[Lars](http://vernetzt.org/lars/) is [worried](http://vernetzt.org/lars/weblog/archives/73-Ideologien-am-Beispiel-Schule.html) about German education policies. Fear not, buddy! There’s always those who will prove to you that, no matter how hard we try as a nation to ruin ourselves, there’s someone else much, much better at it.
The Kansas Board of Education (a misnomer if ever I heard one) has [put Intelligent Design on the curriculum for Kansas schools](http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9967813/).
>”This is a sad day. We’re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that.”
>
> \- Janet Waugh, a Kansas City Democrat, member of Kansas Board of Education
And right Mrs. Waugh is. [Intelligent Design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design) is probably one of the dumbest and most illogical idea mankind has come up with, and what’s worse is that these people cling to it in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. It’s like someone who still believes in the Earth being round.
What’s probably even worse is that, probably to justify the inclusion of Intelligent Design, the School Board also redefined science as to be “no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena”. This’ll open up the path for all kinds of crazy religious ideas.
I know, I know, I really wanted not to go into politcs much anymore.
The Kansas school board has made even more stupid decisions in the past. Some years ago the board decided that evolutionary theory shouldn’t be teached any longer. The following elections brought new board members and the reversal of this decision…
But i don’t agree with you that ID is one of the dumbest ideas of the religious right. It’s a rather sophisticated attack against science since it doesn’t openly reject scientific methods. Instead they pretend that “intelligent design” is a valid scientific alternative. Which of course is not.
It’s a shame that the religious right is so strong in the united states. A few month ago i read an article of Daniel Dennett on edge.org
(http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge166.html)
in which he noted that George Walker Bush and the republican leader in the senate, Bill Frist (TN), spoke in favor of teaching ID. So let us hope that there are enough reasonable men that this time again, the decision will be revoked.
It may not be a stupid strategy, but the idea of Intelligent Design itself is still totally stupid. It falls flat on its face when you ask: If life was designed, who designed it? Of course, for these people, the answer is simply “God”. But then who created god? It’s a nightmare of recursion, an infinite loop that cannot have any answer.
Of course we know that a vast majority of the people are too dumb to ask that question, or think for themselves. What it boils down to is just the old idea that if you repeat any lie often enough, people will start to believe in it.
Which, of course, is what getting I.D. into the schools is all about.
I don’t agree with you that the problem of ID is the possible recursion. You can run into the same problems with
science too. Science can not answer the question of the origin of the world. In some speculative theories we also have endless recursions. In others we don’t. But if we can accept that a universe was there ever since and will be there for eternity, why shouldn’t we accept the same for a hypothetical “god”? From a logical standpoint of view there is nothing wrong with it.
The problem is that promoters of ID pretend that ID is a scientific theory. And this of course is wrong. And therein
lies the problem in attacking these thoughts. Many americans (and many europeans too!) don’t have a clue what constitutes science so you have to explain what methods (science is primaryly a method of reasoning!) constitute it.
And thus the ID-movement is a rather dangerous one, because it’s not simple to argue against it if the people who hear your arguments can’t follow you, because they aren’t educated enough to understand the difference between believe and science.
Last week i received the current issue of the Sceptical Inquirer which includes a poll of 1000 americans about creationism, id and evolution. It shows that almost two thirds believe in some form of creationism! It also shows that the more educated are less likely to believe in simple creationism but also that they not necessaryly “believe” in evolution. Many of them “switch” to the ID-paradigm.
If the ID promoters succeed, they not only bring creationist ideas into the schools but also they help to confuse or hinder people to learn what constitutes science and why.
I’m on your side, but i really think we should not make the same folly and use a too simple and frailty argumentation. We have to stand against such obscurant movements and should see that todays kids learn enough scientific basics that they will be able to differentiate between bogus science and true science.
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