decidedlyodd

I was gonna leave a comment on Kendra’s blog, but there are mysql errors or some such nonsense.

Kendra writes,

the whole intelligent design debate is really starting to worry me. is america really becoming jesusland?

i understand that some people who have religious beliefs may feel threatened by secular society telling them that they are bad/stupid/wrong. i don’t think people should be harrassed for their beliefs, whether or not they have some or not. i guess it’s just the rational side of the small-l-libertarian beliefs. (since when do i have to preface libertarian beliefs with the stupid “small-l”? it’s stupid how quick some people want to jump on the libertarian must always mean thos libertarians.)

in an article, this quote by eugenie scott, the executive director for the national center for science education, really made me see what the real tension is:

“People don’t show up here (at the courtroom) because they believe evolution is bad science,” Scott said. “They show up because they believe that if they accept evolution, then they are abandoning their religious beliefs. They see it as an either/or proposition: Either evolution happened, or God loves you.”
until secular people understand this and respect is (more than they do now), then i think we will become jesus land. the more the liberals and other “enlightened” people ignore and refuse to give this problem its full weight, the less control they’ll have elsewhere.

We’re not becoming Jesusland. We already *are* Jesusland, at least with regard to whose voice is listened to in our federal government, who organizes and who actually votes.

Personally, I understand the believe evolution / God loves you dichotomy, although a lot of people prefer to just throw up their hands and say “those people are just stupid” rather than reason through why such beliefs are held. That said, I don’t respect this viewpoint at all for one simple reason: intelligent design has absolutely no place in a science classroom because it is simply not science. We can debate whether a class in comparative religion or philosophy or theology, which are appropriate topics for discussion creationism aka intelligent design should be offered in public schools. However, science is certainly not about claiming a theory for the origins of life based on something written in a book thousands of years ago. It’s not even about discounting the results of a huge body of experimental work on evolution through claims of life just being too complicated to have evolved. The question is not about who’s right on the origin of life. It’s about what is the proper curriculum for high school biology courses, more specifically is high school biology a science course or a theology course.