Every Child Left Behind

It's no secret that President Bush is a firm believer in everything said in the Bible. He has used the support of evangelical Christian groups to get elected twice and rewarded them with government gifts. He has helped shape a culture that is increasingly subjected to pressure from these specific religious groups to impose on the country what they are convinced is the truth -- or rather, Truth. Now, he's given his approval to extend one particularly pernicious example of this into the schools.

In an interview with Texas newspapers, Bush said that he believes intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in schools. He uses the language many ID proponents use, saying that
"part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." This language mistakenly puts evolution and ID on the same level, granting equal value to each.

I've brought up Slate writer William Saletan before, and I'll point to another column of his in which he tries to make the point that ID represents an evolution of creationist thought. The idea is that creationists are moving more and more toward evolution with each step away from the "young Earth" believers of the past centuries. His point seems to be that since ID pays service to certain scientific concepts, it's only a matter of time before it adopts all scientific concepts and becomes indistinguishable from evolution. I think. Saletan doesn't always hit you over the head with his points. He could also just be saying that scientists are ignoring the strengths of ID at their peril.

At any rate, here's my problem with Saletan's point of view (either one) and why it's so incredibly stupid to teach intelligent design in schools alongside evolution. First, as mentioned, creating a curriculum around these two ideas puts them on the same level. But evolution is science. It is based on the testing of hypotheses. Experiments will disprove weak hypotheses, and the overall theory is modified to fit new experimental results. The refined theory is tested, and so on. That is called science.

Intelligent design is about finding holes, and instead of creating a hypothesis that is experimentally tested, it concludes that wherever there is a hole, there's God. If you can't yet explain, that's where God's acting. And Bush considers this to be a mode of thought equal to science? A way of thinking that our children should learn to prepare them to compete in the world? It doesn't belong in our schools, which should be teaching our children critical thinking. Instead, it tries to show our children a way to stop thinking.

As a side point, I think most theologians would have a problem with the ID approach, if they think about it. And this seems to go along with what Saletan was, at least, hinting about. If you keep applying this reductionist reasoning to try to prove the existence of God, or even just simply that God created life, you run into an increasing problem. As science explains more and more, God diminishes until there's nothing left or so little that God is no longer consequential. If God isn't anywhere (or almost nowhere) at some easily conceivable point in the future, then how was he anywhere in the past? This school of thought that's mostly pushed by certain evangelical Christians in our society is a dangerously slippery slope for them, because it shows the path away from their God.