Intelligent Design Debate in Michigan 


This is some old news (from March 23rd) but it highlights some positive goings on in the "debate" between Intelligent Design and the theory of evolution. A talk was held at the Bovee University Center Auditorium in Michigan on whether ID should be taught in the classroom or not. A quote that is rather pleasant to see:
Panelist and Philosophy and Religion Chairwoman Joyce Henricks, said she’s concerned that people in favor of teaching intelligent design or who are opposed to evolutionism because of their religious beliefs, may have an impact on science curriculums in the future.

“American students, Americans in general, are ignorant to science,” she said. “If we start diluting what goes on in the science curriculum, we’ll increase our ignorance.”
Nice. Some reasonable people here. However, I still see the creeping "validity" of ID toward the end of the article:
“It was a fairly good debate, but most of it was a little less on whether this should be taught in schools,” he said. “It ended up being which one was the more plausible theory than whether (creationism) should be taught in schools.”.
This is the danger in the current push of ID: that there is a debate going on to show which point of view is more valid. There is no real debate about this junk "science" anywhere. Any attempt to frame this as a debate is very dangerous, as it has a tendency to somewhat validate the views of these loonies. As we can see from this article, what happened here was that the talk degraded from "should it be taught" to debating the relative merits of ID versus evolution. Until ID gets any real scientific backing, any discussion over which is more valid is pointless - there is nothing to talk about. 

 

Posted: Mon - April 4, 2005 at 11:16 AM          

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