Not your daddy's creationists
SOMETIMES IT seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" -- an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough.
At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.
These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.
This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."
It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.
The new relativism marks quite a shift from the arguments normally employed by the right. Remember the "culture wars" of the late '80s and early '90s, when conservatives in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, inveighed against the "relativism" that allegedly dominated the thinking of American intellectuals?
Their critique drew on the work of prominent conservatives in the academy, including the late University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who condemned multiculturalism, postmodernism and relativism in his influential 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind." And, speaking to American students in 1987, Pope John Paul II denounced academic pluralists who think that "ultimate questions about human life and destiny have no final answers or that all beliefs are of equal value."
