Intelligent Design

Mention Intelligent Design around City Hall and they will immediately begin discussing the controversial traffic roundabout proposed for Gormanville Road. My only experience with roundabouts was in Kingston in the 60’s and 70’s where the entertainment of the day was using the traffic circle on the main drag and watching the confused visitors try to exit the circling traffic. The increased traffic or number of accidents finally forced Kingston to abandon their one traffic circle. Whether we can design one that will work for the Gormanville / McKeown intersection remains to be seen. It will certainly confuse first-time users and visitors.

If the roundabout is accepted, and works, the short-staffed engineers at City Hall should keep a copy of the design so they can apply it to Gormanville and Main West, Ski Club and O’Brien and even to confusion corner (a.k.a Main and Algonquin). The engineers ought to keep in mind that although the university students may be nimble enough to make their way around a traffic circle on foot, senior citizens may not be so quick. Our Police Services officers may have to trade in their ball caps for a pith helmets so they can do the ‘British Bobby’ thing while directing traffic around the accidents on the roundabout.

The Intelligent Design that is making the news elsewhere is the latest take on Creationism that is making its way across the United States with the religious right. ID theorists believe that all kinds of organisms were abruptly brought into being by divine guidance and have not changed substantially since. When McGill University’s Evolution Education Research Centre in Montreal had their grant application turned down because it failed to provide adequate justification for the assumption that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct, they made the headlines.

The McGill project was entitled “Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution’s intelligent design theory on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policy makers”. While the scientific community applauded the stand taken by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s rationale in denying the grant, they wanted an even clearer definition of why the grant should be denied.

The struggle in the United States to keep a religious theory from being taught as science keeps popping up in the courts and elections of local school trustees. The American constitution, which was at one time the standard for separating the State and Religion, seems to be under attack as some Americans attempt to bring their version of God back into politics. Their President, all the while decrying the fundamentalist Muslims, is little more than an Imam, as he more and more often invokes the assistance of God in everything from waging war to the economy and social reform.

The Age of Enlightenment, when science began throwing some light on the mysteries of life, seems to have passed, and indeed many people are slipping backwards to the Dark Ages. Where once women seemed to have gained some public freedom, religious fundamentalists are forcing them back into the Darks Ages. And it not only the Muslims who are promoting this regressive social practise. Margaret Attwood’s’ Handmaiden’s Tale, dismissed as science fiction when it was published, is now being read more thoughtfully in America. Here in Canada, we still struggle with childcare, when in the backs of some minds, it is a matter of the woman staying home and out of the work place that is really at issue.

Yet lest we look askance at the Americans, we should be thinking about separating the State and Religion here at home. The first step is to remove the invocation to God to keep our country free in our national anthem. In a country that has led the world in setting standards for humanitarian peace-keeping, health care and social equality, we seem to still be in the back-woods when it comes to science and religion. Surely the folk at one of our leading universities ought to have known how to word a grant application so as not to confuse science and religion.

Meanwhile, back at North Bay, we struggle with the intelligent design of traffic flow at an intersection. Perhaps going around in circles is fitting. Why should the process of getting to the new Health Centre be any less circular than the process of funding and building it?