REAL CONSERVATIVE WISDOM (part two)

From the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer goes after the creationists:

'Intelligent Design' Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith

Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.

Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" -- today's tarted-up version of creationism -- on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.

Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

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You know, I have to admit that the "Intelligent Design" theory is appealing to me. Okay, I actually believe it to be true. I think that evolution was God's idea. But that's just my belief. I like it because it can't be disproved, and I believe that God created the universe, anyway, so why not? I would never, however, try to persuade a skeptic that I'm right. Because I can't. I buy into "Intelligent Design" on faith alone. It's just a feeling I have, and it makes sense within the overall context of the feeling that I have about God's existence.

Clearly, that's not science, which is based on observable phenomena, hypothesis, and experimentation, ad nauseam. ID, perhaps, does have a place in public schools, but not in science class--it may work well in a philosophy unit, or a comparative religion course, but teaching it alongside science is like teaching the Greek myths as actual, recorded history. In other words, ID in biology class is total bullshit, and does nothing but make a joke out of serious scientific study. We'd be shooting ourselves in the foot. No, scratch that. We'd be shooting ourselves in the head.

Just for the record, even though I agree with Krauthammer on this one issue, I think he's one evil conservative bastard. I'm just trying to find some common ground, which is what you do in a democracy, right?

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