Intelligent design comes to science class

Here we go again. The news media is framing the debate the same way it was framed in the Scopes trial, that anyone who doesn't believe in evolution must be an idiot. The scopes trial focused on a literal interpretation of the bible, which might make the world only about 10,000 or so years old. God can do whatever he likes, but if he only created the world 10,000 years ago, he certainly hid the creation by planting lot's of scientific evidence to the contrary.

I'm skeptical about the Intelligent Design science too, although I remain open-minded. We do use such rules to tell if bone fragments were worked into tools (i.e., there were the result of intelligent design), or merely abused in the process of eating. I think it would be hard to look at, say, DNA, and prove that it had an intelligent design. To teach intelligent design would require a solid underpinning of what exactly intelligent design means. This would be a fascinating field to study, but it is highly theoretical. And finally, while God may have left some incontrovertible evidence of His hand for us to find, He might not have. (I expect this to be come a part of the debate soon. Remember Stephan Hawkings' quote "... how much choice did God really have in creation." I believe that God had all the choice he wanted.)

So what's the problem? Weakness in the Intelligent Design theory doesn't make evolution any more than a theory. See my post from last Friday. Forcing the teaching of Intelligent Design is probably the wrong attack. I much prefer the label idea, and the choosing of books that teach evolution as a theory, and a theory with many problems.