, rightly forced to make a public apology to all Maori, and perhaps have to face a court case as well. So why shouldn’t Archbishop Vercoe be hauled before the Human Rights Commission and asked to apologise to the entire gay community?

I turned to the newspaper interview which elicited the Archbishop’s comments in The New Zealand Herald of June 5, 2005. Here he allegedly told the reporter that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ and an ‘abomination’ to the dark races. He thinks that in the future society will find homosexuality unacceptable. “It may not come in our time, but it will come”, he says. “There will be a strong reaction for later generations; we will suddenly discover a morality, a new morality”. This sounds like a call to return to an older morality which saw not only gays, but all those regarded as different, at best a blight upon the community and at worst deserving of eradication.

We are here confronting a sensitive and difficult area, that of the traditional beliefs and attitudes of indigenous peoples and behaviours regarded by them as culturally appropriate. In terms of the gay issue some Maori have adopted the typical post-colonial response that homosexuality was unknown in their communities prior to colonisation. I have frequently heard in Africa the claim that homosexuality is a ‘white disease’. But I also recall that when this kind of argument was raised in a meeting of Maori to discuss the decriminalisation of homosexuality, one of my Maori colleagues bravely took the floor and asked people to look back through their genealogies – the rehearsal of which is fundamental to Maori culture – to recall heroes from pre-colonial times whose orientation was homosexual. ‘We all have gays in our tribes and families as far back as we go’, said Hone.

Archbishop Vercoe certainly admits that there are gays in his extended family. “I have relatives who are gay. They’re still my relatives, they’re still my blood, my kith and kin. They have every right to call on me for help and also to be included in my relationship with them and other members of my clan” he says perhaps in an allusion to the supposedly Christian adage of condemning the sin while loving the sinner. The Church’s mission, he says, is “to go and seek out the poor, the lame, the blind, the unfortunate, the landless, the homeless, the foodless, and identify with those people completely. Always look after the underdogs and the underprivileged. Just love them to death”. Asked whether this list includes the gay community, he responds “Absolutely”. He does not indicate what kind of justice he has in mind for the gay community, nor how he will embody it, but loving people to death is an ambiguous activity. And sadly his remarks on homosexuality will probably have driven far more people out of the Church than his long ministry has managed to attract to it.

The interview provoked wide public discussion and a flood of letters to the editor. Many found it strange that a person with such a radical political agenda should also articulate such a conservative social agenda. Cultural questions were posed in many instances. The Anglican Dean of Auckland opined that the comments arose purely out of a cultural context and that Maoris find the issue of homosexuality culturally difficult. Dr Leonie Pihama, a project researcher, responded to the Dean saying “Such statements are colonial and Victorian views that merely seek to oppress certain sectors of society and have no basis in tikanga Maori”. Describing the Archbishop’s view of a world without gays as ‘holocaustic’, she insisted there is no tradition within Maoridom for hatred towards a particular group in the community. Dr Clive Aspen, who heads up a Maori sexuality research project said that statements like the Archbishop’s threatened long-term and permanent damage to young people grappling with their sexuality. He too insisted that research shows that Maori had always had an open and embracing attitude towards sexual diversity within social networks.

In defence of his views, Archbishop Vercoe insisted that everybody had a right to say what they believe. “I’m a Maori”, he says “and can’t be anything else. I have to be true to what I am”. Yes, of course this is so when one speaks in a personal capacity. Amongst previous Archbishops of New Zealand have been three friends of mine, one of them a Maori, who always took great care when representing the Church to convey the generally liberal mind of the New Zealand Church, rather than their personal opinions. Archbishop Vercoe it seems has abandoned this understanding of inclusivity and consensus in favour of speaking out of both his ethnic and tribal perceptions. And in this case he has succeeded only in resurrecting attitudes and condemnations from the past which are, in the words of the internationally renowned gay Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, “very, very punitive, very patriarchal, very homophobic and very sexist”.

Hopefully the Archbishop will wake up to the fact that the scenario he imagines is a nightmare rather than a dream, and substitutes for it the more adventurous vision of communities and cultures which don’t discriminate against but welcome otherness.