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I'm reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for a Creator" right now. It deals with this very issue, among others. Very informative for the lay person that knows little of science.
,If you want to know a little more of science, pick up a textbook. If you want to feed irrational prejudices, go right ahead with Strobel. Just don't kid yourself you're learning any science.
Intelligent Design in Pennsylvania
The Associated Press reports that “high school students heard about ‘intelligent design’ for the first time Tuesday in the Pennsylvania school district that attracted national attention by requiring students to be made aware of it as an alternative to the theory of evolution.” Note, first, the phrase “theory of evolution,” “theory” being a standard term applied to evolution. But a federal judge last week forbade the school district of Cobb County, Georgia from retaining a sticker on science textbooks pointing out that evolution is a theory, not an established fact.
It is obvious that many opponents of Intelligent Design are unreasonably biased against its being taught:
The [Thomas More] law center is defending the [Pennsylvania] Dover district against a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of eight families by two civil-liberties groups that alleged intelligent design is merely a secular variation of creationism, the biblical-based view that regards God as the creator of life. They maintain that the Dover district’s curriculum mandate may violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
I love that: “a secular variation of creationism”! If its secular, then it’s not religious, right?
“Students who sat in the classroom were taught material which is religious in content, not scientific, and I think it’s unfortunate that has occurred,” said Eric Rothschild, a Philadelphia attorney representing the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.
I fail to see how talking about very problematic holes in evolution—complexity theories, probability statistics, or other aspects of Id—is religious content. Unless you consider religious content to be anything at all that suggests there are serious flaws in a theory that asserts everything in the universe that we know, including ourselves, came about purely by chance and can be explained by the (chance) operation of physical laws. If that’s religion, then the secular state by default must be officially materialistic in its, well, philosophy, whatever that is, if it is allowed to have a philosophy at all.
ID critics are right: the dispute often is really not about science. It’s about philosophies, and the materialist are worried because theirs is being challenged.