Spending public dollars to convince the public that intelligent design has no merit violates the Establishment Clause as the government is taking sides in a religious dispute - this time to show religion is wrong, and the Godless theory is correct. Why not spend the same amount of public dollars to tell both sides, thus avoiding the "taking sides" problem? Where is the ACLU challenge? Where is the religious legal challenge?
> Spending public dollars to convince the public that intelligent design has no merit ...
... is not being done. Or perhaps you think that publicly funded planetariums and the like are in violation of the Establishment Clause when they teach about astronomy and not astrology?
All scientific theories are "Godless" in that they don't refer to God. In this, they differ in no way from the Theory of Evolution. Are you telling us you think science violates the Establishment clause?
Why not spend the same amount of public dollars to tell both sides, thus avoiding the "taking sides" problem?
By your own admission, the ID side is religious in nature. That precludes governmental support.
Where is the ACLU challenge? Where is the religious legal challenge?
??
Nothing in the displays shows that religion is wrong or that the theory is Godless. Besides, the leader of the ID movement believes in common descent - that is we all came from little squishy things. So what is your gripe?
That there are people approaching the question from a religious perspective does not mean the debate is fundamentally religious. Any question could be approached from a religious perspective.
Behe:
Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent
to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves
belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an
interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I
have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that
physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all
organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no
particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues
who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary
framework, and I think that evolutinoary biologists have contributed
enormously to our understanding of the world.
And who is this Behe? Just one of the two 'scientists' that the ID'ers are relying on in presenting their case for teaching ID in the classroom ...
"The board names two scientists who advocate ID "as a scientific theory": Michael Behe of Lehigh University and Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho*."
Welcome to the common descent bandwagon. Now that both sides agree that man has evolved over millions of years from little squishy things, maybe we can step forward to a new understanding.