An NPR report on the campaing to teach ID in Kansas was more positive and intelligent than I have heard before. The reporter actually made a distinction between young earth creationism and Intelligent Design, something that for me is absolutely critical but is ussually ignored. Young earth creationism is fundamentalist science where God said it (and God only speaks in plain literal languate), I believe it, and you are an idiot if you disagree. Scientists are deceived, not just wrong; darwinism is about morality, not data. ID attempst to be more modest. It just makes the claim that things look designed. The actual proposal on the slate in Kansas is that some of the ID critiques of Darwinism should be included in the curriculum, which is also pretty modest.
I could be wrong about this whole thing, but I still have a bad feeling. If we go around the scientific community we will never gain credibiltiy. Since I have already debated this point with some people, I know what the answer is: The scientific establishment is so biased against design that you can’t even get a hearting, so you have to take it to the popular level. But is that true? Yes, scientist are biased and tend towards a materialistic world view, which they will no doubt try to defend when it is challenged. But I am not so sure that the scientific establishment is so completely beyond hope. We actually have evidence for this from the Big Bang theory, which was intitialy proposed by a priest (early 20th C) when the scientific community asumed a static universe. Fred Hoyl came up the the moniquer “Big Bang” to mock the idea, but after WWII the evidence began mounting and now the vast majority of scientists believe in the BB. Of course this theory contains just as many implications for the presence of a deisigner/creator as ID does, and it has been accepted because of the facts. So I think we should take courage from that, not paint all scientists as evil or deceived, and do our scientific work for the scientific community.
I have heard a lot about a new book on the origins of the Big Bang theory, but I have not been able to read it yet:
