If you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that Darwins theory of evolution provides just one possible explanation of life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design. You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some scientists laboratory but because the Dover Area School Districts board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwins theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Biologists arent alarmed by intelligent designs arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; theyre alarmed because intelligent design is junk science. Meanwhile, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in their present form or guided their development. As a succession of intelligent-design proponents appeared before the Kansas State Board of Education earlier this month, it was possible to wonder whether the movements scientific coherence was beside the point. Intelligent design has come this far by faith. |
