The last thing I need right now is to get into a big brouhaha over intelligent design. I know there are smart people who like it. I enjoyed Behe’s book. And while I do believe the universe was created for a purpose and that there is a God, I find the intelligent design debate embarrassing. Or, to be more clear, I find the debate as it plays out in the Mainstream Media embarrassing. This morning there was a piece on NPR about the Kansas school board’s fight to put intelligent design into the curriculum. It wasn’t very hard for the reporter to make it seem like this was all a back door attempt to get creationism in and evolutionary theory out. All he had to do was interview people who said as much. One lady insisted she didn’t want evolution taught, period, because it conflicted with her faith. I could only imagine how this was heard by people who work on the assumption that this is how all conservatives think.

But regardless of the merits, I think the Christian Right (and some sympathetic neoconservatives) make a political mistake when they switch their agenda from concrete policies to the teachings of science, religion and metaphysics. Abortion is about deeds. It is an area where science is increasingly on the side of the pro-lifers. Gay marriage is about fundamental social arrangements. Trying to get rid of evolutionary theory in favor of intelligent design or creationism is an abstract battle which saps energy from more important issues and makes it easier to dismiss the Right on other fronts. An atheist or agnostic with an open mind can be affected by pro-life arguments. It’s very difficult to imagine them being swayed by assertions the world was created in six days. Darwinism may have contributed to moral relativism even more than Freud or Marx did, but Darwin was a different kind of scientist. Einstein’s theory contributed mightily to the forces of secular humanism conservatives dislike, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. The war on Darwin simply won’t work the way it did on Marx or even Freud.

And for the record, the reason I find intelligent design interesting and worthwhile is that evolutionary theory is still a theory — one I think is almost certainly right in the big picture. But in the details, I think it’s very interesting to hear where or why it may have gone wrong. And sometimes only people outside the consensus can offer those sorts of criticisms.