Hope you all had a good Christmas, and Happy early New Year to you.
I've been pondering as I watch the blogosphere's parsing of the Dover, PA Intelligent Design ruling. I'm very glad that the judge found ID to be emphatically not science, and further to be stealthy creationism. I don't want creationism or Intelligent Design in science classes for the same reason I don't want Immanuel Velikovsky's "worlds in collision" nonsense in astronomy classes, or Erich von Daniken's ancient astronauts in history classes: It's counterfeit. It is not what it represents itself to the public as being. It's a lie.
As a lifelong consumer of popularized science, this is no shocker for me. What is a shocker is how few there seem to be of my precise persuasion: a politically conservative Christian who admires science and loathes its counterfeits. Making the rounds of the blogs after the decision, I found exultant atheists or agnostics, fuming creationists, and supporters of sound education of all professional backgrounds but of no discernable religious persuasions or lack thereof. Not too many from my pigeonhole, though.
What was even more unsettling was listening to talk radio on the subject. People I respect a lot were repeating all the oft-exploded claims of ID, with no shortage of callers to agree with them. Even the former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, had a substitute host on, Steve Malzberg, loudly deploring the ruling. I remember earlier this year the otherwise quite thoughtful and wise Dennis Prager was taking a "teach the controversy" line, in imitation of President Bush's fence-straddling statement on the matter. It's as if ID were a vital part of the conservative platform, and as if to reject it would be to break ranks. That, or ID answers some kind of yearning inside a lot of people. That still doesn't make it science, though.
