Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Evangelicals intensify calls to pull kids from public schools
(DAVID CRARY, Associated Press, September 2, 2006)

Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized movement is now moving from harsh words to action - with parents taking their own children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the same.

Led mainly by evangelical Christians, the movement depicts public education as hostile to religious faith and claims to be behind a surge in the number of students being schooled at home.

"The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools," said Roger Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee. "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."

The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists' annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into homeschooling or private Christian schools.

Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State. One new campaign aims to monitor public schools for what conservatives see as pro-gay curriculum and programs; another initiative seeks to draw an additional 1 million children into homeschooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor families wanting to try it.

"Homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted," says the California-based Considering Homeschooling Ministry.

Though the movement's rhetoric strikes public school supporters as extreme, some of its leaders are influential. They include R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an "exit strategy" from public schools, and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and host of a nationally broadcast religious program.

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war," Kennedy said in a recent commentary.

Overall, public schools are in no danger of withering away. The latest federal figures, from 2005, show their total K-12 enrollment at 48.4 million, compared to 6.3 million in private schools - most of them religious.

However, the National Center for Education Statistics said private school enrollment has grown at a faster rate than public schools since 1989, and it expects that trend to continue through 2014. Moreover, the private school figures don't include the growing ranks of homeschoolers - there were at least 1.1 million of them in 2003, according to federal figures, and perhaps more than 2 million now, according to homeschool advocates.

According to a federal survey, 72 percent of homeschooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

The president of the largest teachers' union, Reg Weaver of the National Education Association, says public school critics use increasingly harsh language, "but they're not as successful as they'd like to pretend."

"The overwhelming majority of our folks," Weaver said of his union members, "are not being pulled off the agenda of great public schools for all children."

Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, a nonpartisan civil liberties group, said public education leaders should work harder to convince parents they aren't against religion by encouraging nonsectarian teaching about the Bible and the formation of student religious clubs.

"School leaders know they're facing the perception that public education has somehow become hostile to religion," Haynes said. "They understand there's no time to be lost."

According to a federal survey, 72 percent of homeschooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

I don't know what's worse, seeing another page of posts devoted to Spendi (someone just shoot me), or knowing that if he stops posting we may not have anything to talk about.

All the while Wandel tries heroically to chum the water with selected snippets of ID and Creationist lunacy to keep the thread going. You do an amazing job Wandel, you're relentless

Nothing frightens liberals and moderates more, I think, than the vision of religious organizations and movements dictating what may be taught to children in public schools, either through formal legislation or school board rulings or informal intimidation of teachers. Many Americans are horrified by the prospect of a new dark age imposed by militant superstition; they fear a black, know-nothing night of ignorance in which America becomes an intellectually backward and stagnant theocracy. But someone must decide what children are taught about history and science. If the elected school board or the majority of parents in a particular jurisdiction sincerely believes that Darwin's theory of evolution is radically wrong, why should they not have the power to prevent that error from being taught to their children, just as they have the power to prevent teachers from converting their classes to the Flat Earth Society? It is no answer that children must not be taught the biblical theory of creation because the Bible must be kept out of the classroom. The Bible also condemns murder but that does not mean that children cannot be taught that murder is wrong.

But the cosmological and biological beliefs of the religious conservatives do not just coincide with their religious convictions: they would reject those cosmological and biological beliefs out of hand if they were not dictated by those religious convictions. Almost all religious conservatives accept that the methods of empirical science are in general well designed for the discovery of truth and that their children must be taught the reliability of those methods if they are to be prepared for their lives. They would not countenance requiring or permitting teachers to teach, even as an alternate theory, what science has established as unquestionably and beyond challenge false: that the sun orbits the earth or that radioactivity is harmless, for example. The biblical account of the creation of the universe and of human beings is just as silly if it is treated not as a myth but as a scientific explanation. Some religious people find that for them faith trumps science in these and the other few remaining areas in which faith challenges science. They deny the truth of Darwinian theory in the self-conscious exercise of their personal responsibility to fix the role of faith in their lives. That is their right: it would be a terrible violation of liberty to try to coerce them out of that conviction. But they must not try to impose that faith on others, including children, most of whom attend public schools.

In recent years a few religious scientists have claimed a refutation of the main tenets of Darwinian evolution that does not rely on biblical authority or the biblical young-Earth account of creation. This refutation purports only to show that an "intelligent design" rather than the unguided processes of random variation and natural selection that Darwin postulated must be responsible for creating life and human beings. The thesis has quickly gained enormous attention and notoriety. Several states have considered requiring teachers to describe the intelligent design theory as an available alternative to standard evolutionary theory in public high school biology classes. A Pennsylvania school board adopted that requirement a few years ago, and though a federal judge then struck the proposal down as an unconstitutional imposition of Christian doctrine in public schools, other public bodies in other states are still pursuing similar programs. President Bush recently appeared to endorse these campaigns: he said that "I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught." The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who is said to covet the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008, agreed. He said that teaching intelligent design theory along with evolution, as competing scientific explanations of the creation of human life, was fair because it "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone."

