Putting Intelligence in Intelligent Design

I read a wonderful article on teaching of intelligent design in Kentucky in the Lexington Herald-Leader a couple of days ago. I should say, the non-teaching of intelligent design in Kentucky. Although teaching intelligent design alongside of "change over time", Kentucky's fortuitous euphemism for evolution, has been legal since 1999, the story's writer could find no science teacher in the Bluegrass State who would take time out of the curriculum to teach the optional, nonscientific add-on. One teacher, a Baptist minister, even went so far as to say that intelligent design wasn't science and had no place in the classroom, taking a place beside such liberal religious leaders as Herr Pope Benedict. Of course, Gov. Ernie Fletcher, beholden to Kentucky's masses of less enlightened Republican voters, has urged teachers to teach the "fact" of intelligent design while, like most whose science education had its roots in Hollywood, misusing the word "Theory".

As a Kentuckian born and raised, I have to praise the state for its inadvertent clarification of the basic principle of evolution, the change of life over time. The legislature accidentally renamed the theory (a well-tested fact in scientific terms) to a more descriptive name: Evolution implies progress toward a goal and, in evolution, there is no goal. There is merely change over time. Species change through mutation, the more successful survive statistically more often than others, reproduce more and, eventually, become new species. The name Evolution came from Victorian ideas, that Man was the most advanced of any species on the planet. Truth is any species coexisting with us today from elephants to bird flu virus is equally evolved with us as evidenced by their existence. Change over time is the better term for the theory.

Why mention goings-on in Kentucky if I'm in Colorado now? Because one of our less brilliant lawmakers, a Republican syncophant of radical Christian leaders, is proposing that intelligent design be taught in Colorado schools. Why? The Supreme Court ruled against the posthumous Dover, Delaware school board (posthumously because all the backers of intelligent design were voted off the school board at the sensible citizens' first opportunity). Even in Kentucky, teachers given the opportunity to teach intelligent design and religious enough to be creationists reject the chance because they know intelligent design isn't science and teaching non-science in a science classroom is a waste of theirs and the students' time. Why would someone sharp as the leading edge of a boulder propose to teach intelligent design in Colorado? To pander to Dobson's crowd. He'll lose but he'll have taken a stand for the Lord, strongly rumored to be the intelligent designer.

Intelligent design advocates are the last in a long line leading back to the Catholic cardinals who excommunicated Galileo for teaching the world revolved around the sun. Science has been backing religion into a smaller and smaller corner since men finally figured out that the best way to describe the universe was using what they could see, what they could measure. God has always been outside the scope of science because he is inherently unmeasurable. Science has never attempted to disprove God, it has only observed, hypothesized, measured and modified its hypotheses. Intelligent design's basic postulate is the existence of the unmeasurable and that disqualifies it as science.