The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

How can an intelligent design produce people this stupid?

The Kansas Board of "Education" has decided to intellectually handicap all of its students by teaching them intelligent design theory as an equal alternative to science.

Let's ignore, for the moment, the separation of church and state problem this action raises (as Intelligent Design is really - despite protestations to the contrary - just a watered-down version of "God made the universe, just like it says in Genesis.").

And let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that an intelligent designer DID create the universe.

The problem is, intelligent design theory does not enable people to split the atom, map the genome, build rockets to the moon, cure disease, predict the weather, or make any other sort of innovative discovery.

Even if the very tenets underlying science were all completely wrong and misunderstood, decades, centuries, even millennia's worth of scientific progress is all connected by these premises. And they work together in a systematic, demonstrable, reproducible and extensible way.

Science isn't something you can negotiate. You can discover new things and re-evaluate conclusions, but the basic physics and biology and other scientific building blocks upon which all innovation and discovery rests remain absolute. And it is not likely we have been very wrong about them, as they have facilitated all sorts of other innovation, like splitting the atom, mapping the genome, building rockets to the moon, curing disease, predicting the weather, and making an infinite number of other discoveries.

Teaching an unprovable, speculative belief as an equivalent to science is as futile as trying to negate gravity simply by refusing to believe in it. No amount of faith will release you from the Earth's gravitational pull, no matter how authoritative the textbooks may be in suggesting it. Gravity is a permanent, scientifically-measurable force, and it would serve us well to learn to deal with it as well as the other undeniable scientific constants underpinning our universe.

Particularly if we would like our children to be able to grow up to do things like splitting the atom, mapping the genome, building rockets to the moon, curing disease, predicting the weather, or making any other innovative discoveries. If we want them to do these things, we will need to equip them with the knowledge to do it.

Teaching intelligent design, however, will not give them that knowledge. Instead other countries' children, those who have not been taught that scientific reality is but a political concoction, will be the ones to split the atom, map the genome, build rockets to the moon, cure disease, predict the weather, and make any other sort of innovative discovery. Because ours will be too busy waiting around for God to do it.