Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

I watched an excellent NOVA program on PBS Tuesday night that reenacted the trial in Dover, PA a few years ago. You may remember that their local school board insisted that along with evilution, I mean evolution, that Intelligent Design also be given equal time in the science classroom. The science teachers objected, some parents raised a stink and hence a judge was selected to hear the case Kitzmiller v. Dover. I didn't realize all this time (even though I am both a strong believer in evolution and Christianity) what the big hullaballo was about, but after watching for 2 hours, I get it.

Science works one way. You make observations, develop a hypothesis, design an experiment testing that hypothesis, and you either proove it false or......it passes the first test. After others also experiment with the same hypothesis, and fail to proove it false, one day it turns into a theory. If it's important enough, one day it may be called a law (the law of gravity comes to mind, but it's really just a theory as yet unproven). And that's the catch, you can't prove anything using the scientific method. The theory of evolution simply says that organisms can and have changed over time, they do so because of natural selection (survival of the fitest) and determination of traits that are passed to the next generation.....and so on, and so on. Is evolution so complex, so amazing, so unlikely that there must be a higher intelligence orchestrating it? I believe it is. But, since such a proposition is untestable (with our current technology) the question is mute, at least scientifically.

In the Scopes monkey trial (Dayton, Tennessee, 1925) the court found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in the classroom and fined him $100. This time (Dover, Pennsylvannia, 2004) the court ruled in favor of evolution and against the teaching of "Intelligent Design" at least in public school science classes. Bible school is the place for that, and I agree.

Thought for the day!

If one bacterium can divide once every 20 minutes, how many bacteria will you have in 24 hours (assuming unlimited resources and space). Get out your calculators and see what you get.