Preface
The intelligent design movement, which arose in the United States in the 1990s and quickly obtained headlines through its challenge to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, sees itself as the outgrowth of a 2,500-year critique of materialism dating back to the ancient Greeks. Our intent in this short book is to look at this same debate from the opposite point of view, by providing a brief account of the 2,500-year materialist critique of intelligent design (creationism) out of which the modern scientific worldview emerged. This millennia-long controversy within Western thought is examined as it bears on social science as well as natural science, philosophy as well as religion, and the state (politics) as well as the church.
Numerous recent attempts to respond to the intelligent design movement have sought to forge an artificial peace between science and religion. Yet, the conflict between religion and science, which the intelligent design movement brought to the fore, is, we will contend, insurmountable within the present society. Religious alienation, i.e., alienation from the world, is a reflection of human alienation; as is the alienation of science, when conceived as a mere instrument of domination. Both are equally necessary to the present structure of power. The only way to transcend this dual estrangement is to create through social means a broader materialism-humanism; one in which a sustainable relation to nature, i.e., a lived naturalism, is its first precondition. To achieve this, however, we will have to change our relation to the world, making it our friend.
This book, more even than most, is a social product, involving our family, friends, and colleagues. Our argument, which developed over several years, had its first manifestation in a public lecture by Brett Clark, delivered at a number of universities in 2005-2006, and then in an article, co-authored by the three of us, in Theory & Society in 2007. We would like to thank the editors of Theory & Society, especially Karen Lucas, for their help and support at this earlier stage of work. We are also grateful to our friends at Monthly Review for their encouragement, including John Mage, Martin Paddio, John Simon, Michael Yates, Claude Misukiewicz, and Scott Borchert. It is impossible to imagine the present work apart from the inspiration offered by Carrie Ann Naumoff, Kris Shields, and Theresa Koford, through their own struggles on behalf of education, human welfare, and life in general—from which this book derives much of its practical meaning. Finally, we would like to acknowledge, in the persons of Saul and Ida Foster and Arthur and Galen York, a generation of students in public education, to all of whom, and to the hope for the world that they represent, this book is dedicated.