Hate Mail

Of course I oppose the teaching of intelligent design in public high school biology classes in exactly the same way that I oppose the teaching of the materialist-ideological and extra-scientific holding that evolution happened by random chance events acted on by the thread-bare theory of natural selection and that evolution is non-progressive (something which virtually no scientist involved with evolution really believes) and for the same reason, all of those are extra-scientific assertions of the nature of evolution which aren't supported by any physical evidence or any legitimate scientific study of evolution.  It couldn't be done with science because by an incredibly large percentage, so much larger than 99% of the actual events and substance of evolution over more than three-billion years, the evidence you would need to scientifically demonstrate those assertions is not available and never will be.  The use of evolution to promote atheist-materialism is as anti-scientific as the effort to shove the same scanty evidence of what happened into a fundamentalist 6-day distortion of the first chapters of Genesis. 

Twenty years ago I was a fairly conventional, passive acceptor of the claims about evolution, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, though I never, for a second bought that biological determinism of our minds was true.    Because I passively accepted, without any serious look at the scope of the problem of evolution and, especially, the origin of life on Earth, I passively believed lines on the idea of intelligent design - as a general idea and NOT as set out by the ID industry - was illegitimate.

The idea of intelligent design isn't properly scientific and it has, by court order, properly been excluded from public school science classrooms, at least legally.   Neither is the atheist ideological claim that there is no evidence of design or directionality and that everything is all a matter of random chance and probabilities and the silly putty theory that can be stretched any which way and pick up any image it's pressed into, natural selection.   The atheist assertions have not been litigated, of course, but that doesn't change the nature of what they are, an ideological framing imposed on physical evidence for non-scientific purposes.  And I will say that whether it's Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne doing that or the side I like better,  that of people like the late Stephen J. Gould. 

There is not and never will be enough evidence of the billions of years long history of evolution to support such claims.   The extent to which the professionals making a living out of saying things about evolution hold with such things the less legitimate it will be as science and the less reliable anything they say about it will be.  Though, since there is no evidence of much of what they assert ideologically, there is no evidence to use to attack them with, either except on the basis that all such stuff is not supported by physical evidence that can be rigorously analyzed and subject to rigorous logical analysis.

At least that's what I've come to conclude is inevitable from the fact of the paucity of evidence as compared to the enormous size of evolution.   Prove me wrong about that.