Why "intelligent design" isn't just another theory

C-SPAN just replayed a call-in show from earlier today on which proponents of intelligent design were challenging author Matthew Chapman, a great great grandson of Charles Darwin, to explain why intelligent design should not be taught alongside the theory of evolution.

Everything should be taught, the callers insisted. There are gaps in the fossil record and evolution can't be right, they contend. The universe is too complex and must have been created by an intelligent designer, they believe.

Enough already.

Intelligent design is not just another subject that can be taught in an academic setting. Intelligent design is an attack on rational thought which undermines the entire process of education. It does not prepare children to evaluate rival claims and use their own minds to decide what is right. It prepares them to take instructions without questioning from people who wish to control their minds.

Magicians have made a living for centuries on the thought process at work in the intelligent design movement: If you see something you do not understand, it must be supernatural.

Harry Houdini wrote in one of his books that actress Sarah Bernhardt saw his performance one night and asked him afterward, in all seriousness, if he could bring back the leg she had lost to disease.

No, he told her gently, he could not.

The desire to believe is very strong. The gaps in human knowledge are very great. But it simply does not follow that what we do not understand must therefore be supernatural and forever beyond our understanding.

To suggest such a thing to children, in science class, is to destroy their confidence in the power of rational thought to solve problems.

Think that all the way through.

If rational thought cannot be relied upon to solve problems, there is no reason to be educated. Why study math and science when your teachers can do no better than "Then a miracle happens" to explain the history of the world in front of them?

Rational thought is a human being's tool of survival. If we don't think for ourselves, we have to follow what someone else tells us to do.

Think that all the way through.

To undermine children's confidence in their own minds is to set them on the path to a lifetime of victimization. Thank goodness children don't pay attention in school.


Copyright 2005

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