As a known opponent of organized religion, it seems like a forgone conclusion that I should be opposed to intelligent design, and of course I am, but not because I think it is mixing science and religion, it is because science and religion are separate and mutually exclusive.

Science is the search for the explanation of the natural world. How do planets move in the universe, what causes earthquakes, how do you build an atomic bomb. Those are all areas for science, and exclusively science. Planets move in the universe based on (at the current understanding) gravity, earthquakes are a result of the stresses caused by plate tectonics and you build an atomic bomb by shoving too much uranium 235 or plutonium 239 into too small a space causing the atoms to fission into lighter elements.

Religion is the search for understanding beyond the natural world. What is the meaning of life? What happens to our souls after we die? For that matter, what is a soul anyway? Those are not questions science can answer because they are not things that have a demonstrable effect of the world that we can observe.

The intelligent design debate is a lie from start to finish. It says that what we see in the world is so complicated that there has to be an outside hand that has caused everything we see. That position is anti-science. Science is not about coming to a hard and fast proof, science is about the things that we have DISPROVEN.

Why do we say that the earth revolves about the sun instead of the other way around? Because everything we see with a better understanding of the universe tells us that it does. We launch satelites into space, we have sent people to the moon, and other objects off to the other planets in the solar system. All of that is based on the science that tells us the earth goes around the sun, therefore, the earth revolving around the sun is correct, because if it did not work that way, none of those other things would have worked.

Bringing this back to evolution and intelligent design, does this mean unequivically that evolution is correct? No, there are details of it that could be wrong. Traditional Darwinism thinks of evolution as a slow methodical progression from one thing to the next. Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium says that part is wrong, at least on a larger scale, yet the birds of polynesia with their varied tail lengths within populations of what appear to be the same or at least very similar species says that Darwin was also correct. All of this is about science. Why are those lengths different? What caused one version of the bird on one island to stabilize at a length of say 4 inches while one from a neighboring island to have a length of over a foot?

Where ID fails is that it doesn't ask about an explanation of this, it simply says, it is different, and God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster made it so. Well how do you disprove that? You can't. Now is it possible that God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster did all of this? I suppose in some inane way it is possible, except for one small detail. We can't get God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster to show up and do it. In fact, we have no evidence of God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster at all.

What is being asked for by the ID group is an end to a search for knowledge. When someone actually has some evidence to support that, I will be happy to look at it. Evolution doesn't have an explanation for the pre-cambrian explosion, but science is about looking for that explanation. It is not about saying "And it was good." That is not science, and does not belong in a science classroom.

P.S. This is in the politics section because it is not a science question. ID is not science, and in its current context, this is where it belongs.

P.P.S. The people pushing ID are doing a fundamental disservice to every person in this country. They are advocating a position which is guaranteed to lead to a less educated, less questioning populace, that in the best of circumstances, assuming it does not happen for any of a multitude of other reasons first, will lead to America being yet another in a long list of civilizations that have failed.