If You Can't Say Something Nice...

When I was a senior in high school (1972-73), I was on the speech squad: I participated in speech competitions.

I wasn't a debater. I left that for all those future lawyers out there. No, my specialty areas were impromptu and dramatic interpretation. In impromptu you were given a topic, and then had two minutes to prepare a five-minute speech. Impromptu taught me that I had a natural talent for B.S., because that's what impromptu is. You can't do much research in two minutes--it all has to come off the top of your head. I was pretty good at this, actually; I won a third-place trophy once at a speech tournament for impromptu speaking.

My other specialty, dramatic interpretation, was actually solo acting. In D.I., as we called it, you would take a scene from a famous play or novel, usually involving two characters, memorize it and then stand in front of a judge and act out both parts. I never won any trophies at this, but it was fun.

For most of my year as a Spartan Speaker, (my high school's nick was "The Spartans") My D.I. was a cutting from Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit The Wind, a Broadway play of the mid-1950s that made it to the silver screen in 1960 as a vehicle for Frederic March and Spencer Tracy. As those who have caught this flick on AMC or TCM know well, it is a fictionalized reshaping of the events around the John Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, in which a schoolteacher in Dayton, Tennessee was put on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a biology class. March and Tracy played characters representing the two stellar attorneys of the day who slugged it out in that Tennessee courtroom: Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.

I loved this play when I was 17. Heroic Spencer Tracy, representing urban sophistication and scientific inquiry, goes up against March, whose character is something of a mountebank, a thrice-failed presidential candidate hopelessly addicted to public applause. But he is also, in the viewpoint of modern, urban-based belief in science and "progress," defending the indefensible, or perhaps I should say attacking the unassailable: as prosecutor, it's his job to put the young teacher in jail for teaching evolution. So he spouts off through half the film about the truth of the Bible and the lies of science, and how we should believe the Book of Genesis and not Darwin, and so on. In one particularly piquant scene, Tracy's character is badgering March's on the stand, and gets him to admit that he has never even read Darwin. The oafish Bible-banger is made into a figure of fun, as are the equally oafish, agrarian "true believers" in the courtroom who support him with hosannahs and amens.

For those who haven't seen this classic film, I won't spoil the outcome of the trial, but I will tell you that March's character, Matthew Harrison Brady, who has been stuffing himself with food throughout the movie, drops dead of a coronary at the trial's end. Serves him right, I thought at 17. I truly relished getting up in front of judges at speech tournaments and re-enacting that courtroom scene in which Henry Drummond, who represents Clarence Darrow, punctures the hot air balloon that is his opponent, Brady, the religious fundamentalist seeking to ban science from the classroom. Take that, you knuckle-dragging, Bible-pounding, backwoods neanderthals!

Yes, by and large we're not very tolerant of other people's opinions, or indeed of their feelings, when we're young. Ever get into an argument with a teenager? Chances are you'll discover that he's read one book on the subject under discussion, and that one book has made him The World's Foremost Authority. Anything you say questioning anything he says is going to elicit eyeball-rolling, deep sighs and body language that silently shouts, "How can anyone as ignorant as this old fart who stands before me possibly manage to feed himself?" That was me at 17, and I have nieces and nephews today who remind me of myself at that age.

Frankly, I am surprised that the creation-vs.-evolution debate is still raging. The year 2005 marked the 80th anniversary of the Scopes trial. Radio made its courtroom debut in that trial--the first "CNN moment." Since then, we've seen the advent of TV, then cable TV, then satellite TV, then the Internet. In 1925 Lindbergh had yet to fly the Atlantic; now we've been to the moon and back, and are launching probes to Pluto. We've split the atom. Conquered diseases. Extended life expectancy. Cloned sheep. We have digitial music downloads. Global positioning systems. Stealth bombers. Pop Tarts.

And yet we're still arguing about Genesis vs. The Origin Of Species, the most recent skirmishes involving so-called Intelligent Design, the search for...well, just that: intelligent design behind the universe, and life itself. In other words, the age-old search for God in nature.

Up to this point, even my most liberal friends would have to agree that I am impeccably secularist. I'm not the firebrand trying to pronounce ecrasez l'infame that I was at 17, but I will agree that Intelligent Design is not science and has no place in biology class. In theology class yes, in biology class, no. Science, true science, begins with this statement: "We don't know where the evidence is going to lead us. We're going to follow the evidence and see where it goes."

