Margaret Wente, "Intelligent design and other weirdo beliefs" (2005)

Intelligent design and other weirdo beliefs

MARGARET WENTE -
> Tuesday, August 23, 2005<br>

Are Canadians more intellectually sophisticated than Americans? We like to think so. And now there's scientific proof. It's called "intelligent design."

Intelligent design is an effort to sneak religion back into the classroom under the guise of science. Its proponents -- religious conservatives -- argue that Darwin was wrong, and that his theory of evolution is unproved. They argue that the world is far too complicated to have evolved all on its own, as Darwin argued. Lurking behind the scenes is an "intelligent designer," who set the whole thing in motion.

Intelligent design has been overwhelmingly rejected by the entire scientific establishment. (One scientist called it "nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo.") But now it has been endorsed by the President of the United States, who is eager to share his scientific insights with the nation's schoolchildren. A few weeks ago, George W. Bush told a bunch of Texas reporters that "both sides ought to be properly taught," so that "people can understand what the debate is about."

Three states have already introduced intelligent design into the curriculum, and two dozen more are debating it. Harvard University is so alarmed that it's decided to devote $50-million to a massive project that will shore up the evidence for evolution. But the U.S. is a religious nation, and intelligent design is simply what folks want. In one recent poll, 55 per cent of the adults surveyed said children should be taught creationism and intelligent design along with evolution. The same poll found that 54 per cent didn't believe humans had developed from an earlier species. In Kansas, which recently got an F-minus from one group that rated the states on their teaching of evolution, only 26 per cent of the adults surveyed said evolution best described their view on the origins of life.

We Canadians laugh at those credulous Americans. But some of us have pretty weird beliefs, too. For example, roughly two million of us believe what we read in The Da Vinci Code, according to a recent poll. This novel (stop here if you haven't finished it yet) claims that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene produced a line of descendants who still walk the Earth, and that the Roman Catholic Church has been engaged in a murderous cover-up for the past few centuries so that nobody will find out. Some of my best friends have informed me of this dastardly conspiracy. (These people are also convinced that the entire Christian church is nothing but a bunch of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, except for what they learned in The Da Vinci Code.)

Not long ago, I met a woman who's a shaman. (And good on her, I say, so long as she doesn't demand equal time in biology class.) She was trying to decide whether a holy man she'd met from India had actually made sacred ash materialize from thin air. She asked my opinion. I said I thought it sounded a little far-fetched.

I know highly educated people who believe in the healing powers of magnets and therapeutic touch. Other people I know are convinced that vaccines cause autism, or that farmed salmon is poisonous. I know people who think the radiation in cellphones can give you cancer. The Toronto Star even ran a three-part series on this alarming risk -- on the front page, no less -- and quoted every crackpot, victim and class-action lawyer it could find. The science purporting to prove this claim is even junkier than the science that's supposed to prove the case for intelligent design. For days afterward, the Star carried letters from worried readers fretting about the health hazards of cellphones, some of whom claimed that they, too, were being slowly poisoned.

But I suspect that our most cherished belief (even more popular than The Da Vinci Code) is that George Bush is not only ignorant but evil. A recent poll conducted by the Department of National Defence asked Canadians to list the significance of various threats to our national security. Guess what? Canadians think "U.S. foreign policy" poses the same risk to Canada as "terrorism."

To me, that's as weird as believing in intelligent design. But there are all kinds of irrational beliefs out there, I guess. And only some of them have to do with God.

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