A California school district and a group of parents have settled a lawsuit filed against the district over the teaching of a class about "intelligent design," a theory that life is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher power. School district officials said it was a "philosopy" class, not a religion class, but that was only a marketing ploy in a hapless attempt to pass legal muster. Despite the school district's protestations to the contrary, certain evidence, like the course description and the teacher's announcement that the Lord had lead her to teach the class, belie that this class was more about religion than it was science or philosophy.
(ID strikes me as a religious viewpoint, as almost an article of faith for its adherents. But supporters seem willing to diminsh its religious value, i.e. calling the California class a "philosophy" class, only so that it can gain secular acceptance. A similar tactic has been see in past attempts to win approval for displays of the Ten Commandments on public property. Their religious faith clearly drives former Judge Roy Moore and others to rally for such public displays. But to make their case, they are willing to denigrate the commandments' religious significance by arguing instead about their historical and secular significance.)
In the El Tejon case, the lawsuit and settlement thwarted an attempt to instill a little bit of religion into the public schools. ID is more religion than science, because accepting it as a scientific theory requires that you have a particular religious viewpoint.
Also, accepting ID has a serious explanation of how the world works seems to require that you short-circuit scientific examination and jump to a faith-based conclusion.
That's part of why the Vatican doesn't think too much about ID either. In an article in the Vatican newspaper, of which the pope is the publisher, an Italian evolutionary biology professor writes that intelligent design should not be taught in schools as science.
Catholic News Service reports:
The problem with intelligent design is that it turns to a "superior cause" — understood though not necessarily named as God — to explain supposed shortcomings of evolutionary science. But that's not how science should work, the article said.
"If the model proposed by Darwin is held to be inadequate, one should look for another model. But it is not correct methodology to stray from the field of science pretending to do science," it said.
The article said a Pennsylvania judge had acted properly when he ruled in December that intelligent design could not be taught as science in schools.
"Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," it said.
From the church's point of view, Catholic teaching says God created all things from nothing, but doesn't say how, the article said. That leaves open the possibilities of evolutionary mechanisms like random mutation and natural selection.
"God's project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction," it said.
What the church does insist upon is that the emergence of the human supposes a willful act of God, and that man cannot be seen as only the product of evolutionary processes, it said. The spiritual element of man is not something that could have developed from natural selection but required an "ontological leap," it said.
The article said that, unfortunately, what has helped fuel the intelligent design debate is a tendency among some Darwinian scientists to view evolution in absolute and ideological terms, as if everything -- including first causes -- can be attributed to chance.
"Science as such, with its methods, can neither demonstrate nor exclude that a superior design has been carried out," it said.
From a religious viewpoint, it said, there is no doubt that the human story "has a sense and a direction that is marked by a superior design."
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