Intelligent Design in Japan

You'd think a land in which Christians number no more than 1% of the public and in which a mere 10% of the populace considers religion personally important would be one mercifully free of American-style ID stupidity, but as Hiraoki Sato indicates, the Japanese fashion for all things American just might put an end to this blissful state of affairs one of these days.

Why do my compatriots, the Japanese, try to copy Americans -- often on the basis of a most tenuous understanding? The wonderment occurred when I checked the Internet to see if the notion of "intelligent design" (I.D.) was known in Japan and at once found that it was, and more.

Among the "intellectuals" who embrace it is Hisayoshi Watanabe, professor emeritus of English and American literature at the University of Kyoto.

[...]

Asked about the oft-made point that I.D.'s principal promoter is the "Christian right" and that "the intelligent being" assumed to exist in the I.D. argument "is just another name for God in the Creation based on the Old Testament," Watanabe dismissed it by saying, "If it were anything of the sort, not a single scientist would be supporting it."

[...]

The reporter who interviewed Watanabe for the Sankei article is more forthright in this regard. On one hand, he indignantly tells us that a Japanese middle-school textbook, "most heavily influenced by Marxism," carried until 2001 a two-page spread contrasting Darwin's evolution theory with biblical creationism and the treatment of Japan's own creation myth in prewar textbooks. Such a comparison strikes me as apt.

The Sankei reporter thinks otherwise: It tells the students to "regard the Bible and myths negatively," he says, adding that the proposition that the monkey is the ancestor of human beings denigrates human dignity or robs us of "romance."

On the other hand, he approvingly cites Yatsuhiro Nakagawa, who dismisses both creationism and evolution as "unscientific." Nakagawa, who teaches international politics at Tsukuba University, stresses that there is a difference between the two. "The myth that 'God created man' gives us the sense of self-awareness and responsibility to guide us toward a nobler development," whereas "the theology that humans are 'descendants of monkeys' encourages them to deny themselves as humans and leads to their regression."

[...]

As [Watanabe] makes clear in the Sankei interview, his real objection is to "materialism, the mechanistic theory that holds that the universe can have neither purpose nor direction."

In other words, unintelligent design has managed to find a welcome amongst "reds under the bed" anti-communists and romantic rightists who reject any facts which stand in the way of attempts to bolster their sense of self-esteem and need for direction in life, i.e., precisely the same sorts of irrationalist "intellectuals" who have always embraced similar pseudoscientific rubbish elsewhere and in other eras; no doubt they'd have been just as fervently behind the old legends of divine imperial descent from "Amaterasu Omikami" of the pre-war years if that sort of thing were still semi-respectable. At any rate, while nutcases will always find some crank subject or other to latch unto, I hope it's not too much to wish for that this particular American import never becomes as popular as other irritating foreign acquisitions such as Christmas ...

Comments

[SemperFi]

Apparently some "intellectual" Japanese are able to get away from the night-sky air or light pollution and observe, as a person named David did centuries ago, a crystal-clear night sky that in its simple majestic complexity makes the case for intelligent design:

Psalm 19
To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David.

THE HEAVENS declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows and proclaims His handiwork. Day after day pours forth speech, and night after night shows forth knowledge. There is no speech nor spoken word [from the stars]; their voice is not heard. Yet their voice [in evidence] goes out through all the earth, their sayings to the end of the world. Of the heavens has God made a tent for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; and it rejoices as a strong man to run his course. Its going forth is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the ends of it; and nothing [yes, no one] is hidden from the heat of it.

...or do you really believe what you see started spontaneously from nothing?

Which perspective takes the greater faith...?

[Abiola]

"Apparently some "intellectual" Japanese are able to get away from the night-sky air or light pollution and observe, as a person named David did centuries ago, a crystal-clear night sky that in its simple majestic complexity makes the case for intelligent design:"

How odd it is then that so many astronomers who spend their nights gazing at just such vistas, and who actually have an intimate understanding of the physics underlying the pretty view you admire, manage to come to an utterly different conclusion from yours ...

"Psalm 19
To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David."

Ah, yes, the Argument from Old Poetry:

1: There exists a book of myths which is many years old and which was written in a language different from mine.

2: It contains fanciful descriptions of the creation of the universe which happen to tickle my aesthetic fancy.

3: Ergo, [My deity/deities of preference] exist!

No doubt you'll be just as willing to grant that the world was created by Izanagi and Izanami if someone quotes beautiful lines from the Kojiki to you, right?

"...or do you really believe what you see started spontaneously from nothing?

Which perspective takes the greater faith...?"

One would think it's the one which imagines "Yahweh did it!" as an explation for the universe to be anything other than meaningless question-begging - who created Yahweh? - but then again, creationist logic works in mysterious ways ...

[SemperFi]

Some learned-men who also have had "intimate knowledge," although perhaps with a different perspective, have said:

"God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds."
- Giordana Bruno, 1584, "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds"

"What grander idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious and firy globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison, moving their rounds about its body and held tight to their respective orbits by the attractive force inherent to it while they are suspended in the same space by the Creator's almighty arm! And then let us cast our eyes up to the spangled canoply of heaven, where innumerable luminaries at such an immense distance from us cover the face of the skies. All suns as great as that which illumines us, surrounded with earths perhaps no way inferior to the ball which we inhabit and no part of the amazing whole unfilled! System running into system, and worlds bordering on worlds! Sun, earth, moon, stars be ye made, and they were made!" - Edmund Burke, at age 15 praising the "noble science" of astronomy

"The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy." - Steven Hawking

And to all such "complicated molecular structures" who believe in their sense of intellectual superiority not only as individuals but as a specie (with odds of having "evolved" to do so being around 1 in 50 billion organisms), I say, we all will find Truth at our last breath...

...at which time, I think I will have placed the better "bet." If I lose and you win, I lose nothing because if you are correct there was nothing to win in the first place; however, if I win, I gain eternal life with my God and you lose.

Said another way, you're in a lose-lose situation. Not too smart for the "complicated molecular structure" of superior intelligence I am sure you believe yourself to be....

[Barbar]

Yup, that makes sense, God is just waiting for y'all to die, at which point he will reward SemperFi for his oh-so-clever bet with the gift of eternal life, and he will punish the impudent Abiola with eternal damnation! Bwahahaha!

What a noble vision of the infinite being who created the entire universe and all the mechanisms that lead to life and intelligence -- he's sitting around waiting to reward his followers with eternal life, because he's an insecure little prick who is deeply disturbed by disbelievers. What amazing vision, what a keen understanding of beauty. We should all be ashamed.

[Abiola]

Barbar,

Well said! One wonders how such irrational devotees of superstition would get through their days without such childish revenge fantasies to comfort them ...

[Randy McDonald]

I just wonder if some people might take this as cue for a new fascist ideology. "We are divine creations. Our unfortunate neighbours comke from monkey stock. The balance of power should be tilted accordingly."