Right after the new year, a Federal court in Harrisburg, PA will rule on whether the Dover, PA School District violated the Constitutional doctrine of seperation of church and state by requiring high school students to hear a statement about “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation for life on earth as we know it (as compared to evolution). <\/p>\n
The intelligent design movement is an interesting thing. Instead of attacking evolution head-on like the old firebrands did, i.e. by condemning it as contrary to the Bible and the Will of God, intelligent design tries to attack it the way that a virus attacks a cell – by invading it and transforming it to its own purposes. The intelligent design folk think that they can cleverly co-opt the world of science so as to create a vacuum that logically needs to be filled by God. However, the scientific folk are banding together behind their contention that intelligent design ain’t science. Maybe it qualifies as philosophy, but it doesn’t qualify as science. One of their key objections is that a science needs to set out clear, well-stated theories that can be empirically tested and then either affirmed, disaffirmed, or shown to possibly be true with further modifications. Intelligent design would thus need to clearly define the concept of “intelligence”. Now I ask you: is there enough intelligence on this planet to clearly define just what the heck intelligence is, so that an experimenter could say “yes, this is intelligence” or “nope, this ain’t it?” I sure don’t think so! Just read the news headlines from Washington DC, London, Moscow, Paris, Bagdad, or any political capital any day of the week and ask, are there any signs of intelligent life to be found here? <\/p>\n
What is interesting to me is that intelligent design has gotten most of its support in the southern and south-western states, i.e. in the good old “Bible Belt”. The Dover case appears to me (though I’m not an expert here) to be the northernmost geographic expression of intelligent design to date. It thus reminds me of the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War, the South’s farthest penetration into the Union. If the intel-design folk lose the case, it will be the place where another southern cause was turned back. Ironically, Dover is only about 25 miles from Gettysburg!<\/p>\n
I myself believe in evolution and science, but I also believe in God. And I know what the intelligent design folk are trying to do: convince people who aren’t as sure about God as they are to take up the old-time religion like them. People like this — and there are millions of them throughout the nation — say that they have an unshakable belief in God and the Bible, but they really get upset by the fact that other people disagree with them. They’d really feel a lot better about their faith in God if everyone agreed with them. That would be so much easier, so much nicer. <\/p>\n
Well, I’ve got a hot bulletin for people like this: faith in God ain’t supposed to be easy. If they get so upset about other people having beliefs unlike their own, or no beliefs at all, what does that say about the strength of their own belief? They might reply to my logic that they are concerned because anyone who doesn’t share their kind of faith will spend eternity in Hell; thus they’re just trying to help those people to avoid that. But once again, it’s their own faith that is shown to be weak: if they truly had faith in the wisdom and love of God, they might be content to leave it in God’s hands as to how those people will be saved from the eternal grave. They might take to heart one of their own mottos, i.e. that with God, all is possible. <\/p>\n
Bottom Line: I think that the “intelligent design” supporters should stick to keeping Christ in Christmas, and let the scientists keep science in the science class. I hope that someday they decide to put up a museum in Dover dedicated to the intelligent design cause. Tourists to Gettysburg could make it an easy side-trip, as to see another place where a bad idea was (hopefully) turned back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Right after the new year, a Federal court in Harrisburg, PA will rule on whether the Dover, PA School District violated the Constitutional doctrine of seperation of church and state by requiring high school students to hear a statement about “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation for life on earth as we know it (as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}