Bush, Intelligent Design, and the Art of Marketing Slogans

The Washington Post's interview with President Bush was....well, just surreal at times. Bush's answers virtually drip with disdain. At one point he actually says that he's having to make an effort to concentrate to answer their questions. And this exchange can only strike me as bizarre:

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --

THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we're in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

This just struck me as hilarious. It's even funnier if you read it in Vinnie Barbarino style (What? Where? Who?). It's not hard to discern what was really going on here. The political spinmeisters in the White House have obviously decided that the way to sell the privatization plan is by avoiding the term "privatization" and instead using the catchphrase "personal savings accounts". It's not hard to understand why. The second phrase is much warmer, much more likely to evoke notions of self-ownership on the part of those who pay in, something that belongs to them (and of course, it does belong to them, so it's accurate). Rove and his team have probably hammered this into Bush's head, the importance of repeating this phrase like a mantra and never using the term "privatization". So when the reporter used that phrase, he had an automatic reaction to it.

But here's the thing that interests about the exchange, the notion that if you don't ask the question precisely the way he wants it asked, if you don't use the language they prefer to use, you're "editorializing". It's precisely the same thing going on with the ID advocates claims of media bias that I wrote about earlier today. It's equally planned out and fine-tuned using the tools of marketing and public relations. They have their catchphrases that they are intent on using - teach the controversy or Darwin-only lobby - and if you don't use their terminology and you don't define terms the way they want you to, you're showing "bias". For example, look at this post from the DI blog today complaining about the fact that the York Daily Record didn't merely repeat their preferred definition of intelligent design:

The York Daily Record definition says, "ID holds that all living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an unspecified divine being."

The YDR is not alone in using this description which is actually how critics of design define the theory. Hopefully the YDR will begin using a more accurate description, or at least attribute this one to critics rather than leaving it as if it were the proper, working definition.

And they then go on to give the definition they prefer the newspaper to use:

Once more, with feeling: "The scientific theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Note: Intelligent design theory does not claim that science can determine the identity of the intelligent cause. Nor does it claim that the intelligent cause must be a 'divine being' or a 'higher power' or an 'all-powerful force.' All it proposes is that science can identify whether certain features of the natural world are the products of intelligence."

Now, I would argue that the definition that the York Daily Record used is inaccurate not because it doesn't repeat the DI's preferred wording, but because it gives too much ground to that definition by saying that ID has an "unspecified" divine being. That simply isn't the case. The ID advocates are quite specific in what divine being they are talking about and it is the biblical Christian God. Of course they don't say that to the press because it would contradict the myth that they are trying so hard to establish, that their position has nothing to do with God or religion and that they are disinterested scientists looking for signs of generic "design" with no thought at all to the identity of the designer, who could just as well be an alien. But to their followers, the people who actually buy their books and fund their activities, they speak boldly of ID as proving "the reality of God" and they define ID as "the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

So there is a contradiction there. The DI says that you must define ID as an objective search for the signs of generic "design" or you are being "biased". Yet their own fellows have often defined ID as an explicitly religious attempt to restore God to his rightful place in society and destroy "naturalism". This is the same contradiction, and done for the same reason, as when Jonathan Wells tells secular audiences that he was an evolutionist who was convinced solely by the scientific evidence while in grad school that evolution was false, and then tells his fellow Moonies that he was sent to grad school by the Rev. Moon with the intent of "destroying Darwinism". Tell one story to one audience, tell the opposite story to another audience, then when the press reports what you said the first time, accuse them of being biased, presumably because they believed what you said the first time when you prefer that they believe what you said the second time. It's all quite amusing and absurd.

There is another contradiction here, however, and it lies within the second definition of ID, the one they would prefer we all accept without question. Their defnition combines some aspects of cosmological ID and biological ID, the first being the idea that the universe itself must have been designed because it is so finely-tuned for life to exist, and the second being the idea that life on earth must have been designed because there is no compelling natural explanation for how it could have otherwise appeared. But remember that if you say that ID posits a supernatural designer, they will scream bloody murder and tell you that ID could also be a natural entity like an alien. But if that is the case, the cosmological ID stuff has to go out the window. Aliens exist within the universe and are natural entities, so they obviously could not have designed the universe itself. Only a divine being, something outside of nature, outside the universe, could have designed the universe. So by combining cosmological ID with biological ID, they are in effect admitting that all the talk of aliens or non-supernatural designers is nonsense because the cosmological design arguments they make are only consistent with a supernatural one, i.e. God.