Skip to main content

Smuggling Religion into School

"Intelligent Design" isn't science.  It is religion.  It is the Creation Story with the Creator hiding behind an apple tree, where you cannot see him.  


Try to imagine an intelligent design without saying anything about the designer.  Try to imagine the intelligent designer without saying "God".  "I didn't say, 'God'!  It is obvious, but I didn't say it." 


William Paley, in 1802, had a famous watchmaker argument.  Should you take a stroll and stumble upon a watch, and be amazed by it, you would conclude that someone intelligent had made it.  And so you would.  It is an industrial revolution argument.  Machines are made.  A watch is a machine.  


It is not an argument from nature.  Should you take a stroll and stumble upon a baby Robin, and be amazed by it, you would not conclude that it had been intelligently designed.  You would look for its mother or father.  Nature does not manufacture baby Robins:  it evolves them.  And as for complexity, a baby Robin makes a watch seem rather simple.  


One can as easily make an argument for an incompetent designer.  Who designed Alzheimer's disease?  Cancer?  Paranoia?  Science and natural selection posit that nature tries almost everything, and that some variations are advantageous, and some are not, under the circumstances.  If the circumstances change, what is an advantage somewhere else may be a hindrance here.  Penguins and ostriches take advantage of what might be debilitating to the other.  


Some religious people argue that "intelligent design" ought to be taught as an alternative science, even though it is obvious that simply not saying that "God" is the Intelligent Designer does not mean it is not God they are talking about.  Of course, it is!


(And while we are at it, should you take a stroll and stumble upon an Intelligent Designer, and be amazed by Him, would you not conclude that a Very Intelligent Designer Indeed! had designed the Intelligent Designer?)


Michele Bachmann wants Intelligent Design to be taught in our public schools as an alternative science, so that intelligent students can choose which they prefer--science, or religious creationism--although she is going to pretend that if she never says, "God", no one will ever guess that is what she really means.  And given the condition of our educational system, maybe no one will ever guess just that.    


Should you take a stroll and stumble upon Michele Bachmann, and be amazed, would you not conclude that she is perfectly designing woman?  A natural selection?  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more