You see, there is no need for supernatural/spiritual "ideas" in the  science classroom because science is silent on the subject or religion or spirituality.  It's very simple:  that discussion belongs in church or at home.

How many times.....

The smarter ones don't. They have read their Kuhn and read their Popper (and some may even have read their Wittgenstein) and understand that Science with a capital S is a social construct designed to do certain things in certain ways using certain rules.

One of the rules is Occam's Razor "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything".

ID turns this on its head. While it claims that evolutionary theory cannot explain the complex structures we see today, in practice it demands that science admit an outside entity because scientists can't prove that entity doesn't exist.

Lots and lots of scientists believe God exists. Plenty of them probably believe he could send a lightning bolt down this second and fry me at my keyboard. But they don't need him to do their fundamental job of building models that explain how things work. Occam's Razor slices ID right out of the laboratory. If the proponents can show that science just can't do its job without it then fine. But as DarkSyde points out that is not their tactic at all.

It basically involves a creationist arguing that science is just another religion, therefore it's hypocritical to exclude the teaching of "other viewpoints" (ie creationism) in science classes.

That's what I want to avoid.

Here's what I observe, and I'm going to paste it in below:  That people like Johnson, who evidently are using the Bible to whip up politics, are falling on their own sword.  We live in a pluralistic society, the very heart of the supposed democracy which binds us.  And you can't teach one spirituality at the expense of another, right?

I don't understand why several posters think I am arguing for religion as science.  That is the last result I want.

I want posturers and so-called fundamentalist imposters out, and the courts and the politicians too, out of the classroom.  And why not by falling on their own swords?

Sigh... maybe it was too early, not enough coffee, when I chimed in.  It's been like picking up feathers ever since...

And I met some Europeans who were incensed that "Africans could be so superstitious as to pick the color yellow for other than aesthetic reasons" to paraphrase one argument.  I don't know all of Africa, but every friend I had made said the same thing in response to this:  none of them, or their families, would, for instance, employ the color yellow in a fetish without thinking of a spiritual motive first.  When I attempted, as a visual artist, to explore mere aesthetics, they laughed at the idea that one would chose yellow in a fetish because of looking good.

It is so hard for people educated in our society to get into the heads of people educated in a spiritual society.

Similarly even Africans told me again and again that it takes a matter of generations to begin employing "linear" thought common to logic found in western culture.  They think instead cyclically (rain, seasons, crops).  There is no limit to the misunderstanding occuring between cultures because of this, which I see is way beyond the scope of this comment.  Maybe a diary is in order.

I don't know if it's in me to be brief, but as Mark in KS said, "I think you mistunderstand science.  It is one of the fundamental assumptions of doing science at all that the mechanisms and events and objects under study be observable.  If you don't do that, you aren't doing science."

What may be incomprehensible to people of common US culture, if held to such standards as expressed above, many people on this earth, then, are not going to be able to do science.

Flame me all you want, but are there any native-raised Indians out there?  Because people brought up in tribal cultures think very differently from early childhood up.  They don't separate the material from the spiritual.  It is a mistake to expect them to think as we are taught to do in US common culture.

And damn it, tribal "spiritual" people aren't the people polluting and bombing the whole earth either, are they?  Maybe there's something the matter with the way white bread USA thinks then?  If it gets us all in this much trouble?

maybe an examination of people who do not separate material from spiritual the way we imagine ourselves separating the two like a sandwich would be to our advantage.

I'm not saying take it to the classroom.  I am in doubt of the classroom as a context for learning many things, at least the way it's done in the US.

God help us, if any one strata of belief - materialistic or not - should dominate all discussion.

Amen, I'm not arguing.  God help us.

What I am saying, however, is that it is not an insult to a people to observe that they don't separate the physical from the spiritual.

This is a Eurocentric twist of thought which is not common to all people everywhere, and I'm not sure we have profited by slivering up all realms as if they neatly divided like abstract numbers.

I guess this is beyond the scope of the issue, for the two things at play are 1) how people are taught in the classroom, vs 2) how people think based on upbringing.  Plus the issue of bringing courts/laws into it, which is absurd and entirely counterproductive.

I'm not defending the ID'ers.  I like science.  No one's going to learn how to build a bridge without studying physics.

It's just that the issue is a great mirror for how we, as a society, do our thinking.  And I think there is a necessary perspective missing from the debate.