Quote:
Originally Posted by Kipper is King
It's not intelligent design three-card monty. The idea is that it's a possibility, just like the Big Bang is. Nor is it necessarily an "alternative viewpoint". The two ideas could well be presented together without creating conflict.
I believe that God created this all, and that the Big Bang could have been what occured when He decide to. Like I've been saying all along, science makes sense, but to me so does God.
As to the Christian nature of ID, there's nothing wrong with just briefly presenting the idea of intelligent design in general (even in a Science class), without reference to specific religions because it's a possibility that is much more broadly pondered than the Spaghetti Monster. Mainstream science classes tend not to acknowledge fringe stuff, but the notion of intelligent design in general isn't fringe, and may deserve acknowledgement.
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I think you're missing the point. No-one is saying that intelligent design shouldn't be acknowledged as a viewpoint. Just that it should not be taught
as science. Why? Because it
isn't science.
When you suggest that science and religion can co-exist, you're right. But what you're proposing is that they're also interchangeable, and that's false. Science and religion are not really comparable--it's like apples to battleships. They make radically different kinds of truth claims, and ask radically different questions about the world. They just aren't the same, and science class is not the place to ponder the questions of religion.
The fact is, the so-called "Intelligent Design" movement is an attempt to de-legitimize and undermine science from the ground up by indoctrinating children with a wrongheaded and misleading set of assumptions about the nature of scientific theory. If you read "Of Pandas and People" (I have--one and a half hours I'll never get back) the so-called ID "textbook"--you'll find that its basic argument is not that evolution was "controlled by God"--since that's in any case a matter of faith, not proof. It's a dogmatic attempt to undermine the theory of evolution in general and to undermine the validity of science as an approach to understanding the physical world.
Worse than that, it's utter nonsense. And when you force feed it to children who don't yet have the maturity to make critical judgments about what they're being told, it becomes
dangerous nonsense. That's what gets people upset.