A Retraction

We admit it. We were wrong.

Many months ago, we at the Blasphemy Blog came out in favor of teaching intelligent design in biology class alongside evolution. We did this even though we ourselves are quite sure that we are descended from chimpanzees, and even though we considered intelligent design to be a load of horse manure. But now we recant our stance, and say, No, it would be a bad idea to teach this crackpot theory in high school biology classes.

Our reason for favoring the crackpot theory, originally, was that it would inspire spirited debate in biology classes, which might thereby promote learning. We had one good biology teacher our senior year of high school, but before him we had pretty shoddy science instruction all the way through, and it seemed to us when we wrote our pro-intelligent design post that a little debate on the merits of evolution might shake things up a little and prevent high school science classes from becoming boring note-taking exercises.

But we’ve had it pretty well explained to us by a lot of people that any debate between the two “theories” is a waste of time.

Why? Well, intelligent design is just not science. It’s not a scientific theory because there are no circumstances under which it could be disproved.

One of the hallmarks of a scientific theory is that there is always some imaginable data you could discover that would disprove it. Evolution, for example, could be disproved if we found fossilized rabbits from the Pre-Cambrian Era. (We haven’t, by the way.)

Intelligent design, on the other hand, can never be disproved, because the hypothetical designer, a.k.a. God, always has a good reason for creating whatever we discover. Even if it doesn’t make sense to us, we assume it makes sense to God, because God designed it that way.

So intelligent design is not science, and should not be taught in science classes. Simple.

Now, it might be okay to study it in philosophy and literature classes, where it can be fun to debate these questions with no answers.

The universe must have come from somewhere, so God must exist. We don’t really know for sure what God really is, though, and we see no evidence that God designed anything.

We are not deists at the Blasphemy Blog, and believe that God is always with us. We just don’t think God is an architect, genetic engineer, or telekinetic manipulator of atoms. God is present with all of Creation, and always has been. God does not now, and never has needed to tweak Creation like some mad scientist. God designed nothing; design implies thought and the force that created the universe, whatever it is, is certainly beyond thought.