Deeply distressing is the Australian government’s “Education” minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, has endorsed the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools.
“I think that parents and schools should have the opportunity – if they wish to – for students also to be exposed to this and to be taught about it”
I don’t think that telling impressionable young kids that space aliens or maybe God built all life on Earth because “there’s no reasonable alternative, it’s just so complicated, so someone or something quite clever must have done it” is a good place to go. Especially in that following Intelligent Design through to it’s logical conclusion, it means that only God could have done it, because someone had to build those clever space aliens, and it can’t have been space aliens because they’re so clever and all, and where could they have come from. Of course, ID happily ignores “so who built God?”.
The Intelligent Design community would have a better chance of arguing for Unintelligent Design. The number of stupidly designed creatures is impressive – just look at sausage dogs for a start. And the amount of junk DNA – 97% of the human genome. The aging process, quite clearly some nasty joke by our benovolent creator, along with cancer, another handy inclusion. Yep, whoever built us was a shoddy workman, that’s for sure. Intelligent design my arse.
But you know what? No (federal) politican has come out and said “Intelligent Design? You want to let them teach that bullshit? Are you as stupid as you look, or were you wanting to use it as the basis material for a subject on logical thought and reasoning?”
Australians have brought this on themselves. Stand by, now that Family First are in, we’re going to be hearing someone suggesting that Young Earth creationism ought to be taught as an alternative to the “theory” (it’s just a theory, so it’s as valid as any other, right?) of evolution. Mark my words. You see it happening the the USA, it’s gonna happen here, because we’re cultural lap dogs.
It just makes me want to cry. What kind of world will my children grow up in, if morons are driving the education system? If parents wish, they can bloody well teach that religious mumbo-jumbo to their children themselves! Now, if only for some effective child abuse legislation…
Conclusive proof against “Intelligent Design” is…
Man nipples.
C’mon, either God put them there to serve a function, or there IS no God. Go up to an Creationist and demand they explain God’s plan for men’s nipples. Explain the Intelligent Design.
There was a great comment in the Age the other day that “maybe schools should consider teaching ID when the church preaches evolutionism”.
I really agree with Josh here. I’ve been exposed to a lot of literature in support of ID/Creationism. It’s like it’s been written in the Grade 6 end of year book picking on the popular kids. It focuses on one small inconsistency someone may have ever written about evolution and picks it to pieces. It then says that if that part is wrong then it must all be wrong, right?
To me, the best support for evolutionism is what happens in your kidney. You see, part of your kidney function is to remove the salt from your bloodstream. It’s shunted off to the bladder to be pissed out. However, just outside the kidney there’s this little organ that takes the salt out of the urea and puts it back in the bloodstream! You call that intelligent design? The evolution theory explains it that we used to live in the ocean, surrounded by salt, so we needed to get rid of it. Then when we adapted to live on land, we needed to keep that salt because it’s vital for cell process, so we evolved this bit to put the salt back in.
Sounds like a dodgy hack to a piece of code that someone wrote and someone else couldn’t be bothered working out. So they patched it. 🙂
I’m developing a real hated towards God botherers all this “where did we come from” crap. Evolution – natural. Creationism – convoluted beliefs, who the hell is right? ARGH! Personally, I think it’s cool that we came from monkeys.
ooh, Geekrant goes political!
Geekrant evolves
Sorry Ren – we didn’t come from monkeys, primates and humans came from a common ancestor.
A subtle but important difference. Like ID and the Theory of Evolution 🙂