This, That, and the Other

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 5th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

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This was originally posted on my old blog all the way back on November 5, 2005

The End of Evolution

The so called “Monkey Trials” of 1925 captured the interest and imagination of the public and contributed to the growing chasm between men of science and men of faith. But men of science won that round and evolution has since prevailed over creationism as the accepted theory for the origin of the species.

Yet those who shun Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection and consider it to be an affront to the bible, to faith, and to religiosity have not been silently sitting around taking it on the chin for all these years. They have continued to espouse their belief that evolution is nothing more than a flawed theory and has no basis in fact.

Until recently, this argument against decades, if not centuries, of exhaustive scholarly research and overwhelming scientific evidence was accepted only by the far religious right. But more recently there has been an all-out assault on the science of evolution by Christian evangelicals and even some religious mainstreamers through the aggressive promotion of creationism in sheep’s clothing. It goes by the name of “intelligent design,” or “ID.”

In their effort to remove religion and to avoid overtones of theocracy in this new wave of creationism, proponents of intelligent design are carefully crafting their messaging in secular terms and are going to great lengths to avoid mentioning the identity of the “designer.” The belief of this movement is that the use of secular terms, cultivation of ambiguity around the “designer,” and dialog that avoids religious overtones are necessary to reintroduce the religious notion of God as the designer. The idea is to get the bible out of the discussion and to put this “scientific theory” on an even footing with evolution.

Charles Krauthammer, in an article that appeared in the August 1, 2005 issue of Time Magazine, observed that intelligent design is nothing more than a “new and gratuitous attempt to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion.” He continued to note that “evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology.” But those who support ID focus on only one word in that observation: “theory,” and attempt to fill what they perceive to be gaps in the theory of evolution with the notion of an intelligent designer — and a divine one, at that.

Intelligent design is a fine curriculum for Sunday school and religious schools. Let’s keep it out of our public, academic schools’ science curriculums.

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Note: The Doonesbury (©️Garry Trudeau) strip above was not included on the original post.