David Kling­hof­fer is sur­prised that his Dis­co. ‘tute col­leagues man­aged to get an arti­cle pub­lished at the Huff­in­g­ton Post. Kling­hof­fer­’s col­league must’ve known this was com­ing, and Huff­Po isn’t noto­ri­ous for refus­ing essays, so I can’t fath­om why it was any sort of sur­prise. Nor is “pleas­ant” the word that came to mind on read­ing the essay, or any­thing com­ing from Dis­co. Any­way, Kling­hof­fer asks us to “Try to Imag­ine Our Coun­try’s Found­ing if the Founders Had Not Been Advo­cates of Intel­li­gent Design:

The Huff­in­g­ton Post pleas­ant­ly sur­prised us today with an excel­lent piece on the nec­es­sary role of faith in pub­lic life, by James Robi­son and Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s Jay Richards…

The authors prompt me to won­der how Dar­win­ists think the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion might have gone — whether it would have been pos­si­ble at all — if the Founders had not been intel­li­gent-design advocates.

For the rest of Kling­hof­fer­’s piece he stu­dious­ly avoids ask­ing any “Dar­win­ist” any­thing of the sort, or cit­ing their views on the mat­ter. Of course.

The thing is, it’s not a hard ques­tion to answer, since – con­trary to Kling­hof­fer­’s fram­ing of the ques­tion – it does­n’t even involve a coun­ter­fac­tu­al. The Founders were not, as a group, advo­cates of intel­li­gent design in any sense that means any­thing today.

First, because their reli­gious views were notably het­ero­ge­neous, with main­stream Chris­tians of var­i­ous denom­i­na­tions to deists like Thomas Paine (whose deis­tic attacks on orga­nized reli­gion verged on athe­ism), George Wash­ing­ton, Thomas Jef­fer­son (a self-described fol­low­er of “mate­ri­al­ism,” who loved the eth­i­cal teach­ings of Jesus but who edit­ed all mir­a­cles out of the New Tes­ta­ment), and Ben­jamin Franklin (who was regard­ed by his con­tem­po­raries as “an apos­tate or an Athe­ist”). It seems rather hard to extract sup­port for intel­li­gent design from men who saw the New Tes­ta­ment as a “dunghil” of super­nat­ur­al tales from which a dia­mond of eth­i­cal teach­ings had to be extract­ed, or who wrote, “I do not believe in the creed pro­fessed by the Jew­ish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turk­ish church, by the Protes­tant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”

Of course, the reli­gious views of the Founders are almost irrel­e­vant here. The impor­tant thing is that “intel­li­gent design” as advo­cat­ed by Kling­hof­fer and the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, an off­shoot of the 20th cen­tu­ry cre­ation­ist move­ment that came into its own in the 1980s and ’90s. Cre­ation­ism in this sense, and intel­li­gent design in par­tic­u­lar, are reac­tions against evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, an idea that did not exist dur­ing the life of any of the Founders (Madi­son was the last to die, in 1836, before Dar­win had drawn his first evo­lu­tion­ary tree).

Indeed, Kling­hof­fer and oth­er Dis­co. staff have argued that ID is defined by its anti-evo­lu­tion­ism – any even loose­ly anti-evo­lu­tion argu­ment is treat­ed as pro-ID, even if it does­n’t argue in favor of ID. But how could some­one who died before Dar­win pub­lished On the Ori­gin of Species be expect­ed to take a posi­tion on the mer­its of Dar­win’s argu­ment, let alone on mod­ern evo­lu­tion­ary biology?

To say they were “intel­li­gent design advo­cates” wrong­ly treats them as if they were of a sin­gle mind on this (or near­ly any top­ic), mis­rep­re­sents their reli­gious views, and man­gles the his­to­ry of sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy beyond repair. “Intel­li­gent design” did­n’t exist in 1776, and to claim any­one alive at the time as an advo­cate for it is rad­i­cal­ly anachro­nis­tic, not to men­tion insult­ing to the read­er’s intel­li­gence and to the founders of this great nation.

Which is to say, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca was­n’t found­ed by ID advo­cates, so a USA found­ed by peo­ple who weren’t ID advo­cates would look exact­ly like the one we actu­al­ly have.

Set­ting aside the bizarre anachro­nism of try­ing to force late-18th cen­tu­ry thinkers into late-20th cen­tu­ry argu­ments, it’s far from clear that the Founders would have been ID advo­cates even if the con­cept meant any­thing to them. Franklin and Jef­fer­son, in par­tic­u­lar, were active nat­ur­al philoso­phers, and would pre­sum­ably have tak­en some stance on evo­lu­tion if they had lived a cen­tu­ry lat­er. What would they have said about ID creationism?

Franklin’s essay “Obser­va­tions Con­cern­ing the Increase of Mankind, Peo­pling of Coun­tries, etc.” has been sug­gest­ed as an inspi­ra­tion for Malthus’ essay on pop­u­la­tion growth, an essay which Dar­win cred­it­ed as a major inspi­ra­tion for his think­ing on nat­ur­al selec­tion. Not only that, but Franklin social­ized with Dar­win’s grand­fa­ther Eras­mus (who was also an advo­cate for trans­mu­ta­tion of species), and Charles’s father vis­it­ed Franklin in Paris and regaled his chil­dren with tales of the Amer­i­can Found­ing Father. It’s hard to imag­ine him aban­don­ing this idea he may well have helped inspire.

