Quote of the Day

David Klinghoffer on his recent speech advocating Intelligent Design…

One lesson I took away with me is that out there in the real world, the evolution debate matters to people for reasons that may not be quite the same as the reasons it matters to many of us who are involved with it professionally. For them, it’s not about the scientific issue per se or about academic freedom. It’s about their children.

If you’re meeting with rabbis and speaking at a church, obviously faith is going to be front and center in the mind of your listeners. But it was not the theologically knotty problem of reconciling God and Darwin that was at issue so much as the effect of the cultural pollution pouring out of various smokestacks in public life, the media, and academia. One very tall and ominous smokestack is represented by Darwinism.

Our listeners were not fixated on science or theology, nor on the consequences of Darwin’s idea in the past (Nazis, eugenics, racist imperialism) but on how the culture right now is corrupted by animalism and nihilism -- the drumbeat of despair that tells young people they are animals just like our ape cousins, that life in the present, just like its origin and development in the past, is without meaning and purpose. Worry for their children is, I think, the chief reason that parents, unlike the California Science Center, won’t allow this debate to be canceled.

Why be worried? Exhibit A.