Inherit the Wind II: Judgment Day

It may be 2005, but in Kansas they're partying like it's 1925:

TOPEKA, Kan. (Reuters) - A six-day courtroom-style debate opened on Thursday in Kansas over what children should be taught in schools about the origin of life -- was it natural evolution or did God create the world?

The hearings, complete with opposing attorneys and a long list of witnesses, were arranged amid efforts by some Christian groups in Kansas and nationally to reverse the domination of evolutionary theory in the nation's schools.

I see George Clooney as the dashing Clarence Darrow in this one, with crotchety Wilford Brimley maybe as William Jennings Bryan.

Seriously, is this a fucking time warp or what? Have radical Bible-thumpers gained so much power in parts of our country that they can simply overturn SCIENCE? The answer, of course, is yes. The new face of creationism is called Intelligent Design, which is nothing more than putting a pretty face on ridiculous arguments like "God put million year-old dinosaur fossils in the ground to test our faith."

Here's the front page of the Intelligent Design Network website:

The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.

In other words, Intelligent Design seeks to find patterns where none exist, rationalize random acts of evolution as pre-planned, and basically confer an order to the chaos that is our entropic universe.

These are the same people that tell you that the conditions that allowed life to sustain on Earth are so improbable that there just HAD to have been a Creator to design it. Never mind the fact that if you look at it that with that long a lens, EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED is also just as improbable. Flipping a coin 1000 times and having it come up heads is next to impossible. So is flipping a coin 1000 times and having it come up 591 heads and 409 tails. But one of them HAS to happen. Intelligent Design is a tautology.

The sttorney for evolution has already scored one point:

(Intelligent Design movement leader William) Harris acknowledged under questioning that there were many people who saw no incompatibility between religious beliefs that God created life and evolutionary teachings about how life evolved through natural processes.

In other words, a Prime Mover might have set out those conditions for life to blossom, and subsequently let nature take its course. There actually is a way to reconcile belief in a higher power and natural law. It's unnecessary and disingenuous to continue to play out these pseudo-debates because conservative Christians will not allow reason to triumph over dogma.

Read these arguments from the National Center of Science Education for a more in-depth look at Intelligent Design and its flaws.