Now some sense... from Utah?
Under siege from the fundamentalist forces behind "Intelligent Design", the Utah Board of Education on Friday in a unanimous decision rejected the proposal to include thinly-veiled Creationism in the science curriculum.
The gist of the board's rejection of Intelligent Design as part of the science curriculum was eloquently expressed:
"By definition, science does not attempt to explain the world by invoking the supernatural," University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark told the board.
"Intelligent design fails as science because it does exactly that - it posits that life is too complex to have arisen from natural causes, and instead requires the intervention of an intelligent designer who is beyond natural explanation. Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
Comments
Whether "God" created all of this or not is rather beside the point.
Faith isn't something that should taught by government-run schools.
Rather simple, when you get down to it.
Part of the problem is that those who want to essentially teach fundamentalism attack evolution out of ignorance, though it's impossible to tell how much of it is sincere and how much willful ignorance. They quote and misquote old text - some of Darwin's initial speculations, for instance, that have long since been revised. It could be the fundamentalist mindset, that That Which Is Writter Is Eternal to the faithful. (It's almost like going back to the time when science thought that heat was an invisible fluid in some materials like metals, that could be pounded or squeezed out of it, taking those speculations and waving them around as the failure of science.)
In so doing they perpetuate myths such as the evolutionary record having substantial gaps, which simply isn't true. A great many people want Simple, and if they can't be brought up to speed on something in a few minutes they root for something that claims the complicated thing is irrelevant or wrong. It becomes an issue of self-esteem and comfort more than one of fact.