Ever since President Bush suggested that Intelligent Design theory ought to be taught to kids in schools alongside Darwinism/Evolution, the blogosphere has been abuzz with people commenting. I ran across a number of comments at Media Matters, a liberal blog, regarding a column that Fox News's Tony Snow wrote on the subject. I found the article to be fair to both sides of the debate, but the comments were a bunch of unchallenged rants with very little basis in reality. I got the impression that folks just flat-out don't want to believe in God, and therefore cannot bring themselves to even consider subscribing to Intelligent Design theory. They don't have an argument against it, other than to say that those horrible Christians just want to rule the country as a theocracy and that such talk about higher powers is idiotic:
or this gem:f*ck snow and all of the other theofascists who embrace science when it's convenient for them (computers, planes, cars, medicines, phones, etc) but shirk science when it threatens their dream of turning the US into jeezusland.
snow keeps talking about the supposed "missing links" in evolutionary theory. but the fact is that new discoveries are being made all the time, including the recent discovery of a dinosaur with feathers. intelligent design is nothing new. but with so many of the "missing links" being filled in, the religionists are looking for something to keep the idea of creation going, since the bible view is an obvious fairy tale.
I'm in the middle of a book that a friend of mine let me borrow called "The Case for a Creator." I'm not crazy about the way he wrote it, but the interviews are fascinating. The author interviews a dozen different scientists - all with accomplished resumes - to have them explain various aspects of what you could call Intelligent Design theory. That is, what is it and why should we take it seriously; and what about all those "traditional" theories like evolution and the Big Bang, etc.?
Intelligent Design is NOT Creationism. Creationism is based on the bible (e.g. God created the universe in 7 calendar days); ID is based on science (e.g. if the universe were expanding at a rate even a fraction faster than it is, life in the universe would be impossible). So why all the screaming about teaching it to kids? It has at least as much validity as Darwinism, which hasn't been proven after 150 years of trying.
Case in point, raised in this book: Darwin claims that all life on earth has a common ancestor. That is, we were lizards, or amoeba, long before we were humans. According to one scientist interviewed on the subject, Darwin himself acknowledges that to prove this theory, we would eventually need to unearth fossils of "transitional" creatures - creatures that exhibited a connection to more than one species of animal, and that no such fossils at the time had been found. He believed that soon afterward, the fossil record would vindicate him with these "missing link" fossils. 150 years later, we're still waiting for the first one. Claims that various fossils have met these criteria have been proven in every instance to be wrong or false. Yet we continue to wait, sure that he was right. And we continue to teach this theory to our children in schools, despite its lack of any evidence.
I'm not a scientist, and thus not qualified to refute any of these claims on either side. But I think the debate is a healthy one and I find the arguments that I've heard so far for ID to be compelling. Why can't liberals welcome this debate, as well?
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