Author and secular humanist Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed on NPR (listen here) yesterday morning.  His assertion at the beginning of the interview that "Karl Marx got a bum rap," has been getting some attention.  However, there's a much more unexpected exchange towards the end of the interview about the "tribal" thinking among scientists--how they take a defensive posture, protecting their own views from the opposing intelligent design "tribe" at the expense of exploring real scientific questions.

KV:  It's obvious through the human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important.....  Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design.

NPR:  Are...are--

KV:  Look, it's--the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.

NPR:  How are the scientists behaving tribally?

KV:  They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened--the fossil record shows that; but look--my body and your body are miracles of design.  Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such a machine.

NPR:  Does that mean that you would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom?

KV:  Look, if it's what we're thinking about all the time, if I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the h*** we really got this way.  It's a perfectly natural human thought.  And okay, if you go into the science class, you can't think this?  Well, all right.  As soon as you leave, you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.  Also I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior--I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved.  He is simply representing a tribe.

NPR:  There are tribes on both sides here, in your view.

KV:  Yes.

Materialist scientists aren't going to be able to ignore the evidence offered by the ID movement for much longer if even Kurt Vonnegut is starting to catch on to their defense-at-all-cost strategy.  The dogmatism with which Darwinism is protected from examination will eventually lose out to intellectual curiosity. 

A special thank you today to all those in the ID movement facing unrelenting opposition and ridicule in order to drive a wedge between science and naturalism so we can finally be free to follow the evidence where it leads.