As a middle school teacher, I am often confronted with issues in education that boggle the mind.  How does one deal with a child who is emotionally disturbed or learning disabled?  How do we teach a class of students about worldly concepts of our brilliant past yet acknowledge that few of them even have a concept of government?  There are countless questions that force me as an educator to cringe and grimace at the possibilities.  However, the question of evolution has never played such an obstinate role.

I am never nagged daily by the thoughts of our ancestry.  I am not awakened by the thoughts that perhaps the Bible is not ardent fact.  Instead, I examine the notion of science and religion and concluded that to a large part the two are not mutually exclusive, much the same way the message was conveyed in the classic film Inherit the Wind. 

For most of life, I was nestled away in an environment of free thinkers and intellectuals who read, questioned, and progressed.  I regret I did not walk the earth believing that Jonah was indeed consumed by a whale or that Adam and Eve were the first beings on Earth.  Yet many Americans do believe Biblical accounts as absolute truths, at least as far as it confuses their sense of logic and science.

I wish to briefly explore the notions of intelligent design (ID) and its rival and currently standard body of thought, evolution.  The central disagreement between both bodies of thought is not evidently that humans evolved.  Instead, it is that evolution depends on random chance which is inconsistent with patterns and cosmic realities that do exist.  More clearly, ID advocates claim that the world is not random but that on some level there is evidence of some celestial involvement because random chance as through evolution, is well, too random.  As the Intelligent Design Network succinctly puts it

The theory of intelligent design(ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.

And this appears to be a very sound, logical argument (almost inconsistent with the often illogically fanatical ravings of Bible thumpers around the country.)  After all, if science is based on logic, then the notion that the complex patterns found in nature might very well be the manifestation of a higher power, would appear to be quite logical.

Unfortunately, that’s where the argument begins to crumble.  ID appears to be quite a logical mode of reckoning realities that are yet without an explanation.  But they are not real answers.  They are assertions that do not match scientific data.  I caution the reader that I AM NOT saying God does not exist or played a role in creating the universe.  In fact, in my heart, I believe it.  But, the only way my heart should play any role in a scientific debate is if I’m having open heart surgery (God forbid!)

What I mean by this is simple.  Evolutionary theory looks at cells and creatures and humans and bacteria and countless other beings and examines quantifiable changes in them over time.  You can measure the length of a finch’s beak.  You can see the splitting of a cell complete with nuclei and so forth.  Yet an ID supporter would argue that there are just so many complex patterns and connections that this serves as proof that an Intelligent Design does indeed exist.  Follow the nuance: while a scientist can measure certain changes and argues therefore that changes exist over time, an ID advocate would say that these changes serve as proof of some outside force.  The latter is not basing the crux of proof for ID on actual facts or data, the bedrock of scientific argument, but on corollaries.  If IDers want to be taken seriously as a form of scientific thought, then they would produce results, data that there is an Intelligent Designer or designers or that there is proof that these patterns are not random, no matter how unlikely.  Instead, ID advocates say, “Well, it just seems reasonable” or “How can you say there isn’t some connection.”  In fact, no one is saying soundly that there aren’t connections.  All true scientists are saying is that no one has proven that there are connections yet and further that if they would prove Intelligent Design, it would be based on more than throwing up our hands because no other explanation seems to work.

Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education argued, “That's a fancy way of saying 'Wow, this is a really tough subject to explain, so God did it,’ That makes for a really short lab. The fact that we don't know something does not mean that we should jump to the conclusion of design. If we don't understand something, we say 'I don't know yet.'"  Evolution, for instance, is proven, no matter how views are misconstrued and distorted in the media.No one has disproven evolution.  Hard data and facts have accumulated enough over time to show that these manifestations are very real.  What ID supporters claim is that evolution must be inaccurate because it does not take into account the logical possibility that these connections are based on something other than chance.  In effect, ID advocates disqualify decades of hard data and fact because the scientific community has not provided all the answers, namely if there is a God.  And so, it’s easier to be rid of science and base it on “a feeling.”

Furthermore, apart from being bad science, ID is also clearly a slippery slope to creationism, many argue.  Scott continued her assault arguing that religion is implicit in ID theory because although it is left unsaid, the Intelligent Designer is not necessarily as mysterious as ID supporters might claim.  "We all know who the designer is. We know it's not little green men," she said. And Sander Gliboff, IU professor of the history of science wondered, “How can you possibly argue that there's a supernatural intelligent designer that isn't based on religion? Who else would it be if it's not God?"  And if this were taught in classrooms, both pointed out that, “If intelligent design were overtly taught in classrooms, it would cross the boundaries separating church from state.”