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, begins with the statement: "We believe in God, the creator of the universe, and we're going to look for evidence to support that belief." That's faith, not science. Faith, of necessity, puts the chicken before the egg: Science goes at it the other way around, starting with unbelief and proceeding, hopefully in an unprejudiced way, to puzzle out the way things work.

As we get older, if we have managed to mature at all, we become less passionate about things. Zealotry is dangerous, the most dangerous people in the world being those who think they hold the sole keys to the repository of truth. This isn't only true with regard to religion, but with any system of belief. Look at totalitarian regimes based on utopian notions, such as the late, unlamented Soviet Union. I'll leave Hitler out of the discussion--he's too obvious. But look at Freud: he had himself so convinced that his every idea should be Holy Writ in the world of psychology that he regarded any student who questioned him as an apostate, worthy only of banishment. And look at how discredited Freud is today.

I read something yesterday that really got me going, even as one who stands firmly in the secular camp with regard to the teaching of biology. It was a Q&A session on the web site Beliefnet.com, which in turn I had arrived at through one of my favorite web sites, Arts and Letters Daily.com (www.aldaily.com) The Q&A was with Dr. Richard Dawkins, a British biologist. Dawkins is passionate about the argument from design: he not only hates it, he hates the very idea of God in general. Dawkins is the atheist version of the True Believer. If it is indeed true, as has been asserted many times, that science is what replaced religion in our lives during the last century, Dawkins is one of its high priests. After reading the interview, I had this to say about it in my journal:

"Went on Arts and Letters Daily.com this afternoon and read a Q&A with Richard Dawkins, in which, with great gusto, he trashes the idea of intelligent design and religious belief generally, and speaks up boldly for the immutable truths of Darwin. We should be years beyond such arguments now—even Pope John Paul II confirmed that Darwinism is so well-founded in science as to be beyond theory. It’s unfortunate that we have some die-hard Bible-belt types in this country who never got past the Scopes trial.

"But what an obnoxious, childish boor this Dawkins is! It’s one thing to be an atheist, but to cockily sneer at the idea of belief, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as stupid and ignorant, is what one expects of an emotional adolescent, the kind of snotnosed loafer-about-the-hallways who likes to try and start trouble with questions like “If God can do anything, can he make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it up?” I heard plenty of this kind of thing in high school from assorted James Dean wannabes. And should anyone take the showy arrogance of an adolescent seriously? From his tenured position at Oxford, Dawkins noisily opposed the establishment of a chair of theology at Cambridge, simply because he happens to be an atheist-materialist who has no use for such things. Is there so much difference between that and demanding that evolution be banned from classrooms?"

I will defend to the death--well, maybe not quite that far--Dawkins' right to scream "There is no God." I'm not particularly religious myself. But what he's saying is by no means revolutionary, fresh or new: go back to Baron d'Holbach in the 18th century and you'll get the atheist-materialist position with a special wine sauce, the way they serve everything in France. In fact you can go back much further: Bertrand Russell, the last century's most famous atheist, said he got his worldview essentially from Lucretius, who died in 55 B.C. It was not Dawkins' belief or lack of it that I found off-putting, but his snotty arrogance. It served to remind me that scientists are not always humanists. Not every scientist is a Loren Eiseley, a Jakob Bronowski or a Carl Sagan. The humanistic tradition calls for studying--and embracing--every aspect of human experience, not just the spirit of scientific inquiry. I have tremendous respect for science, as we all do these days. But scientists like Dawkins are essentially technocrats, and I wouldn't want to live in a world run by them. They may take great pride in being soulless, and in telling the rest of us that we are too, but in dismissing so huge a part of the human experience as the religious impulse, calling it stupid or irrelevant or whatever, they are only showing themselves to be as narrow-minded as those they sneer at.

Bob Dylan wrote "Negativity won't pull you through." And he didn't write that line when he was going through his "Christian" period either, but when he was young, proud and questioning many things. The spirit of inquiry is perhaps the greatest human birthright. But it only forms part of the human experience, and those who would write off as meaningless any part of the great human experience are only cheating themselves. And perhaps, in their most disingenuous moments, they are also attempting to cheat others, even if they think they're doing it for some noble reason, as I'm sure Dawkins thinks he's doing when he scoffs at all religious belief, unconcerned about those to whom he is deliberately showing a downright pimply lack of respect.

I say let's go ahead and ban intelligent design from the public classroom.

I also say let's go ahead and establish a chair of theology at Cambridge.