Intelligent Design not very intelligently designed

You know, I completely understand what the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) are trying to accomplish, but I disagree 110% with their means of doing it.

To put it simply, the teaching of evolution is causing kids (who sometimes have a tendency to grow into adults) to develop a world view that may become an intellectual and moral road block to somebody’s willingness to adopt Christian beliefs and behaviours – eg. evolution implies that widespread procreation helps to ensure the survival of the species due to genetic diversity. Therefore, children may think that sex with multiple partners is a normal and acceptible behaviour, which obviously goes against the teaching of Christianity, which promotes sex within marriage and monogamy.

Therefore, what ID tries to achieve is to remove these “seeds of thinking” from schools so that they might end up with a more level moral playing field in regards to not having to deconstruct pre-conceived notions, before applying their own.

It is just very sad that the way they have chosen to address this is to try and establish equivalence between dogma and science, and in doing so have distorted religion into something that it was never intended to be. The bible itself says a whole bunch of stuff about how infallible God’s word is, and how one should not being ashamed of it. But the proponenents of ID have turned Christianity, and God, into a thing of ridicule. I can’t see how these people can conscionably refer to themselves as Christians any more. It’s shameful, and not a little pathetic.

Where religion has a purpose is to define a set of morals by which one can choose to live. Whether a person wants to subscribe to that set of morals should be entirely left to the individual’s assessment as to the merits of that particular way of living. Just like we don’t allow children to vote, we should not be placing the choice of moral stance into the hands of minors, until such a time that they are able to be trusted to make such a decision. Educators should be tasked with ensuring that our children have all of the necessary information to make that descision. This is where the ID folks have gotten very confused. They should have pushed for mandatory religious studies, rather than trying to shoehorn religion into science.

Granted, children will then also need to learn about Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Scientology, etc. etc. but if they have as much faith in what they believe as their bible tells them to have, then they shouldn’t have to worry which of these will be chosen.