Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> I was thinking of something else (but of course I can't remember what 
> now).  You are correct that ID does try to pretend to be - I guess I'm 
> having a problem with "scientific" being combined with "religious belief" 
> and that's what led me to say "anti-scientific" - as I see 'religious 
> belief' as being antithetical to 'knowledge'.

  The whole idea with the "intelligent design" movement is to mask the
fact that it's simply repackaged creationism, by removing all mentions
of "God" and other theistic claims. In other words, ID attempts to be
a "legit" scientific objection to the currently established hypotheses
and theories on the formation of the universe, life and its diversity.
The idea is to try to circumvent the annoying limitation in the US
that theism and creationism cannot be taught as part of science, by
simply maskerading it. Of course they aren't fooling anybody. Everybody
knows that the ID movement is simply a repackaged version of creationism,
with all mentions of theism artificially removed.

  It's actually such a well known fact that even the ID movement itself
is in part kind of starting to abhor the use of the very term "intelligent
design", and instead they are changing it to a "teach the controversy"
movement. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years the whole "intelligent
design" term dies off, and is renamed to "teach the controversy" (or
whatever fancy term they come up with), just to avoid the stigma.

  Or in other words, it's simply an attempt to get creationism past the
hurdles of lawmaking and legal courts and into the schools, as well as
an attempt at sabotaging the teaching of evolution.

  Seemingly this tactic is somewhat effective seeing how anti-evolution
legislation is being proposed, and even passed, in more and more states
of America.

  In principle, if they succed, it could not only sabotage the teaching
of evolution, abiogenesis and even cosmology, but could possibly cause
a chain reaction with all kinds of other fields of science. After all,
if one pseudoscientific hypothesis is taught at schools in order to "teach
the controversy", what stops other pseudoscientific hypotheses from doing
the same? Perhaps homeopaths, faith healers, anti-vaccination people and
germ theory denialists will start demanding to "teach the controversy" to
medical students, holocaust denialists and conspiracy theorists will start
demanding to "teach the controversy" in history class, flat earthers will
start demanding to "teach the controversy" in geography class, and so on.

  In the worst case scenario the whole schooling system could get sabotaged
to a catastrophical point. Science, technology and progress would suffer
enormously.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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