Tuesday, August 02, 2005
ID: Weapon of Mass Distraction
Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder Newspapers reports that "President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
Eventually, people will discover that Bush has the same problem with intelligent design that he did with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. When he goes looking for a theory of intelligent design, he'll find that none exists. Intelligent design does not even rise to the level of a testable hypothesis. The so-called science behind ID is nothing more than a tired rehash of creationist arguments that go back more than 150 years.
ID remains, and will always remain, nothing more than a legal strategy to hustle creationism past the courts and into public school classrooms.
ID's real value, in the end, may be that it distracts the rubes while their government strips them of medicare, social security, and pensions, and simultaneously shifts the burden of taxes from the wealthy to the middle class.
With the corruption and cronyism deepening in the nation's capital -- as we saw last week with the passage of the deeply corrupt highway and energy bills -- it gives the pulpit pounders among the values crowd a way to deflect attention away from the beating the Ten Commandments is taking from the Troglodytes they voted into office.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Eventually, people will discover that Bush has the same problem with intelligent design that he did with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. When he goes looking for a theory of intelligent design, he'll find that none exists. Intelligent design does not even rise to the level of a testable hypothesis. The so-called science behind ID is nothing more than a tired rehash of creationist arguments that go back more than 150 years.
ID remains, and will always remain, nothing more than a legal strategy to hustle creationism past the courts and into public school classrooms.
ID's real value, in the end, may be that it distracts the rubes while their government strips them of medicare, social security, and pensions, and simultaneously shifts the burden of taxes from the wealthy to the middle class.
With the corruption and cronyism deepening in the nation's capital -- as we saw last week with the passage of the deeply corrupt highway and energy bills -- it gives the pulpit pounders among the values crowd a way to deflect attention away from the beating the Ten Commandments is taking from the Troglodytes they voted into office.
