Joseph Vandehey (“Ben Stein’s new movie not thought out intelligently,” ODE May 15) would be upset with the final proof of the existence of an intelligent designer. He fears that religion would lose its power, and faith would disappear because we’d have an answer. If a designer is found, Vandehey claims, “there’s no wonder; there’s just a footnote in a school
biology textbook.”
Some old wonders: the sun pulled around the flat earth by chariot, a “firmament” sky affixed with stars. We don’t even need textbook footnotes to clarify these fallacies. The goal posts shift more with each discovery, and the flock awaits the nod from the leaders. Recently the Vatican okayed belief in alien life, so hey!
Paraphrasing the 11th paragraph of Vandehey’s column: Religion’s great gift is hope, which is the ability to do the right thing selflessly because of faith in the world’s inherent goodness. With proof given to religion (discovering the designer), good acts become mundane and meaningless. Doing the right thing in the absence of suffering means not really caring about what you’re doing.
Does this make any sense at all?
Finally: “I can’t appreciate a good thing done just because it had to be done.” A popular consensus seems to be that a strong morality can only stem from the divine. I find this absurd, despite its popularity. Is doing good for its own sake less moral than doing good to gain favor and tally points with some invisible eternity-granting skydaddy? Are my own good acts diminished because I’m an atheist, despite the fact that I feel love and gratitude toward and from the good people in my life? Doing good is a human, evolved trait hijacked by religion.
Further, I’m hard-pressed to find “inherent” goodness on a planet where life is all but demolished by mountain-sized asteroids every 100 million years or so, never mind the earthquakes, monsoons, tornadoes and tsunamis of the last couple of years.
Justification for maintaining willful ignorance seems based in a desire to feel special in the universe, and the more we know, the less special we are, Enlightenment be damned. Keep the faith if you want to. Just don’t confuse it with understanding, and so don’t tell me you “know” what your unknowable God expects from me. That kind of knowledge will lead you into the freakish life of proselytizing fire and brimstone on the
EMU plaza.
Aaron Rosenberg
University student
Intelligent design argument confuses faith with understanding
Daily Emerald
May 27, 2008
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