Intelligent Design

So having only yesterday got on my high horse about Indonesia introducing Islamic Law, I am today wondering how long before the USA starts down a parallel path with a stab at implementing Christian Law. This story from the BBC today relates a school in Pennsylvania insisting teachers instruct students in ‘Intelligent Design’ alongside Darwinian Evolution.

Having read a little about the Intelligent Design theories they don’t impress me much. They seem to me to be a cop-out: Desperately trying to seek meaning in the complexity of life by saying it must have been designed by God or some hyper-intelligent alien. It fails to ask how the creator came into being. By failing to ask that question, it is simply avoiding the question of ‘how did life start’ rather than answering it. There is a more complete discussion here.

The Intelligent Design idea is just an attempt to put a scientific face on Creationism to make it acceptable to teach Genesis in non-religious schools. Promoting faith in unprovable ideas over empirical evidence and hard science is the path back to the Dark Ages.

I wonder how the people of Pennsylvania would feel if their courts started handing out prison sentences because Judges had faith in people’s guilt, even though no-one had presented any evidence to that effect. There is a reason why there is a burden of proof - in science as well as law!