No surprise there, of course.
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Here's my humble opinion: Intelligent design is A: a soothing way to keep God in science for folks conflicted between their belief and all available evidence, and B: a refuge for stupid people. Let's face it, it's a lot easier to just shrug your shoulders and accept a mysterious creator than to conceptualize intense evolutionary pressure of enormous spans of time. I think it's both - it just depends on the person (guess which one I think applies to Bush!).
More after el jumpo
Intelligent Design is just a fancified version of Philosophy 101's
Watchmaker argument by William Paley in 1802. It's been debunked by scientists time and again, but even I can see the elegance and simplicity of the argument. It's alluring.
But here's the problem. It's a religious philosophical theory. It isn't testable, and it isn't verifiable unless you're willing to use the Bible as a source text. And if you use the Bible as your source text, you're necessarily seeking to disprove all other theories, proofs, and evidences by way of faith and untestable beliefs.
Evolution and science, on the other hand, require the constant testing and attempt to disprove their own theories - if you can't disprove it through testing, it is considered proved pending continued testing.
And therein lies my real problem with Intelligent Design. I don't really give a shit if they want to teach it in schools; my school taught something similar as part of a series of ideas about how things work. But we didn't, and no school should, teach a religious philosophical concept in a science class. ID isn't science in any way, shape or form. If you can't test it or even attempt to disprove it, it ceases to be science. So teach evolution in science, and teach ID in philosophy/social studies/wherever literary ideas fit.
sigh Everyone's talked about this, I know, but I wanted to get my two cents in.