ID: Out with a Big Bang

By MIKE ARGENTO

The people trying to push the idea of intelligent design love the Big Bang.

They love it like nothing else in the whole wide world. They love it more than Harriet Miers loves the president. They love it more than life itself.

They talk about the Big Bang constantly. Week before last, during his three days on the witness stand in the Dover Panda Trial, intelligent design moolah Michael Behe could barely utter a sentence without referencing the Big Bang.

At one point, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, Eric Rothschild, suggested an agreement. He wouldn’t ask Behe about the Big Bang if Behe didn’t offer any of his thoughts about the theory, which, of course, resulted in Behe launching into a lengthy dissertation on the Big Bang.

He tried.

Anyway, it was abundantly clear that the intelligent design people love the Big Bang.

Now, it would be fair to say that they love it because it gives them a chance to talk about a scientific theory that is actually a scientific theory — supported by evidence and pesky stuff like that — as opposed to intelligent design, which is only a scientific theory if your definition also includes astrology.

The intelligent design people love the Big Bang because they believe it’s a lot like their notion, except for the aforementioned evidence and the fact that the Big Bang wasn’t devised essentially as a legal strategy to get around a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the teaching of creationism in public schools.

They believe the Big Bang is a lot like their idea because it, too, wasn’t initially accepted by the scientific community because of its religious implications.

That’s the idea.

Too bad it’s pretty much a fantasy.

Here’s the history: A Belgian priest Georges Lamaitre first proposed the idea that the universe began with the explosion of a little gob o’ matter. (I believe that is the scientific definition, gob o’ matter.) That was in 1927, and at the time, a lot of physicists thought old Georges had had one too many lambic ales.

But they thought it was kind of a neat idea and messed around with it. A couple of years later, Edwin Hubbell, the guy who discovered that there are lots and lots of galaxies out there, figured out that the universe was expanding, supporting the idea of the Big Bang.

But still, the Big Bang was pretty nebulous. Scientists still worked on it. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered background radiation in space — and by measuring it, confirmed the Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson won a Nobel Prize for their work.

Of course, there’s no way to prove the Big Bang, and there are a lot of unanswered questions — if the universe is expanding, does that explain Oprah’s fluctuating size? — but it is a widely accepted scientific theory.

So, let’s review: The Big Bang started out as some half-baked idea and scientists worked on it and developed it and collected data and such and eventually, it was accepted as a scientific theory.

And its religious implications — whatever they may be — had nothing to do with it. (Actually, the Big Bang has greater stoner implications — what was around before the Big Bang and if the universe is expanding, what’s it expanding into, and is it true that the universe is shaped like a big taco? Mmmmmmm. Tacos.)

Now, let’s move on to intelligent design.

Intelligent design has been called creationism dressed up in a lab coat. It started gaining steam after the Supreme Court ruled creationism out of bounds in public schools as a violation of the separation of church and state.

Still, let’s take it on the merits of what its proponents claim are its scientific basis.

OK.

Let’s see.

OK, they say certain biological structures were designed by an intelligent designer because they look designed. This takes it out of the realm of science and into the province of religion because it assumes a supernatural cause, the designer, whoever that is, for a natural phenomena, and you can’t test, measure, observe or otherwise develop evidence to prove the existence of a designer. Essentially, it’s a religious proposition because as an integral part of the theory, it relies on the existence of whoever the designer is — God, space aliens, Fred Flintstone.

So ignoring the designer part, for now, what they’re saying is something that looks designed was designed.

That’s not a scientific theory; that’s the musing of an 8-year-old.

And the effort to prove this theory is focused on getting it mentioned to ninth graders in Dover.

The folks at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank dedicated to all kinds of wacky stuff, even put out a book titled “Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curriculum: A Guidebook,� which was intended to convince public schools to teach the notion. The book advised public school officials that teaching intelligent design is a means of getting ID into science classes without having to worry about legal action, which, considering the current federal case, is an indication that the folks at the Discovery Institute have as much expertise in constitutional law as they do in science.

As an example of their theory, the intelligent design people like to show a photo of Mount Rushmore and ask people to look at it. They ask, could Mount Rushmore have been carved by natural processes? Or was it designed?

That’s the wrong question. The question for these guys should be, can you tell the difference between an inanimate object and a biological organism?

So, the Big Bang is supported by physical and experimental evidence that other scientists have confirmed.

And intelligent design is supported by the notion that people can’t tell the difference between their lawnmowers and their dogs.

Other than that, they’re exactly the same.

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Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com. Read more Argento columns at ydr.com/mike.