Unintelligent Design

Every once in a while, the holier-than-thou wing of American Christianity makes another attempt at taking our schools and perverting them from bastions of learning and intelligence into halls of indoctrination. Such it is with "intelligent design," the latest version of creationism.

At least creationism is honest enough to admit that it's rooted in the Biblical story of the creation of the Universe as told in Genesis. ID, called "creationism in a cheap tuxedo," depends on sleight-of-hand tricks in selling its claim that some form of higher intelligence - but not God - created the world and everything in it. ID advocates claim that it deserves to be respected as a scientific theory alongside those of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Indeed, they usually bend over backwards to insist that what they offer is not religion, but merely an "alternative" to Darwinian evolution which should be taught as such in science classes. "Teach the controversy!" they cry.

Now while it's not as poetic as its Genesis-based counterpart, ID is an interesting way of looking at how the world began. But it's not science. It's many things - philosophy, religion, metaphysics, culture - but not science.

Science looks at how the world is, and in order for something to be scientific, it has to be testable, provable, disprovable and repeatable. Darwin's theory of evolution has proven to be the most durable theory in the history of human scientific knowledge. Every time new medicines are created to combat bacteria or viruses that have become resistent to a drug, you're seeing evolution in action.

But how can one prove that God (or, in the world of ID, Not-God) created the world? One can't; it's quite literally a matter of faith.

Indeed, ID's reputation as a non-religious scientific theory took some hits after voters in Dover, Pennsylvania voted out all eight school board members who tried to compel local schools to teach ID as science. TV preacher Pat Robertson, last heard distinguishing himself in the world of foreign affairs by calling for the assassination of the President of Venezuela, declared that the people of Dover "rejected [God] from your city" and "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God." Other comments made it abundantly clear what ID advocates are trying to hide - that intelligent design is a religious doctrine.

That's why when they refer to an "intelligent designer," ID advocates really mean God, and the Christian version of God at that. They'll just never admit it. So if we're going to shoehorn the Biblical version of creation into America's classrooms via ID, we should include alternative versions of ID as well. Native American versions (one per tribe, of course) of how the world began, perhaps, or the African tale of how the world was literally vomited into being by Bumba. Or my personal favorite, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

When you get right down to it, the fight over ID really has nothing to do with science. Rather, it has everything to do with the efforts of the Christian right to force their own religious beliefs on the rest of us. The framers of the Constitution were quite right when they mandated a separation of church and state in the fledgling nation called the United States. Looking back on centuries of religiously-motivated persecution, oppression and massacres in Europe, they were determined never to let America emulate what had failed so disastrously in Europe.

Mixing religion and government is always a bad move. If you're going to teach ID, do it in a philosophy or comparative-religion class. But keep it out of science classes.