Intelligent Design: Stop These Religous Fanatics

After all the discussion around Islamic fundamentalism it is a sobering reminder to see that the Christian extremists are not for behind, and already active in Europe.

SvD reports today on the 'Intelligent Design' and Creationist movements who have been trying so hard to get a foothold in America schools and are now at work in Europe too.

The premise is this: Since the Bible says that God created the Earth and explicitly created man and everything in the Bible is true, so you can't ignore it, it follows that Darwin’s view of gradual evolution and the Origin of species must be wrong.

Young Earth Creationists have looked at some time markers in the Bible to show the Earth was created around 6000 years ago. They have to explain away things like Dinosaurs and the Carbon Dating to make this stick of course. Dinosaurs lived alongside people and were gave birth to all the Dragon and Monster Myths. You don't see them today because they never made it onto Noah's Ark (of course!). Carbon dating is simply rubbished as being based on inaccurate assumptions, making its results worthless.

Intelligent Design (ID) proponents say that since life was designed by an intelligent agent (God), then signs of this will be visible in the biology of living organisms. They rubbish Darwin by saying his theory has too many holes in it to be trusted (whereas just throwing up your arms and saying, God did it is much more plausible).

These people are dangerous and are trying to take us back to the Middle Ages when scientists were heretics and the Biblical dogma was all that mattered. Don't forget they once believed the world was the centre of the Universe and the sun revolved around it.

ID not science. It makes no testable theories or predictions and exists only to prop up the belief that the Biblical work must be the absolute truth and so by default, everything else is wrong. Is this what we want to teach our children? That religious dogma should be blindly accepted instead or looking for truths through the rigours of logic and scientific method.

Darwin's theories have made many predictions and have been seen to be at work countless times, even changing species on time scales we can observe. Saying it is wrong because it cannot answer everything is just plain stupid, as all theories take time to develop and expand and we build up our understanding of the world in small incremental steps.

One argument against Darwinism is that there is no explanation as to how life spontaneously began and evolved from the most simple amino acid building blocks. But just wait a minute, Nature has had millions of years to evolve these mechanisms and modern Biochemistry is only about 50 years old. The human genome was mapped less than a decade ago. Who knows what our knowledge will be in 50 more years time.

Keep Science with the Scientists and keep this kind of mindless, thoughtless faith in religious dogma out of the schools so we can bring up generations of kids who will have enquiring minds ready to search out the real truths behind our origins and not just robots to faith.

Amen.