What Rafael Palmeiro and intelligent-design creationism have in common

August 2, 2005

There were two seemingly disparate elements in this Knight Ridder story that are not only related, but help explain a great deal about how the president deals with the world.

President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and “intelligent design” Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.

In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation’s schools.

I’ll spare you my tirade against intelligent-design creationism (though, if readers were interested, here’s a published article I wrote on the subject a few years ago), but it’s important to keep this in context. Bush has generally been very cagey when it comes to modern biology and this was, as far as I can tell, the first time he’s said he wants public school students to be taught pseudoscience and real science at the same time.

The same interview told us:

The Orioles slugger was suspended for 10 days after testing positive for steroid use, despite his insistence that he never intentionally used the prohibited substance. Bush has been an outspoken critic of steroid abuse.

“Rafael Palmeiro is a friend. He testified in public and I believe him,” Bush said, referring to Palmeiro’s denials under oath to a congressional committee on March 17. “He’s the kind of person that’s going to stand up in front of the klieg lights and say he didn’t use steroids, and I believe him. Still do.”

Both of these, when considered together, paint an interesting picture of the president’s worldview. Evidence, truth, and accuracy are nice, but when it comes to the president’s beliefs, please don’t bother Bush with facts.

With intelligent-design creationism, Bush recommended that students learn long-discredited nonsense in science classes. It doesn’t matter that advocates of intelligent-design creationism have been discredited, repeatedly. It doesn’t matter that they’ve published no articles in scientific journals. It doesn’t matter that they don’t even make any testable or falsifiable predictions. Bush has his gut, which outweighs anything those eggheads at the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science might tell him.

With Palmeiro, it’s the exact same thing. He knows Palmeiro, he heard Palmeiro deny steroid use, so there’s no point in even discussing it further. Sure, someone might point to conclusive lab results, but Bush doesn’t care.

As Kevin Drum put it, “It’s like listening to a small child. He doesn’t want to believe it, so it isn’t true.” It’s annoying when he applies the standard to a baseball player, but it’s tragic when Bush applies this to everything.

Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat? Sure it was. No weapons of mass destruction? Wrong, we found them. The Social Security privatization scheme would weaken the system? No, it wouldn’t. There’s overwhelming evidence pointing to global warming? No, there isn’t.

The president knows the truth, independent of facts or reality, because his instincts tell him whatever he needs to know. Evidence that conflicts with beliefs is simply ignored, filtered out for convenience’s sake.

It must make Bush’s daily life absolutely delightful. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.

In very far northern Minnesota recently we saw a sign that read ‘Global Warming?’ Bush says – Bring It On!

(the reverse side of the sign had some uncomplimentary things to say about ‘No Child Left Behind’…)

His theory seems to be if he closes his eyes, you can’t see him.

  • Kathy says, “His theory seems to be if he closes his eyes, you can’t see him.”

    When I was a kid, my pet dog used to hide his head under the coffee table, with its big ass standing straight up in the air and completely out in the open, and yet the dumb dog thought he was invisible to us. Then, when I was just a kid, I knew how ridiculous that was, and I LMAO.

    Today, Bush does the same damn thing, and I weep every day as a result. Ain’t life ironic?

  • First time I’ve heard him comment on this, also.
    Very disturbing. Science, objective reality
    being dismantled by these dangerous
    ideologues.

    Very good article on ID, CB. I recommend
    it to everyone here. In fact, it’s required
    reading, so get busy!

    Interesting factoid: John Wells, Senior Fellow
    at the Discovery Institute, and I were classmates
    at Montclair High School in New Jersey, and we
    graduated in 1960. He was an exceptionally
    bright and dedicated student in all subjects.
    I am utterly baffled at the turn his life took some
    years ago when he abandoned real science
    for pseudoscience.

  • Bush and Intelligent Designists are a natural fit: both have been trading in bogus claims since they entered the public stage.

    Never forget that Bush is the guy who justified his set of budget-busting taxbreaks on the grounds that the economy was in great shape, and then on the grounds that it was in terrible shape.

    Any day now I expect to see Republicans start wholesale invention of studies in support of intelligent design.

  • We know the some of the facts about this man. We can see that he is a far cry from what we need in a president. But still he is. It’s hard to believe their are so many people who think this man is a great, religous, and honest leader.
    There must be something in the water.

  • Would anyone believe that the Islamic world up to the 12th century was the center for science and intellectualism? Sure, the political leaders had to listen to the ignorant rantings of the imams and mullahs, but they did not act on their demands to silence the scholars. But slowly the leaders gave greater heed to them. And look where the Middle East is today: an intellectual and scientific backwater.

    I cannot believe that this is what Americans (who are too proud) and business leaders (who are too practical) would want. Sure, we can train a generation of our best minds to know the subtleties of ID; the best minds of the rest of the world, however, will pass us by and their standard of living/wealth/influence will increase. More businesses than Toyota will leave the US, and America will resemble its Central and South American neighbors as poor, backward, ignorant, and superstitious. Science and knowledge will not stand still just because we don’t practice it here.

    CB wrote: “It must make Bush’s daily life absolutely delightful. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.”

