This FoxNews article chronicles the downfall of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania which tried to get Intelligent Design approved to teach in the public schools. All eight of the members of the board who were Republicans lost out to Democrats who fully intend to go back to the closed-minded status quo of teaching Evolution.
It’s sad that such progressive attempts to understand the physical world such as the Intelligent Design movement meet up with such narrow-thinking people in the scientific world. The people who ban Intelligent Design are akin to those who refused to accept Newton’s new system of physics. Hopefully someday those who would stifle scientific progress will come to see the advantages of a system that acknowledges a Designer (not necessarily the God of the Bible) is at work in the universe and not everything can be explained by material causation. Maybe the same people will even be able to understand the last statement I made someday…but sometimes that day seems so far off.
It’s been a bad day in my political/cultural life. It’s a sad day in our beautiful America.
If you want to hasten that day, start by overcoming your theological biases. Stop referring to one Designer with a capital D.
Jim, (above comment)
If you want to one to overcome a theological bias, you need to give sufficient reason why YOUR theological bias is superior (i.e. a [d]esigner). Arbitrary statements accomplish nothing.
brain fry,
It’s not about my bias, since I’m not the one claiming it’s “not necessarily the God of the Bible.”
If ID is truly designer- (or designers-) neutral, its proponents need to adopt neutral language. Otherwise, they’ll continue to have an uphill battle convincing non-Christians that ID isn’t just creationism in disguise.
Brain Fry has linked this before from his blog:
http://apologiachristi.blogspot.com/2005/10/top-questions-and-answers-about.html
Quote from this link:
“Intelligent design theory is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the “apparent design” in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text.”
Neautral language… The evolution theory (the adaption of the species evolution) supports atheism. Atheists speculate and even draw conclusions from the fact that evolution helps support their non-belief in God. Does that affect the theory itself? Is Evolution just atheism in disguise? I don’t think so. It’s a legitimate scientific theory, like ID, which happens to support a certain group’s beliefs.