Minister's Wife Teaching Intelligent Design 'Philosophy' Class
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports:
The class taught by a minister’s wife shocked some school board members when they learned that three experts on intelligent design were scheduled to speak while two evolution experts listed as guest speakers were not coming.
One of the “guests” was Francis Crick, who has been dead since 2004. Either the course organizers weren’t bright enough to know this, or they didn’t care because they never intended to really have him come in the first place - which means they only listed him in order to make the course appear more fair than it really was. The other guest declined to come because he disagreed with the class.
If Intelligent Design were mentioned as part of a larger course on philosophy, then it might work, but here we have a course created with Intelligent Design in mind — teaching Intelligent Design is the point, as is contrasting Intelligent Design with evolution. That was a primary reason why the school board in Dover lost.
“I had concerns about the credibility of the content, and whether it was balanced,” said board member Kitty Jo Nelson, who was in the minority when the board voted 3-2 on Sunday in a special session to allow the course. “I believe in critical thinking, in giving students the opportunity to look at various options, but I wasn’t sure if this was the place to start.”
Credibility? This course has no serious credibility:
Board members recommended changes to the original course plan, which included 24 videos – 19 of them supporting intelligent design. They also voiced concern over scientific issues in the class, such as the laws of thermodynamics and how fossil dating works.
In a New Year’s Day session, they approved a class that would only use videos, in spite of opposition from at least one parent and both science teachers at the school of about 500 students from surrounding towns.
Several parents have written in to oppose the class, but it’s not clear if any have taken legal steps to stop it. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has written a letter demanding that the course be cut, and it’s unlikely that they would do so without at least one parent willing to stand up about this.
The parade of the terminally misinformed has already started on behalf of this course. The same sorts of people wrote the same lame arguments in defense of the Dover course which was struck down, but they won’t even acknowledge that they were wrong in that case, so of course they haven’t learned anything that they could apply to this one.
Marylee Shrider, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian, is a good example:
Those who seek to bar intelligent design from schools, including U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who made the decision to ban the theory in Dover’s biology courses, condemn intelligent design as a thinly disguised version of creationism.
Not so, say ID researchers, who simply question evolution’s claim that all life evolved from a common ancestral organism and insist their focus is finding evidence of a deliberate design in nature, without regard to who or what the designer might be.
If Marylee Shrider had read the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, she’d realize that testimony from both sides of the case made it unambiguously clear that Intelligent Design is not merely a religious position, but ultimately a Christian position based on the Bible.
Evolution and intelligent design are theories and will remain theories until they can be proven conclusively, without qualification, gaps or flaws.
Like so many others, Marylee Shrider appears to be completely ignorant about science. She describes evolution and Intelligent Design as if they were “theories” in exactly the same respect — thus giving the impression that they somehow deserve to be presented together. This is false. Evolution is a scientific theory, which means something very specific. Evolution is no more or less “proven” than Plate Tectonics, Meteorology, or the Theory of Gravity. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, isn’t “science” in any respect, theory or otherwise. It’s a religious and political ideology.
Most supporters know this, which means that their defenses of Intelligent Design are not erroneous, but in fact lies. This forces us to wonder if Marylee Shrider has been misled by others and her own failure to do basic research, or if she is one of those who is actively trying to deceive others.
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