11/25/2004: "Time to get the ol' sniffer checked�or read a book"

The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial last weekend, questioned the decision of a Pennsylvania school board to require the teaching of intelligent design theory alongside evolution:

Far more troubling was last month's decision by the Dover, Pa., school board to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that the required teaching of creationism as science violated the 1st Amendment. Trying to disguise creationism with the label of "intelligent design" (which sounds like an IKEA marketing pitch) doesn't pass the smell test�or any valid science test.

Why do editorialists insist on opining about stuff they know nothing about? Equating creationism and intelligent design is like saying the Los Angeles Times and the Communist Manifesto must be the same thing because both use words to convey ideas. The fact that creationism and intelligent design have in common a non-materialist approach to origins doesn't mean they are the same thing, something the writer would have known if he'd cracked Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box or William Dembski's Intelligent Design. Might intelligent design be wrong, and evolution right? Of course. But ruling one out of bounds without even considering its arguments and evidence, simply because the other is the "widely accepted theory" smacks of quasi-religious thinking. In an day when some scientists are actually giving thought to the idea that "our universe might have been manufactured by a race of superintelligent extraterrestrial beings" (Time), is intelligent design really an idea to be dismissed so cavalierly?