Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Intelligent design

From the ongoing debate about Intelligence Design and evolution:
Last year, the [Kansas state] board asked a committee of educators to draft recommendations for updating the standards, then accepted two rival proposals.

One, backed by a majority of those educators, continues an evolution-friendly tone from the current standards. Those standards would define science as "a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." That's close to the current definition.

The other proposal is backed by intelligent design advocates and is similar to language in Ohio's standards. It defines science as "a systematic method of continuing investigation" using observation, experiment, measurement, theory building, testing of ideas and logical argument to lead to better explanations of natural phenomena.

So how do you make "intelligent design" fit into that context? How do you continually investigate intelligent design? Do you look at random objects in nature and go, "Yep, had to be made by someone, no way this evolved." What about experiments? Do you put a glass box off to the side and wait for life to form in it? If it doesn't, does that disprove your theory? And is any of that really science?

I'm not saying intelligent design isn't a theory of how the world began, I'm just saying it is not a scientific one. I'm listening for you to convince me otherwise.

*UPDATE* Let me put it this way. You don't teach intelligent design in school for the same reason you don't teach evolution in church. One is science, and belongs in a science class, the other religion. Hopefully you can figure it out on your own.