FreeThinkingAtheist.com

"In the summer of 2005, the intelligent-design hoax, many years in the making, blossomed spectacularly. Over the course of a few weeks, its victims made headlines around the world. 

-         Cardinal Christophe Schonborn, Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times of July 7, proclaiming the Catholic Church’s disavowal of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection.

-         A month later, President George W. Bush announced at a press conference that he was in favor of teaching schoolchildren about intelligent design, saying that “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”

-         Shortly afterward, Senator Bill First, the Senate majority leader, made the same point to reporters after a Rotary Club meeting in Nashville. Teach both intelligent design and evolution “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone,” Frist said. “I think is a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

 Where did nonscientists like Cardinal Schonborn, President Bush, and Senator Frist get the idea that a proposition favored by their religious perspectives is also a serious contender within science that ought to be taught? 

These declarations were a public-relations coup for a well-organized group of conservative religious activists who are intent on persuading the American public that there is a significant controversy within biology about the status of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The challenger to the scientific establishment, they suggest, is the hypothesis of intelligent design. In response to their vigorous campaign, many Americans have come to think that ID is a legitimate school of thought in biology, worth of stuff in classrooms."

 - From Danial C. Dennett's essay of the same name, in the book Intelligent Thought

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 Is Intelligent Design a "science"?…

"Intelligent Design is not an evangelic Christian thing, or a generally Christian thing or even a generically theistic thing… Intelligent Design is an emerging scientific research program. Design theorists attempt to demonstrate its merits fair and square in the scientific world, without appealing to religion authority."

- William A. Dembski
The Design Revolution (2004)

 … or is it really just Creation?

"Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient… The conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ."

 - William A. Dembski
Intteligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999)

     William Dembski, the poster boy of Intelligent Design, was brought up Catholic, and went to all-male Catholic school growing up. As far as I'm concerned, he grew up already brainwashed, where his disbelief in evolution was inevitable really.. To make matters worse, he "sold his soul" to become a born-again uber-Christian during a hard time in his life. I always thought this as strange. Why does Christianity always seeze you during your most vulnerable times? He later went onto college to study Pyschology, which is a dangerous weapon in his hands, considering he is a rather manipulative poster boy, with a goal in convincing the law that Intelligent Design is a more appropriate "science" to be teaching in our classrooms than Evolution is!

      Judging by these two quotes from two books written by Mr. Dembski, one has to wonder; Is Intelligent Design just another science, or is it really a coverup to sneak Creation into our schools? Well, it depends who My Dembski is talking to, or trying to convince. If he's reaching out to a scientific/secular audience, then he will say Intelligent Design is a "science", and will "run away" cowardly when any scientist challenges Intelligent Design, because it is the only "science" lacking any evidence what-so-ever. However, if it's a Christian audience he's talking to, well then Intelligent Design is the scientific story of Creation, and that Christ is responsible for everything in science. Even then, I personally still do not get how Christ influences any science, would it not be God? Catholics think all three are of the same essence, so perhaps he's getting the names mixed up? 

     Traditionally, Intelligent Design is supposed to be an alternative to the Big Bang Theory, but may or may not also include evolution. Most IDers believe God created everything in its present form however. The key in that sentence, was "..believe God created..", God with a capital "G". The problem with Intelligent Design is that IDers will tell the public, government, secular, and scientists that Intelligent Design is based around "a creator", it could be any god. But when it private, they will openly admit that they are teaching the story of how the Christian God created everything. Intelligent Design is just a cover up of the Christian story of Creation. Thankfully, so far, the judges have been able to see through their lies, and that Intelligent Design is not a science at all.

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Declaration of Independence - 1776
Origin of Species - 1858
Intelligent Design - 1987
ID gets its ass kicked - 2005

Details

Judge John Jones, a federal judge, and a church-going Republican, dealt a major setback to Intelligent Design. He ruled that it is
unconstitutional to teach the concept in public school science classes
because it is “a religious view.”

Jones’ ruling is not binding outside the Middle District of
Pennsylvania, but attorneys and outside experts say it will have broad
impact on judges, lawyers and school boards. This is how the system works, in that judges largely make their decisions on previous rulings from other cases and judges.

Jones cited Supreme Court rulings that
teaching creationism, which holds that God created all life, violates
the First Amendment wall between church and state. He said evidence at
trial established that intelligent design is “a mere re-labeling of
creationism.” Intelligent design theory does not answer the
question of who or what is the designer. Jones said “no serious
alternative to God as the designer” has been proposed by ID proponents.

In his ruling, Jones said intelligent design
“violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and
permitting supernatural causation”; it relies on “flawed and illogical”
arguments; and its attacks on evolution “have been refuted by the
scientific community.”

The judge also said: “It is ironic that several
of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their
religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover
their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

Judge John Jones is what’s called a “good” Christian, in that he realizes the importance of seperation of Church & State, and keeping his beliefs to himself. And he obviously realizes that ID is another way of saying “Creation”, and if we teach it in school, we might as well declare the U.S. as a Christian Communist nation.

President Bush, definately our most intelligent president to date, and makes me absolutely proud to be an American, also weighed in on the issue of
intelligent design. This man of brilliance
says schools should present the concept
when teaching about the origins of life. That’s great and all, but
there’s a huge problem with this. Intelligent Design is not science, it
is religious belief. Therefore it cannot be presented in a science
class nor in school at all. Why can’t anyone get this?

Source: USAToday, paraphrased and commented by me

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” …the odds against DNA assembling by chance are 1040,000 to one [according to Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space,1981]. This is true, but highly misleading. DNA did not assemble purely by chance. It assembled by a combination of chance and the laws of physics. Without the laws of physics as we know them, life on earth as we know it would not have evolved in the short span of six billion years. The nuclear force was needed to bind protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms; electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together; and gravity was needed to keep the resulting ingredients for life stuck to the surface of the earth.”
    –Victor J. Stenger

    “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or “Life was always there’,  and be done with it”  –Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design p. 141

“… rarity by itself shouldn’t necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable.” –John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

Source: http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html

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A Thinly Veiled “Creationism”-Substitute Tries To Pass For Science

By offering this more modern alternative to the ancient allegations of Creationism in the Bible, they (the Kansas School Board) say Intelligent Design qualifies as a science course and want it taught in public school science classes. Doing so would clearly be odd. Here you have a science book full of scientific facts that can all be backed up with scientific evidence, and then here comes ID, which is simply a claim, and a belief, that will stick out like a sore thumb in a science book..

Believing in Intelligent Design is just giving up all together. They believe the world is too complicated to figure out through Science, so why bother trying? Look at how far we’ve come in the last 100 years, from the Wright Brothers, to today’s space craft and computers. Teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom would set us back, and halt our on-going progression and understanding of the world (and the universe). I guess you could say we are long over due for another Dark Ages…

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