If there is any scientific evidence against evolution, then of course students should be taught what it is. But the intelligent design movement has discovered no such scientific evidence at all. We must distinguish the following three claims. (1) Scientists have not yet shown to all their satisfaction how the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection explain every feature of the development of plant and animal life on our planet; some features remain areas of speculation and controversy among them. (2) There is now good scientific evidence that these features cannot be explained within the general Darwinian structure; a successful explanation will therefore require abandoning that structure altogether. (3) This evidence also at least suggests that an intelligent designer created life and designed the processes of development that have produced human beings.

The first of these claims is both correct and unsurprising. The details of evolutionary theory, like the phenomena it tries to explain, are enormously complex. Eminent biologists disagree in heated arguments about, for example, whether some features of developed life are best explained as accidents or byproducts of no survival value in themselves. Evolutionary biologists face other challenges and disagree in how best to meet them.

The second of the three claims is false. It does not follow from the fact that evolutionary scientists have not yet found or agreed on a solution to some puzzle that their methods have been shown to be defective, any more than it follows from historical controversies or unproved mathematical conjectures that the methods of historians or mathematicians must be abandoned. Scientists have so far found no reason to doubt that the evolutionary puzzles can be solved within the general apparatus of neo-Darwinian theory that supplements Darwin with the dramatic recent discoveries of genetic biology. None of the rival solutions that scientists offer to the puzzles of evolution calls that general apparatus into question. The proponents of intelligent design theory claim in their lectures, popular writing, and television appearances that the irreducible complexity of certain forms of life proves that Darwin's theory must be rejected root and branch. No element of certain even primitive forms of life could be removed, they say, without making it impossible for that form of life to survive. But their arguments are very bad, a judgment confirmed by their failure so far to expose these arguments to professional review by submitting articles to peer-reviewed journals. It is no explanation of this failure to suppose that the scientific establishment would reject even well-reasoned articles that challenged Darwin. On the contrary, a scientifically sound general attack on evolution would be very exciting news indeed: a Nobel Prize might be around the corner.

The third claim would be false even if the second claim were true. The proponents of intelligent design do not state explicitly that the designer must be a god?-they try to avoid overtly religious claims in hopes that the constitutional bar to religious instruction in public schools would not prevent their theory being taught there?-but that is the clear and unacceptable implication of their argument. If the failure to find a natural physical or biological explanation of some physical or biological phenomenon were taken to be evidence of intervention by a god who intended to bring about that phenomenon, science would disappear.

Excerpt from "Three Questions for America" by Ronald Dworkin (The New York Review of Books, September 2006)

Almost all religious conservatives accept that the methods of empirical science are in general well designed for the discovery of truth and that their children must be taught the reliability of those methods if they are to be prepared for their lives. They would not countenance requiring or permitting teachers to teach, even as an alternate theory, what science has established as unquestionably and beyond challenge false: that the sun orbits the earth or that radioactivity is harmless, for example.

Scientists have not yet shown to all their satisfaction how the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection explain every feature of the development of plant and animal life on our planet; some features remain areas of speculation and controversy among them..............
The first of these claims is both correct and unsurprising. The details of evolutionary theory, like the phenomena it tries to explain, are enormously complex. Eminent biologists disagree in heated arguments about, for example, whether some features of developed life are best explained as accidents or byproducts of no survival value in themselves. Evolutionary biologists face other challenges and disagree in how best to meet them.

Italy
Pope keeps intelligent design off the agenda

The subject of intelligent design did not come up as Pope Benedict XVI and 39 of his former doctoral students spent the weekend pondering evolution, a participant said yesterday. Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design, which claims to prove scientifically that life could not have simply evolved. But Father Joseph Fessio said "that particular controversy did not arise". The Pope has previously stated that the Church recognises evolution as a scientific fact, but God ultimately created the world.
Reuters Paris

A clever escape for the ID "scientists" and the Catholic Church then?

Despite what was feared/hoped before:

Quote:

Italy
Pope keeps intelligent design off the agenda

Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design,

I do believe timber that in view of-

Quote:

Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design,

that those who bit at the "media speculation" are the idiots. Media plays its own game but those who are its gobsmacked followers have, once again, had the pratfall.

The Pope doesn't do "flavour of the month".

We all know what Media wants and it has nothing to do with anything except money.

You are all just that little bit more Anti-IDarian than before and --hey-- nothing happened. Ingsoc is here.

Don't you know that Mediacorps is insanely jealous of every other centre of power? And it is well into pickpocketing on a grand scale. It generates its own energy now rather than mediating.

Have you nothing to say timber on the adaptability of "life" to radioactivity which Mr Dworkin and his editor so carelessly drew our attention to?