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this is just a philosophical debate, not a congressional session. nothing is going to get pushed, shoved or hammered down anyones throat or even made into law.
i had thought my understanding of intelligent design was kinda accurate--that although the are more than a few zealots attached to the idea, there are several objective scientists who do have a hunch and would like to explore it in a scientific manner and see where it leads them. i’m getting the idea there's a few folks who think it’s all zealots and psuedo-science. here’s where I got my info, and I tell you why I think it was fairly….um fair….i was listening to the local npr station do a piece on intelligent design--if i had known i would need them here, i would have paid more attention to the names-- part of the show was history, part was investigative and another part devoted time to outlining intelligent design, with the help of two well spoken scientists who never descended into the least bit of emotional debate even though they held opposing views. nor was any specific religion’s god menioned...perhaps carefully so, i don't know, but there was only the brief mention the possibility that the designer is so far advanced of us as to be considered god-like. but still, that doesn't quite jive with me as any christian fundamentalist trying to force their religion into science class. for a couple reasons: one, without actually linking his ideas with any religion, in fact going out of his way to distance himself from it, i was left with more of an imression that the guy beleived that (a true god) to be the least likely of all possible 'intelligent designers'. and two, i may be stereo-typing too much here, but i don't think the npr host would have given the man the same respect and time she gave the woman debating him had she (the host) believed him to be from the christian right.
he said the science he was interested in was something along the lines of reverse engineering. i think he called it design recognition. and i am of the opinion that if one is using scientific methods to uncover data, as opposed to just saying it must be so, it must be considered science, no matter how green and wet behind the ears and weird.
what’s the harm of a mention somewhere during the theorized history of evolution section of h/s earth sciences? perhaps even an entire class offered at the university level? oh oppression! how you stalk my every thought!
i see it as a natural byproduct of the idea itself that compells religious organizations support this science. it would after all, put a very capital G at the beginning of god if god was proved real. different denominations have been accused of suppressing knowledge for ages, not the least of the accused being the catholic church and the city of rome, and a lot of those accusations are true--an example: it took over 1800 years for it to be acknowledged that aristarchus was right and we do actually revolve around the sun, in the beginning because of fear and ignorance and at the end because of outright censorship—so is it tit for tat, then? how does anything ever get learned when we were all too busy plugging our ears and mentally planning our verbal rejection of the idea we refuse to listen to.
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