Intelligent design are 'empty buzzwords'

Editor,

Those supporting "intelligent design," the newest iteration of creationists, decry they are merely urging "serious and objective thinking" regarding evolutionary models as they have the same "passion for truth" as science claims. Empty buzzwords.

Lacking any explanatory power creationism was discarded as hopelessly flawed the day after "On the Origin of Species" was published.

It was simple, really. Science now had a powerful explanation (theory) of how the hugely complex life on this planet came to be, while the assertions of creationism — validated solely by religious authority and reinforced with tortured logic — became shackles to scientific thinking.

To fundamentalists, those assertions were Truth because scriptures said so, not because any evidence weighed in their favor. Evidence being an imperative of the scientific enterprise as faith is not science.

And while evolution has been earning its place in the science classroom over the last 150 years, fundamentalists have been desperately hammering the square peg of ancient scripture into the round hole of modern science, then blaming evolution for a no fit.

The effort is patently futile because mankind's spiritual well-being is outside the purview of all science, including evolution. Fundamentalists would lose little by following the lead of most theologians today who have long discarded their hammers, religious lives still intact.

Since science classrooms are not Sunday schools, apologies are unnecessary for rejecting intelligent design and teaching perhaps the most powerful and best-documented theory in the history of science.

That the sun revolved around the earth was never a theory, merely another assertion imbued with religious authority. As theories of orbital mechanics verified the opposite was true, religious arrogance finally succumbed. It may take some time but the unjustified assault on evolution will end the same way.

W. Bennington

Polson