How is Intelligent Design not religious?

[elfs]

Apparently the faculty at Kansas University have had enough of their primary-school brethern making a mockery of the state. Next semester, KU will offer the class "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other Religious Mythologies." This is exactly where it belongs, as intelligent design has no science at all behind it. Intelligent design proponents will scream and yell that it is not a religious theory at all. They steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the identity of the designer in their "official" documents that they feed to the press.

Apparently, someone didn't get that memo. State Senator Kay O'Connor said, "I think in the very least it's a slap in the face to every Judeo-Christian religion that's out there."

The Discovery Institute has received over four million dollars in the past five years: you would think that they would have published a meaningful paper or two, or done some research, or something. But no: there has not been a single, useful paper published by anyone associated with the Discovery Institute. In fact, most of those in the DI with a PhD. all have the same arc: they all stopped doing, writing about, and publishing meaningful research about the same time they became part of the intelligent design cheerleading squad. The popular books they have, trying to convince the lay people that there is a "controversy," have all been published by IV Press and Regnery Press, two evangelical outfits that otherwise publish books found only in Christian bookstores.

Someone at Kansas University decided to "teach the controversy," which is the line the DI people use when trying to convince high schools what they should teach in biology classrooms. The controversy is not between evolutionary theory and intelligent design: the controversy is between those who believe the sacred should remain sacred and those who want to impose a religious, teleological point of view on everything we do damn the consequences.

Senator O'Connor has made her point very clear: the teaching of intelligent design is a religious agenda, and we anger her Christian brethren at our risk.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Maybe if we cheeze them off hard enough, they'll take their toys and stomp off home.

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

I'm figuring more on Christian sharia. Not that these people are actually following the teachings of the Master or anything.

Teach the children quietly, for someday sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we sit still...

[jenk]

How is Intelligent Design not religious?

1. Define "religious" as "specific to a particular sect".
2. Define "not religious" as "not specific to my particular sect".

So. Seventh-Day Adventist dietary preferences are specific to a particular sect, so "religous". Catholic rosaries are specific to that whole 'other religion', so "religious". (I was raised by Protestants who regarded Catholics as non-Christian.) Celebrating Christmas is "not religious" because all those not-our-sect people get their kids' photos taken with Santa. Belief in a Deity is "not religious" - Jews do it, right?

Limited worldview. Just stay inside the box and it all makes sense.

[norman-hamer.livejournal.com]

Well, _technically_, ID _isn't_ religious. They're perfectly happy in theory with the idea that we were created by space aliens, who could have just evolved from primordial muck. They don't reject a naturalistic hypothesis, exactly, just the theory that life _here_ evolved from the ground up without someone interfering.

In practice, of course, they have a better explanation.

[tagryn]

Not that one would expect a course which from the start labels one viewpoint as a "myth" to fairly represent both sides, of course...

[norman-hamer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would expect it to be phrased more along the lines of "Intelligent Design, Creationism and creation myths in religion". ID and Creationism aren't myths, they're cosmologies.