Intelligent Design; Inelegant Politics

From the New York Times web site:

DOVER, Pa., Nov. 9 - In the end, voters here said they were tired of being portrayed as a northern version of Dayton, Tenn, a Bible Belt hamlet where 80 years ago a biology teacher named John Scopes was tried for illegally teaching evolution.

I am pleased by this.

ID, it seems to me, speaks to two different, possibly overlapping, types of people: those who prefer to believe that humankind comes from divine activity, not the application of biological principles, and those who believe that the theory of evolution is incomplete, and until complete is not sufficient to stand alone as the definitive explanation of our origin.

I believe that the first group has as a hidden agenda the promotion of religious observance in public schools. I believe that the second group is mostly people from the first who don’t want to admit to that agenda, and sought an alternative explanation that would pass secular muster. A small percentage of them might well feel that evolution isn’t sufficiently proven, but I doubt that’s their compelling reason.

I don’t have a problem with proposing a religious alternative to evolution (though I don’t understand why those who believe that divine activity brought us here can’t incorporate the concept, accepting the possibility that the deity might have brought us into being through the evolutionary process -- perhaps they find the concept distasteful, or just prefer that the deity take a more direct approach) but I do have a problem with sneakiness. I think that the advocates of ID were trying to sneak in a religious agenda, and thats wrong.

What if they did it because they honestly thought that the theory of evolution was incomplete, and IT a valid alternative explanation for how we came to be, without regard to religious concepts? Then, I suggest, they were being preposterous, like the probably apocryphal story of the school board that ruled to make Pi exactly equal to three. Suburban school boards aren't qualified to judge the worth of scientific theory. They can have opinions, of course, as can we all, but they cannot implement them without sufficient justification. Its difficult to imagine what would suffice for such justification.

Political concepts and the commonweal don't mix well. I have heard of Catholic bishops saying that they would not give sacraments to politicians holding values with which they did not agree, or failing to speak out against practices with which they did not agree. Moral force can be quite powerful -- but this isn't a theocracy, and we don't live according to the views of a mullah. Our lives can and should be guided and informed by religious and philosophical concepts, but thats it. The ability for religion to rule stops at the church door -- and at the door of the school board.