    Sociopaths, it is said, are seldom troubled by dreams.

  • Great article, CB. If anyone is interested in a further exploration of William Paley’s teleological argument for the existence of God and how that argument is rebutted by Darwin’s theory of evolution, I recommend Richard Dawkins’s “The Blind Watchmaker.”

  • Mr. Fribble,

    Right once again. The Muslims (and Jews) operated with a lunar calendar, which required their religious people to support astronomers and mathematicians just to know when their annual religious rituals should occur. The only Christian remnant of this are dates associated with Easter (first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox – to know its date years ahead, you have to calculate astronomical expectations).

    I heard Kenneth Clark (BBC’s “Civilization”) say something to effect that, apart from Bibles and Missals, the Western world, around 1000 A.D., had 1,000 books total. When the universities got started (Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne … 1100s) they borrowed Arabic and Jewish scholars from the older Islamic “houses of learning” (Bologna, Salamanca, e.g.) in order to translate the ancient books (mainly Greek originally, but lost except for Arabic and Hebrew copies) into Latin. The growing universities competed with each other for books the way modern universities compete for football players.

    Anyway, mathematics and science were much easier and quicker to translate than poetry and philosophy, so that’s what the west built up in its libraries. That led, fairly quickly, to the revival of interest in science (between 1500 and 1600 – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton) in the West. The East (mideast) kept science subordinate to the needs of religion.

    While we’re on this and Bush’s pontificating on “intelligent design”, I wonder what Biblical fundamentalists make of this (1 Kings 7:23 and also 2 Chronicles 4:2, RSV):

    Then he made the molten sea; it was round,
    ten cubits from brim to brim,
    and five cubits high,
    and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.

    The mathematical constant pi is the ratio of the circumference (30) to the diameter (10). It follows that, in the Bible anyway, pi = 3, not 3.14159265358979….

    A lot of science, perhaps the entire reality-based world, will have to be re-thought, huh?

  • The swing to the right this country has taken is alleged to have occurred, as the Republicans see it, as a response to the “moral relativity” that permeated society, especially in the Clinton years. (Yeah, right.)

    What the Republicans are now engaged in is the Relativity of Truth. While the right may assert its moral compass is fixed, as a dogma-driven coalition its grasp on the truth has gone wobbly. According to them, truth is what you think it is, hence the positions Bush and his adminstration have taken since coming to office. But even sleazier is that Bush hides behind this false “open-mindedness” on creationism and Palmiero to not have to face the truth. Plausible deniability, parsing words … hiding the truth is just a verbal shell game to this adminisitration.

  • Ed,
    I’m looking foward (not!) to the day when the GOP & our own radical clerics decide that modern medicine is a blasphemy & that medical schools need to be more open-minded and teach faith healing!

    You’re right! There’d need to be a lot of curriculum-revising to satisfy the religious right (it wouldn’t just stop with biology): math, astronomy, geography, medicine, law, and biology, to name just a few.

  • That Intelligent Design is simply religion wrapped
    up in scientific double talk can be seen in many
    ways, and I certainly don’t need to go into all of
    them. But there is one favorite of mine.

    They claim that the “Designer” need not be the
    God they are pushing, but some unknown entity,
    perhaps an alien, in fact. But of course, this is
    nonsense. The Designer cannot be a natural
    being, because its existence would then be subject
    to the main tenet of the ID crowd – namely,
    that it’s too complex to have developed through
    natural processes. Therefore, the natural designer
    must have had a designer itself. So they’re just
    being coy. Logically, the designer can only be
    a supernatural being.

    And a very special kind of supernatural being
    at that. One whose origin doesn’t have to
    be explained. That might be classified as a
    Class A supernatural being, like God. One
    is obliged to conclude that the Designer is,
    for all intents and purposes, God.

    It’s just religion. They simply can’t tolerate the
    idea that they weren’t created for some purpose
    by some god that they believe in. They can’t
    even accept what most religious people tacitly
    do: that somehow, when God created the universe,
    perhaps through the Big Bang, that he endowed it
    with all the natural laws that govern its behavior,
    including the creation and evolution of life.

    They are creationists in disguise.

  • My favorite thing about that WaPo link is that the URL ends with:

    ….notFound=true.

    Truly, the MSM is tipping its hand.

  • My daughter, 21, had to go in for an eye exam the other day because her sight seems to be weakening a bit. We got on the subject of I.D. and how one of the favorite examples of I.D. being the only logical answer is the creation of the eye, because of its complexity, blah blah. But if God (or the alien designer, see hark’s post #11) designed this thing, how come he did such a crappy job? If you have an all-powerful designer creating your main sensory organ, why wouldn’t he have made it self-repairing and better? How come we don’t all have hawkeye vision? Why do so many people need glasses? Is God punishing them? If so, then you’d think that Christians would have fewer glasses, wouldn’t you?

    You can take almost any I.D. argument like this and pick it apart so easily that it’s like dueling with an unarmed man. And this is supposed to be taught alongside science? Don’t make me laugh.

    Oh, I forgot: “God works in mysterious ways.” The age-old copout, answer to everything from the death of innocents in natural disasters to why your kid’s dog got hit by a car. What a crock!

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