The New York Times, December 19, 1997, Friday, P. E34
The debaters on Sunday night's "Firing Line" take
pains to avoid pitting Charles Darwin squarely against God. But
for many Americans, that's what the debate -- "Resolved:
The Evolutionists Should Acknowledge Creation" -- is all
about, and religion slips in here, too.
William F. Buckley Jr., leading the creationist team, begs the
audience to spurn "the dogma of evolution" and choose
instead "a broader intelligence which makes way for a First
Mover." Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United
for Separation of Church and State and leader of the evolutionist
team, says the dispute is between "the only logically coherent
and useful explanation for the development of life" and "fundamentalist
religious beliefs or discredited philosophical constructs or what
we sometimes refer to as just plain nonsense."
The complications are in the details. Advocates on both sides
come equipped with charts, drawings and even a mousetrap, which
do not clarify matters for the moderator, Michael Kinsley, who
interrupts to ask the debaters what they are talking about when
they give forth with such creations as "micro-evolution,"
"irreducible complexity," "adaptive differential
reproduction," "bushy sequence" and "the gravamen
of your argument is the chordate."
Despite the fancy phrases, however, the attentive listener should
be able to pick up the major lines of the dispute. The Darwinians
say that discoveries of fossils make a powerful argument for the
evolution of humankind. The anti-Darwinians say that the fossil
record is far from conclusive and that other discoveries suggest
strongly that life is the product of an intelligent designer.
Some Darwinians say it is possible to believe in God without believing
that He created the universe. Some anti-Darwinians say it is possible
to doubt the theory of evolution without being a creationist.
That makes for a sporadically lively hour, if not one likely to
change many opinions. Mr. Buckley takes exception to what he calls
the evolutionists' tendency to "imperialize" the issue
by not allowing creationist thought into the schools. He dismisses
evolutionary theory as "materialist philosophy." Kenneth
Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, counters that
any "intelligent designer" would have to be incompetent
because almost everything such an entity designed has immediately
become extinct.
Mr. Kinsley does not ask Mr. Buckley to intelligently define "stochastic,"
one of his contributions to the session. If you were wondering,
not that it advances either side's argument, it means conjectural.
Thus does language evolve.
Copyright © 1997 Walter Goodman. All rights
reserved. International copyright secured.
File Date: 12.23.97