Intelligent design is not science. It is not even a field of study. It is a belief system wrapped up in "scientific" language. Scientists have been studying the origin and nature of life on earth for at least 4,000 years. In that time, they have come up with a number of hypotheses. Then new evidence has been turned up, and the old hypotheses have been discarded, often reluctantly.
Scientists, like all humans, really hate to discard ideas that they have defended for years. The history of science is a history of unhappy people reluctantly changing their minds. Imagine the person who first realized that the sun was just another star. Terrible, terrible news. It's the universe saying, "You're not special."
The intelligent design people have never suffered such a crisis. They have never changed their minds based on new evidence. That's because they started with the desired results and worked backward.
The intelligent design people don't do mosses. They don't spend 17 years in a laboratory with a glass case full of earthworms. They are indifferent to the symbiotic relationships that create lichen. The intelligent design people are not interested in studying; they are interested in preaching. They do not present papers; they present sermons.
It's not an equal struggle. It's the world scientific community against a few guys with some Web sites and a lot of political clout.
Here's what it's like. Suppose there were a conference on child development and parenting. And some people are saying that children should start early on a rigorous academic program, and others are saying no, they should have real childhoods and be allowed to develop their creative abilities naturally. And some people say that children should get regular allowances, and others say, no, children should always do chores to get money. And some people say children should get complete sex education and access to birth control devices as soon as they reach puberty, and others say no, that just encourages promiscuity and reinforces our society's unhealthy preoccupation with sex.
And then someone says, "We should throw pingpong balls at them. All day, every day, we should throw pingpong balls at our children. It just seems like the right thing to do."
That's the role of the intelligent design people in serious discussions about the nature and the origin of life. They are the pingpong-ball people. They're not even talking about the same thing. They have an agenda. They want to change the subject.
Even their most basic premise is false. The theory of natural selection does not deny the existence of God. It has no opinion on the matter. The theory of natural selection arose from a series of observations and experiments by people who were, for the most part, believing Christians. Faith and science can live very comfortably together, if only someone would give them the chance.
I could probably live with these ID whackjobs and their moronic ideas if they didn't want it to be enshrined in law that everybody else has to be taught to be as ignorant as they are.
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