But Franklin’s writ­ings and research tend­ed more to the prac­ti­cal, mechan­i­cal, or phys­i­cal than to the bio­log­i­cal, and it’s hard to know what he might have thought of evo­lu­tion. Thomas Jef­fer­son, was a poly­math, a polit­i­cal philoso­pher, an agron­o­mist, and a nat­u­ral­ist. And his writ­ings reveal some attempts at grap­pling with the ques­tions Dar­win would lat­er answer so clev­er­ly. And alas, Jef­fer­son let his deism lead him astray on some sci­en­tif­ic issues. “The move­ments of nature are in a nev­er end­ing cir­cle,” he wrote in “A Mem­oir on the Dis­cov­ery of cer­tain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the West­ern parts of Vir­ginia,” pub­lished in 1799 in the Trans­ac­tions of the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety. In that essay, he argues not only for the fix­i­ty of species, but denies pos­si­bil­i­ty of extinc­tion: “The ani­mal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still prob­a­bly mov­ing in that train. For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, anoth­er and anoth­er might be lost, till this whole sys­tem of things should evan­ish by piece-meal; a con­clu­sion not war­rant­ed by the local dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two species of ani­mals, and opposed by the thou­sands and thou­sands of instances of the ren­o­vat­ing pow­er con­stant­ly exer­cised by nature for the repro­duc­tion of all her sub­jects, ani­mal, veg­etable, and min­er­al.” He reject­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extinc­tion because he saw no route to the ori­gin of new species; if only extinc­tion was pos­si­ble, the earth would become depau­per­ate in time.

Indeed, part of Jef­fer­son­’s agen­da in send­ing Lewis and Clark to sur­vey the Louisiana Pur­chase was to locate liv­ing spec­i­mens to match fos­sils found on the East Coast, spec­i­mens which would rival the size and feroc­i­ty of any­thing in Old World bes­tiaries and estab­lish that extinc­tion was impos­si­ble. He was wrong, of course.

While cre­ation­ists might pounce on his appar­ent rejec­tion of species trans­mu­ta­tion and extinc­tion as anti-evo­lu­tion, this would be his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate. Evo­lu­tion did­n’t exist yet, and in its absence, it was not unrea­son­able for peo­ple to look for oth­er expla­na­tions for the diver­si­ty of life. So we have to look deep­er, and ask how Jef­fer­son approached ques­tions of divine inter­ven­tion in the world. The fact that he edit­ed mir­a­cles out of the Bible is pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant in that regard: intel­li­gent design calls for count­less mirac­u­lous inter­ven­tions through­out life’s his­to­ry, after all. If he did­n’t think Jesus could turn water to wine, why expect Jef­fer­son to look for Jesus to slap a fla­gel­lum on bacteria?

Indeed, some of what Jef­fer­son said about sci­ence would fit him in nice­ly with the New Athe­ists. He told the nat­ur­al philoso­pher Cor­rea de Ser­ra, in 1820: “Priests…dread the advance of sci­ence as witch­es do the approach of day­light and scowl on the fatal har­bin­ger announc­ing the sub­ver­sions of the duperies on which they live.” And he declared, in an 1819 let­ter to William Short (a close friend and sec­re­tary dur­ing Jef­fer­son­’s ambas­sador­ship in France): “As you say of your­self, I too am an Epi­cu­ri­an. I con­sid­er the gen­uine (not the imput­ed) doc­trines of Epi­cu­rus as con­tain­ing every­thing ratio­nal in moral phi­los­o­phy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

That last is not note­wor­thy in itself, except that Kling­hof­fer­’s (whig­gish, anachro­nis­tic) account of the eter­nal strug­gle between intel­li­gent design and evo­lu­tion places Epi­cu­rus at the font of evo­lu­tion­ary think­ing, and there­by at the root of all moral evil. Here’s Kling­hof­fer in 2009:

The most pro­found inter­preters of the Hebrew Bible … have always under­stood that “Biblical reli­gion” sets itself against a mas­ter­less, mate­ri­al­ist pic­ture of nature. Clas­si­cal­ly, that pic­ture is crys­tal­ized in Epi­cure­an phi­los­o­phy, a vein of think­ing that led to Dar­win­ism. …The hor­ror in which Bib­li­cal tra­di­tion holds Epi­cure­anism is reflect­ed in a rab­binic term des­ig­nat­ing a par­tic­u­lar kind of heretic: apiko­rus, lit­er­al­ly an Epi­cure­an. The Mish­nah urges us to “Know how to answer an Epicurean.”

Kling­hof­fer added a few days lat­er:

The apiko­ros is list­ed along­side oth­er heretics, those who say the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead has no sup­port in the Torah and those who deny the Torah’s divine ori­gins. These are intel­lec­tu­al mat­ters, not mere­ly ones of tem­pera­ment or man­ners. In a Hebrew dic­tio­nary, it is defined as an “atheist, free­thinker, heretic.”…

The full intel­lec­tu­al line of descent from Epi­cu­rus to Dar­win is traced with bril­liant clar­i­ty by Ben­jamin Wik­er in Moral Dar­win­ism: How We Became Hedonists.

Any ques­tions?

I sup­pose the only remain­ing ques­tions are: how could Kling­hof­fer claim a self-described fol­low­er of Epi­cu­rus – an affirmed apiko­ros and mate­ri­al­ist – as a sup­port­er of intel­li­gent design? And how much of his­to­ry is he pre­pared to tear up to do it?