A few weeks ago, ads started appearing in my Gmail about Expelled, a film with Ben Stein that had the smell of a right-wing pity party. Boo-hoo: someone disagrees with him. Give me strength.
No link to it, but a link to Expelled Exposed, a rebuttal site. I don’t have a horse in this race as such, but like Steve Caldwell want to help a pro-science voice get a better search engine hit.
There’s no virtue for a Christian to deny observations and the scientific method in order to embue biblical metaphysics with — wait for the irony! — a cachet of science. Perhaps I do have a horse in this race: an insistence that the truth must be fought for and sought after.
If you have a site, so and do likewise. Surround the link with meaningful text for best results. Thanks.
Any rebuttal of the Intelligent Design theory must begin saying that ID is religion, not science. But when we accept that it is a religious thing, then it is easier to understand why it is a part of the modern Unitarian tradition as well. You only need to check the Hungarian Unitarian catechism:
2) How do we know that God exists?
Whether we look to the universe and its order, or to ourselves and our talents, we obtain the conviction that there exists one God, who created, maintains and manages everything.
http://unitarius.hu/english/catechism.html
Unfortunately there is a long history of persecution hysteria around this issue, and it no doubt feeds upon the kind of persecution-chic poppular in certain kinds of conservative Christian circles. In those circles, one is not considered a true Disciple until you can claim to be persecuted. And unfortunatly, when it comes to issues around science, academic criticism is mistaken for persecution.
Unlike some, I am not willing to condemn Intelligent Design as merely a religious fundametalist issue. There are some interesting issues involving philosophy and epistemology, that are relevant to discussions and studies of Intelligent Design. But ID is still not science, anymore than theology can be equated with dentistry. ID is an epistemological quandry (how do we know what we know?) involving the puzzle of how we would recognize if something is made by an intelligence (God/gods, aliens, ancient human artifacts, etc.). As such its academic study falls within philosophy, and the methods of philosophical scholarship.
And this is where we get into the religious issue. On a consistent basis, ID is promoted as a science by those who want to use the philosophical quandry as a Trojan horse for introducing into public school classrooms religious doctrines involving a young-age Earth, and a denial that species change through time. When ID is mis-presented as a science, the philosophical questions get ignored; and an inflated and unconstructive conflict is promoted between religion and science. As a scientist who is also a Christian, this only makes me depressed.
I wanted to add that the reason this is so depressing to me, is that the dishonesty of the film-makers makes Christianity look dishonest, and promotes a fear of scientists among Christians. And it does nothing to promote truth and understanding among men and women.