Unmasking the Creationism Debate

In Clinical Psychology, a common method of analyzing mental illness involves searching for instances when a person's motivational energy seems to be overly focused on one particular object, person or issue.  By tracing this kind of mono-mania to a distinct psychological need, one can begin to address the illness itself, seeing it as a symptom of some unfulfilled need.

I--against my better judgment--pay passing attention to the "evolution-creationism-templeton-religion-atheism-dawkins-etc" discussion that dominates most of the intellectual blogosphere.  While reasonable persons occasionally weigh in with important insights, the vast majority of the discussion is simplistic, under-informed, riddled with logical inconsistencies, and (most importantly) absurdly polarized.  The interlocutors spend enormous amounts of energy asserting, over and over, that they are on the side of Truth and Reason, and that their opponents are morally corrupt and intellectually inferior.

Every week or so, one of the larger online academic forums erupts into frenzied, histrionic activity along these lines.  Sometimes, the "atheist" crowd perceives that religion is behind some recent intellectual coruption or moral travesty.  Sometimes, the creationist side believes that some recent tentative discovery or speculative metaphysical argument with dubious logical credentials overturns 200 years of biology.

Against this monsoon of blithering energy, a patient and rational person is powerless.  However, no rational critique could possibly match the psychological one that seems to follow naturally from what I've just said.  This becomes apparent when we realize that the concern that these people show for their little pet-issues is wildly out of proportion with their actual importance.  This leads us to justifiably hypothesize that they suffer from a kind of intellectual mania driven by deep, unacknowledged personal needs.

Take, for example, the concern with teaching creationism in schools.  This, no doubt, is an important issue.  As many remind us, it is important because a society (trivially) needs good education for its children.  Yet, if this value forms the rationale for the massive amount of debate over intelligent design, why do we not see a similar mountain of discussion over, say, racial inequalities in early education?  Or rapidly declining funding for public schools?  Surely, these two issues alone constitute major threats to the quality of education in this country.

By comparison, as if, as if the educational health of children depended in some vital way on their acceptance of Darwinian biology or Intelligent Design Theory.  Any idiot, let alone anyone who knows anything about education, will tell you that the vast majority of educational value is realized from the ages of 5-12, long before any child is able to take in upper-level biological theory.  Participants in this debate should not be worried about whether students will read Darwin.  They should be worried about whether they will be able to read Darwin.


The reality of this situation begins to take on a depressingly obvious shape.  We do not see proportional attention to various educational issues.  Rather, we see monomania.  The only rational explanation left is that these people don't actually care very much about education, despite repeated, chest-thumping claims to the contrary.  We are forced to search for alternative psychological explanations.

Why the emphasis on ID?  One reason that intelligent design recieves so much attention is that the issue offers the participants a luxurious chance to slot themselves into the modern equivalent of a tribe, an in-group which affords an enormous sense of belonging to its members.  After all, taking a stand on racial inequality is boring... so 1962.  Leave the teachers to argue for their funding themselves: I'm going to be an atheist or an anti-darwinist!  

There are probably many more such "unmaskings" available, and I bet a lot of them have significant force, but I'll allow a friend to summarize my critique in a far more eloquent manner:

The efficient goals or causes of these pursuits have more to do with the psychological maladies and deficiencies that constitute the personalities of those involved. Here we are talking about the craving for validation, the desire to form an identity by applying various labels to oneself, the need to accommodate personal flaws by projecting them onto 'the other,' and the imperative that there actually be 'an other' so that 'we' can escape from the difficult work of genuine self-improvement through the distractions afforded by group membership.

 This is our hypothesis.  If you think about it, it could be empirically tested, and it should be.