Education
Columnists Need Schooling on Textbook Definition of ID
Mark Franek had a piece in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer showing off his ignorance on intelligent design. Here’s his attempt to describe ID:
“The basic tenet of intelligent design takes about five seconds to teach – the mechanisms of life are so complex that they could have only been orchestrated by a supreme power – but the implications of this belief are better taught and served in a religion or philosophy class, or better yet, in a place of worship.”
He’s right, his definition of ID would be better suited for a religion class. But, that’s not the standard definition of ID and is in fact a definiton that we reject outright.
Also interesting is this comment:
“I can’t prove the existence of macroevolution in a commentary, but I will bet one year’s teaching salary on the hunch that biology teachers in the Dover area will quietly sidestep the requirement that they teach intelligent design.”
This is similar to one point I’ve made before which is that this is one reason we don’t think it would be a good idea to mandate ID because teachers don’t know what the theory really is about and wouldn’t know how to teach it. So, they would likely do what he suggests here, ignore it. Or worse, they’d do like Franek does and make up out of whole cloth their own definition and description of the theory and teach that.