Journals of the State of Thought

Volume 12, In Which our Host Discovers that Kansans are lucky that People From Pennsylvania will be Available to Fix their Toasters,

or

Be Careful what you Vote For - there Will be Another Election Someday

So this week there were two big votes, one in Kansas and one in Pennsylvania, about the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in high school biology classes. The vote in Kansas was a 10 person school board that wanted to redefine the word "science" to allow for religion, and the vote in Pennsylvania was a local election to see who would be on the school board. In Kansas, the vote was 6-4 to include ID in classes, the vote being led by the chair of the board, who is a conservative Christian who complained that science wasn't compatible with what he read in the Bible. In Pennsylvania, the voters ousted all 8 Republican members of the board that had supported including a statement about ID in class, and replaced them with 8 Democrats who opposed the statement.

Thoughts:
1) All you ever need to know about ID is that Chimpy McNero believes it should be taught in science classes.

2) Quick review - a scientific theory cannot be proven. It can only be disproven. The word "unproven" in the phrase "an unproven theory" plays much the same role as the word "wet" in the phrase "wet water" or the word "dumbass" in the phrase "a dumbass Republican".

3) The statement being read to students in Penn classrooms mentioned something about "inexplicable" gaps in the theory of evolution. Another exercise in definitions here, people - just because something has not yet been explained does not make it inexplicable. Early civilizations didn't understand why some rocks stuck to other rocks, but that didn't mean that we couldn't someday explain magnetism.

4) Why do people insist that religion must be something taught in a science class, as if God were something that were explainable and comprehendable? Isn't faith, by definition, belief in that which can not be seen? And isn't science, by definition, the study of what we can observe in the natural world? I know plenty of deeply religious scientists who teach classes on evolution. They have no problem going into a class 5 days a week and discussing how natural processes affect living beings, and then going to (in some cases very fundamental) churches on Sunday and worshipping their God. To them, the actions are completely sensible when paired together, but they understand the distinction between a faith in a God, and a book which was written by the hands of men, usually with some political objective in mind, that has been translated countless times in thousands of years.