THE CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN

By M. Grant Winston, Science Editor

Recently, the entire school board of Dover, Pennsylvania was ousted. Parents had spoken. They want their children to be taught science in science class, not thinly veiled religion. Intelligent design is a recent reshuffling of creationism purported to be a scientific theory. It puts forth the notion that some things are too complicated to be explained by random chance, therefore there must have been an intelligent designer. That is not science. You can't observe it, you can't test it. You can't perform experiments based on it. These logical observations do not convince people who say, "If evolution is real, Why haven't all the monkeys evolved into us?" So I will present evidence against their so-called intelligent design.

Let us suppose for a minute that the world and everything in it were created by an intelligent designer. Why are there nipples on men? Why would an intelligent designer create an organ like the appendix? It has no function. All it ever does is get diseased, and force us to have it removed. Some creationists have claimed that penguins are evidence of an intelligent designer. How exactly? Birds that can't fly are evidence to the contrary. Here is another point to ponder. I have eaten at many exotic restaurants around the world, and sampled meats from more animals than I can count. If there were an intelligent designer, wouldn't he or she create a wide variety of flavors like a master chef? Instead, it all tastes like chicken.

Whenever I try to argue with these intelligent design people or anyone else does, they usually accuse us of not having an open mind. It seems that anyone who dares to doubt or disagree with a single idea someone else puts forth has a closed mind. Here is how I respond to that. Having an open mind can be a good thing, but don't open it so far that your brain falls out! A healthy level of skepticism is part of common sense. Failure to recognize the absurd and ridiculous when it is presented to you isn't having an open mind, it is having no mind at all. Being an idiot is not a virtue.

What the advocates of creationism, aka "intelligent design" are really saying is this: I can't figure this stuff out, so it must be magic! With attitudes like that, our ancient ancestors would have never left caves, never discovered fire or invented the wheel. Humanity probably wouldn't have survived.

Around the world, this ridiculous debate about intelligent design has made America a laughing stock. It seems that people in Kansas don't have a problem with that. It gives me hope to see that the parents of Dover, Pennsylvania do.

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