Mark Shea is an interesting Catholic blogger who holds “no brief for Intelligent Design arguments.” Actually he could stand to brief himself a little better on what those arguments are. He thinks: “Intelligent Design seems to me to be essentially God of the Gaps argumentation.” But of course that’s not true. Shea should take a moment to review Jonathan M.’s recent comments on the Gaps Myth (“Once Again, Why Intelligent Design Is Not a ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ Argument“).
Nevertheless, Shea scores with a post (“I hate being right all the time“) on how the alternative to seeing evidence of design especially in human life tends to erode notions of equality, citing “post-Christian blood and soil pagans” who prattle “about ‘human biodiversity’ (by which they mean white supremacy vs. ‘low-IQ Third World hordes.’)”
Shea admits:
[T]he ID guys are quite right to note that once you make materialism the basis for your ethos, there is no particular reason you can’t — as the racist tools at Occam’s Razor and related sites do — say, “I don’t see anything particularly equal about human beings and so I will embrace a blood and soil racism and treat large segments of the human race with racist contempt.” All the buttercup-twirling babble about a happy return to pre-Christian paganism at one with Nature that we’ve heard in growing chorus over the past 40 years forgets that frank and open racist tribalism is the norm, not the exception, for man in his natural fallen state. Look for a lot more of this stuff as our culture de-christianizes.
A quick glance at the (moronic) website he mentions confirms that these individuals are obsessed with denouncing ID, for precisely the reason Mark mentions. Who cares? Well, I’ve pointed out before that Darwinian racialism has been a stumbling block on the political right, and not only in foul corners like that. That’s not a scientific reason for investing the time to consider ID carefully, as I hope Mark Shea will do, but it is a moral one.