A common refrain from opponents of evolution is that schools should teach "both sides" of the debate - a debate which is wholly their own creation and based upon a pseudoscience of no greater intellectual value than astrology. They are trying to appeal to Americans' sense of fairness, but it makes no sense to teach "both sides" when one side is simply wrong.

Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne explain:

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; “evo-devo”; the “Cambrian Explosion”; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened? [Guardian]

There is no “Intelligent Design” science out there, just as there was never an “creationist” science out there. The entire ID argument reduces to complaints that the explanations provided by evolutionary biology lack absolute completeness and perfection. There are unanswered questions in evolution, the criticism says, so therefore it’s legitimate to believe in something that doesn’t actually provide any explanations in the first place, much less incomplete explanations. Does this make sense? No, but it’s what passes for high intellectual vigor among Intelligent Design theorists.

Read More:

• Evolution vs. Creationism
• Science vs. Religion
• What is Intelligent Design?
• What is Balanced Treatment?
• What is Science?