Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-To-Understand Guide to the Controversy by William A. Dembski & Jonathan Witt

Author:William A. Dembski & Jonathan Witt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Religion & Science
ISBN: 9780830867141
Publisher: IVP Books
Published: 2010-04-07T22:25:15+00:00

Impotent pieces in the game He plays

Upon this checkerboard of nights and days,

Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,

And one by one back in the closet lays.

What had this boy to do with it? He was not his own father; he was not his own mother. . . . All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth. And yet he is to be compelled to pay.[2]

If DNA is destiny, Darrow is right: The murderer is no more to blame than is an impotent piece in a losing game of checkers. And if no one is guilty, no one is punished. The justice system is reduced to a system of therapy and restraint, an asylum of impotent pieces administered by impotent pieces, and none to fly over the cuckoo’s nest (that is, the insane asylum) because there is nothing over the asylum, no realm of spirit, of good and evil, transcending the shuffle of DNA.

IMBECILES

Even more far-reaching is the legal opinion of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes believed that since modern science, including Darwinism, had overthrown traditional religious belief, lawmakers and judges should decide cases strictly based on what would have the best practical results, apparently with people like Holmes being the best judges of what best is. Holmes also believed that society had to institute artificial selection in order to make up for the diminished role of natural selection in modern society, diminished by modern medicine. If that meant making it legal to sterilize people who might be mentally handicapped, so be it. Indeed, Holmes argued for “restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn’t pass the examination.”[3] In 1927 Holmes had an opportunity to put such thinking into practice when the high court heard the case of Buck v. Bell.

Carrie Buck’s mother had been classified as “feebleminded,” a loose term routinely applied to poor and minority women regardless of whether they actually were mentally handicapped. Carrie was put in a foster home and became pregnant with an illegitimate child. Her foster family promptly turned Carrie over to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. The superintendent, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, asserted that she was “incorrigible” and fit Virginia’s legal definition of “feebleminded.” Claiming that the girl’s mother had also been sexually immoral and dimwitted, he argued that Carrie was a genetic threat to society. He moved to have her sterilized under a 1924 Virginia statute calling for the mandatory sterilization of the mentally handicapped in order to improve the gene pool of future generations. The order came to sterilize, but rather than agreeing to the decision like a dimwitted little sheep, Carrie Buck fought the decision all the way to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for her, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Supreme Court decided against her in an 8-1 decision.

Chief Justice Holmes penned the majority decision:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives.

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