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Whether it's Santorum or Baxley, proponents say intelligent design fills in evolution's gaps and should be taught to broaden kids' perspectives -- a type of postmodern all-things-are-equal viewpoint that conservatives once decried.

It's good that he mentions postmodernism. Now these reporters need to make the connection between postmodernism and IDers' motivations for waging this fight in the first place.

The leaders of the ID movement have been able to raise millions of dollars to wage this fight in the last decade, because they and their followers are afraid that postmodernism is correct: There really is no objective truth in this world. But where "traditional" postmodernists accept this starting assumption and try to figure out how to live in harmony with it, IDers are stuck in stage 3 of the mourning process: Bargaining with God. They want to get everyone to believe in the same supernatural Authority Figure who simply declares a moral code for us to live by, to stand in for the objective truths that the IDers fear don't really exist.

This is more subtle than it being a simple case of believers vs. atheists. Creationists are afraid that anything that undermines their particular conception of God as arbitrary authority figure will be harmful to society.

The real way out of this fight is to get enough religious conservatives to understand that the real world is objective, and that it gives us perfectly objective criteria by which to judge actions or moral systems as right or wrong, good or bad.

Yes, it can take a generation or two for the full, long-term effects of a societal fad to reveal themselves. But eventually history does teach us its lessons. That's why we can learn from history - actions have objective consequences. If the IDers & postmodernists are correct, then nobody'd ever be able to learn from history.

In which case we'd all have much more to worry about than Charles Darwin!

"This is more subtle than it being a simple case of believers vs. atheists. Creationists are afraid that anything that undermines their particular conception of God as arbitrary authority figure will be harmful to society. "

You have something, there, I think. Perhaps the beginning of a new "Know Nothing" party here in the U.S. We've had that before, although it didn't amount to much.

What seems to be forgotten in all of this is that Science is not a popularity contest, nor is it a proposition to be voted on by the general public.

Science is science. It has a method. It has lots of folks who have studied it all their lives.

Religion is religion. It has doctrine. It has lots of folks who have studied it all their lives.

However, the two are quite different things. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion is the study of the supernatural.

Scientists from all cultures generally agree on the fundamental questions of science. They disagree on some details, but the TOE is not one of those details.

Religionists from different cultures, on the other hand, generally disagree with each others' beliefs. Even within a single religions, such as Christianity, wars have been fought over doctrinal differences, and hundreds of denominations have split off from the Roman Catholic church in just the past few hundred years, then split again, and again, and again. Never mind Hinduism or Buddhism, or Jainism, or any of the other religions of the world. All have faith that their religion is true, and all have faith that the others are false.

Science and Religion have nothing whatever to do with each other, either in principle or in their areas of study. Let's just keep them that way, thanks.