A WINGNUT GETS IT

I have to give credit to John Derbyshire: He understands that Intelligent Design is a new form for barbarism and he isn't afraid to go public.

Here are excepts from his "A Blood Libel on Our Civilization" which appeared in NRO's The Corner:

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. ... And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. ... Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism.