Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [13]
Chapter 11, “The New New Creationism,” picks up the anti-evolution movement in America with the mid-1990s development of “Intelligent Design Theory,” or ID, in which these quasi-scientific thinkers shed the cloak of the old creationists from the 1960s and 1970s who demanded a literal biblical interpretation of scientific findings, and that of the new creationists of the 1980s who were more flexible in adapting the findings of science but still insisted on a divine hand in nature. The IDers are more sophisticated in their thinking, more professional in their presentations and publications, and more politically successful in their ability to gain a public hearing for their cause. That cause, however, is the same as it has always been: to promote a Judeo-Christian biblical cosmology and world-view, to defuse any perceived threats to their religion (such as science and evolutionary theory), and to tear down the wall separating church and state in order to get their doctrines taught in public schools, including and especially public school science classes.
Chapter 12, “History’s Heretics,” is the oldest essay in the book, written initially while in graduate school in the late 1980s, and redacted over the years as I thought more and more about who and what mattered most in history. The germination of this project, in fact, dates back to the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate and one of my professors, Dr. Richard Hardison, introduced me to a book titled The 100, by Michael Hart. In the book an attempt is made to rank the top hundred people in history by their influence and importance (not just fame or infamy). Ever since then I thought about this as I studied the great (and not so great) people of the past, and when the millennium came and endless commentaries were published to venerate (or scorn) those of the past thousand years, I revised the piece yet again. Through this survey of attempts to rank the people and events most influential in our past, I devised my own ranking of who and what mattered most.
The book ends with Part IV, “Science and the Cult of Visionaries,” including chapter 13, “The Hero on the Edge of Forever,” an examination of Gene Roddenberry, the Star Trek empire, and the continuing role of the hero in science and science fiction. This is the most indulgent essay in the book because I was a fan of Star Trek from September 8, 1966, the date of the first airing of the first episode, a date imprinted on my psyche because it was also my twelfth birthday. But Gene Roddenberry was a humanist, which I later grew into after my stint as an evangelical Christian, and his vision of the future was far grander than any I had previously encountered. A science fiction author once explained to me that one can get away with a lot more speculation and controversy the further in the future one’s narrative is set. Scientists are fairly skeptical and hard on shows like X-Files, because it takes place in the all-too-familiar present. But when Roddenberry put his characters into the twenty-third century, scientists were far more forgiving, and viewers glommed on to this vision of the way things could be. Still, this subject would be too self-indulgent if I had not included an analysis of what we can learn about history and social systems from an in-depth analysis of one episode of the original series—my favorite, of course—“The City on the Edge of Forever”—and what it tells us about the role of contingency and chance in our lives.
Finally, chapter 14, “This View of Science,” is a comprehensive analysis of the life works of the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, and how science, history, and