Creationism Lecture

I went to a lecture last night entitled “Creationism in Camouflage: The Intelligent Design Deception,” which was sponsored by the USC Objectivist (i.e. Ayn Rand) club. The speaker was pretty good. The funniest part was how he kept intentionally describing everything the Creationist movement has done in terms of Darwinian natural selection. (To wit, for a long time Creationism inhabited a comfortable ecological niche, but then increasing pressures from competing theories caused the weakest versions of Creationism — i.e. young earth Creationism — to die out, and eventually this pressure caused Creationism to adapt protective coloring — i.e. the surface appearance of scientific legitimacy — in order to survive in a hostile legal climate.) The only part where I disagreed with the speaker was at the end, where he simply stated, “The only coherent system of thought that can provide a robust rebuttal to Creationism is Objectivism,” without anything to back that up.

Then came the dreaded Q&A session. The host began with a very strongly worded injunction that the questions should actually be questions and not diatribes. The audience was stunned into momentary silence, aghast at the thought of actually having to ask a question rather than deliver a furious stream of verbal diarrhea, but their reticence didn’t last long. I spent most of the subsequent proceedings thinking about all my teachers over the years who always said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” and wondering if they ever attended events like this, and if so, how they could keep saying that with a straight face. Seriously, it made me embarrassed to be at a major university, and I thought that many of these students should have their acceptance letters retroactively revoked. What part of “ask a question” don’t these people understand? “You’re wrong!” is not a question, and “You’re still wrong!” is not a “follow-up” question. And seriously, it’s cool that you talk to dead people and all, but a) you don’t, and b) that has nothing to do with the debate over Intelligent Design.

The speaker did make one other point that I thought was kind of clever. Intelligent Design argues that humans are too complex to have come into being without a creator. God is obviously more complex than a human being, so their own argument seems to require that God also could not have come into being without a creator. It’s one of those arguments that is never going to convince anybody of anything, but at least it made me chuckle, so that’s something.