[Intelligent Design]

Bad Science and Worse Theology

Intelligent Design is coming to Kansas:

The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation's scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

It's not actually clear what they'll be teaching--casting doubt on evolution isn't the same as promoting an intelligent designer, but possibly that's what they'l be doing. The ways in which this is an affront to science are well-documented. No point in rehashing all of that. But there is a little-evaluated secondary affront here, too. The meaning and significance of Christian faith is perverted and demeaned by trying to shoehorn it into a science classroom for obviously political ends.

By coincidence, Jimmy Carter has a new book out that tackles science and religion, and when he spoke to Terri Gross last week about ID, he spoke beautifully about this:

I studied nuclear physics when I was a young man. I was one of the originators of the nuclear submarine program; [unintelligible] at the same time, as you've already mentioned, I am a Christian. I don't see any incompatibility at all between the two. My belief is that God created the universe. My belief is that God permits us to understand the new developments that we can witness in universal matters. When the Bible was written, we didn't have the Hubble telescope, we didn't have microscopes so we could look at small items, we didn't have a way to test the age of rocks and so forth, but now we have these scientific capabilities. And so I think that science is just a revelation of God's creation.

So the two are completely separate and we can't prove the existence of things in our faith. As a matter of fact, the definition of faith in the Bible is that we know things that cannot be proven. Well, we don't have to have faith to believe that the moon is out there--that's something that we can see for ourselves. And we can't have science prove the existence of God, or all of the things that we know about Jesus Christ as Christians. So the two are separate.

I don't believe that there's any place in a scientific classroom to try to prove to the students that God exists. So I think the two ought to be completely separate. I believe in both of them--science and religion--and one should not be imposed on the other.

Amen.