Teaching Intelligent Design

Here’s a story about a new attempt to allow teaching of Intelligent Design and some other controversial hypotheses in public schools in Louisiana: New legal threat to school science in the US.

So far as I can tell, many of those trying to push Creationism or Intelligent Design into the schools are driven to do something irrational by legitimate fears for their children. From the 1960s on, many parents have seen that rapid societal and cultural changes had made it more difficult to raise children to be morally mature adults and to nurture some sort of faith in them. Many of those parents, and their friends at church and elsewhere, have felt their own beliefs under assault. Many scientists who don’t seem to be particularly harsh individuals, many other intellectuals of the sort which once appreciated at least in theory the problems of modern ‘alienation’, seem to have no sympathy for those who belong to particular cultures in a rapidly changing world, one where most changes work to increase activity of all sorts in the modern marketplaces and often by destroying that which is local and particular.

I advocate and will always advocate the idea that this world is part of God’s Creation and we honor our Creator by studying His world and trying to understand it in empirical terms. This includes what we we now call ’science’ but also nearly all forms of organized knowledge gathering and analysis. But I sympathize with those who have good reason to fear some aspects of a world in which technical expertise is in far greater supply than wisdom, in which profits trump respect for the teachings of Grandpa and Grandma.

See Proving the Existence of Zeus for my position on Intelligent Design Theory.

See Debating Popular Intelligence Design for a good discussion of one of the major intellectual confusions behind those who accept the Creationist or Intelligent Design arguments.

Explore posts in the same categories: Education, Evolution, Intelligent design, Modern culture, Moral issues, religion and science

Tags: Education, Evolution, Intelligent design, public schools

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