Nathan Newman is saying some interesting things about how we should deal with the Intelligent Design creationism movement and the issue of American secularism. It's a radically different perspective than the good guys/bad guys polarization we're usually dealing with, and so it's useful to think about and shake up some of the ol' cerebral calcifications. I'll run through some of the main themes, from the one that I think is completely wrong to some strong ideas I could get behind, although not without some worries.

1. One thing he's suggesting is that we shouldn't get hung up on the religious motives of the ID camp, and we should recognize some of their secular ideals, too. This is a serious mistake, I think, and gives them far too much credit—and unfortunately he undermines his own argument by not doing his homework.

The very fact that they see themselves initially engaged in academic debate shows a secular component of their work. The biggest mistake that many secularists make is not taking their opponents seriously. As I've said, I think the ID science is crap, but there's lots of crappy science that has been believed by respectable people for long periods of time. And much of ID is framed in subtle ways. For those unfamiliar with it, maybe you should check out the Science and Research section of the Discovery Institute. There's a hell of a lot of secular sounding critiques of Darwinism there, whatever the overall purpose of the research may be -- and let's not pretend that many advocates of Darwinism have not had other ideological goals that led them to be strong advocates of evolutionary change.

The subtle and secular critiques he brings up are a facade. Newman has read the Wedge document; it's hard to see how he can now claim that there is a serious secular component to what they are doing. The ID creationists recognize that science does have credibility and authority in American culture (and that's a strength we need to exploit more), so what they are doing is adopting the language and posture of science to pursue entirely religious goals. "Secular sounding critiques" is all they've got; there is no substance there. I really recommend Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design by Forrest and Gross as a solid look at what's really going on at the Discovery Institute beneath that veneer of fake science.

A minor problem: Newman also uses the term "Darwinist". That's a tell to us in biology. No one here uses that term—it's archaic and misleading and suggests a very narrow and specific subdomain of evolution. It's like referring to Christians as Athanasians. It'll leave most of them scratching their heads and wondering what the hell you're talking about, and confirm that you've got your information about us from suspect sources.

2. Another point Newman makes is not marred by misconceptions, and although it's completely counter to the assumptions of most evolution proponents, maybe it needs to be thought about. He suggests that the courtroom battles are distracting us from the job of winning over religious voters, and that maybe we should let the creationists slide a little of their crap into the schools, where it can be confronted.

Courts make secularists too intellectually and politically slack. The religious right is mobilizing broadly, not just at the ballot box but in the day-to-day lives of people to convince them that their values are the correct ones. Commentator Dan S. worries that if evolution and "intelligent design" end up in the same classroom, he doesn't think students will come out with the right evaluation of the evidence. But that's a problem in the larger society where parents aren't pushing for a fair evaluation of the evidence by their children. And that's where we need to organize, not just depend on courts to fix "the problem" over the objections of parents.

He's suggesting that not only has it weakened the broader cultural response by secularists to fundamentalists, but it has fueled a backlash by the fundamentalists. This is a point Susan Jacoby has also made in the NY Times.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, America was well on its way to an accommodation between science and mainstream religion, now a fait accompli in the rest of the developed world, that pleases neither atheists nor theocrats manqués but works for almost everyone else. A growing number of Americans accepted both evolution and religion but considered it the responsibility of the church, not public schools, to sort out the role of God. This view was expressed in 1904 by Maynard M. Metcalf, a zoologist and a liberal Christian, who praised the move to exclude religious speculation from the teaching of life sciences.

The Scopes trial changed all that. Instead of being the nail in the coffin of creationism as many believe, the trial undermined the emerging accommodation between religion and science by intensifying the fundamentalists' conviction that acceptance of evolution would inevitably weaken any type of faith.

I worry about surrendering one of the few weapons a minority has in its fight for recognition in our society, but I think there is some interesting truth to these ideas. Maybe one of the things we need to do is stop thinking like an oppressed minority that needs court protection and flex our muscles a bit more, and perhaps even turn it all around and treat the fundamentalists as the minority. Although I'm actually more inclined to think we should continue the fight in the courts in addition to increasing our visibility in other venues.

3. Which leads into another idea that I, personally, find very compelling, but know from interactions with other members of the pro-evolution camp will encounter strong opposition from our own side: We need to assert secularism in public life more.

Seculars may fight the religious right at the ballot box today, but most do remarkably little to fight them in the spiritual realm of peoples day-to-day lives. Partly it is the complacency of insular secular worlds where they often just can't believe people actually believe in creation science, so they don't think it deserves a serious debate.

But what is clear is that we need more than mobilization at the ballot box; we need to take the fight for the free thought to the steets and pews of the country, much as has been done in response to each upsurge of orthodoxy in our history.

Now if pressing our case in the courts is triggering a backlash, I worry that aggressive proponents of the agnostic/atheist/secular might be even more threatening, and Newman doesn't try to address this contradiction…but hey, my readers know me. Yes, let's loose the godless firebrands!

He also touches on something that irks me: the idea that religion and science should be compatible. They aren't, they really aren't. Religion can make itself compatible by adopting a very abstract position, the idea of a largely non-interventionist, watchmaker god, but that isn't the kind of religion that is causing us trouble, and it's not the kind of religion our leaders and the public are imagining.

Secularists often spend their time talking about the compatibility of religious beliefs with secular rules in order to justify the legal basis of those court decisions. Which weakens those secularists in the cultural realm to directly confront religious fundamentalists to say their beliefs aren't compatible with science. What is striking in reading Freethinkers is how vibrant public debate was in the 19th century over these core issues of religious truth.

America was never the religious theocracy imagined by the religious right, but the important changes in social values in our society have come not from court rules but from a vibrant democratic debate. We need to continue that tradition of democratic mobilization on secular values and abandon the elite crutch of the courts.

I agree, but see one problem: where is the vigorous, loud spokesperson for freethought in America who can do all this for us? Ingersoll is long gone, and I've noticed a tendency in pro-evolution arguments to instead emphasize the compatibility of religion and science, and to promote rational religious people as our representatives; atheists should stay in their closets and be very, very quiet, lest they scare off the skittish Christians we want to join us.

What we need is to clearly declare our fellowship with the reasonable theists who believe in reason and science, and at the same time be willing to proudly acknowledge our affiliation with the community of atheists and agnostics. That isn't said often enough, and all too often there is a sense that the atheists among us (Dawkins, for instance) are a detriment to the cause of good science and evolution. That is killing us. It reinforces the bias of the religious that atheism is something shameful. After all, if we can't be proud of ourselves, why should they be?