Manufacturing Controversy

Recently the Religion vs. Science debate has popped up again in the US.

After being roundly defeated in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in 2005, Creationists have regrouped and are again trying to make it okay to teach Intelligent Design in science classes.

The passing of Louisiana senate bill SB 733 is going to make this possible, although not to teach ID directly. That's now clearly and legally understood to be unconstitutional.

The idea now is to "teach the controversy". That is, to promote ID as an alternative to evolutionary theory based on (acknowledged) weaknesses in evolutionary theory. This "controversy" has been manufactured by the proponents of ID.

The implication is that those evil scientists are trying to banish religion from our lives and claim, by teaching evolution, that there's no God.

But that's the thing. Science has precisely nothing to say about the existence of God, for or against.

To quote myself from a comment in an earlier post:

The point is that science is only concerned with examining and interpreting what can be observed and measured.

In that sense, the existence or non-existence of God is simply not a scientific question. It can't be, because there's no objective evidence to examine or measure or test.

From the scientific side there is no controversy, because Intelligent Design is not science. It's religious instruction posing as science. If the proponents of ID were a little more honest, they'd be upfront about that.

But the rejection of ID in science classes is not a rejection of religion, because science has nothing to say about religion.

The rejection of ID in science classes is just a rejection of bad science teaching.