Up to date in Kansas

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William Saletan has a Slate article arguing that Intelligent Design, the latest incarnation of Creation Science, and about to be adopted in Kansas, is so much less obnoxious that the previous version that scientists and liberals should take it seriously, or at least give it a fair hearing. To my considerable surprise, I found myself more or less in agreement, subject to the usual caution that selective quotation can make anything look good (or bad).
The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism...that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us.
There are two main aguments against "Creation Science:" by explicitly invoking a deity, it violates the establishment clause, and it promulgates a demonstrably false picture of reality. The 1999 version of CS sinned in both ways. By insisting on biblical literalism, they essentially insisted on a Christian version of creation, and had to explicitly reject the age of the Earth, scientific dating methods, and the stratigraphic sequence. 2005 ID abandons both, according to Saletan.
The board's draft standards said, "The fossil record provides evidence of simple, bacteria-like life as far back as 3.8+ billion years ago." CSA would have tried to remove that sentence. IDnet embraced it and proposed to add a prepositional phrase: "almost simultaneously with the postulated habitability of our earth." This would underscore Calvert's argument that life arose faster than randomness could account for. A few lines later, the board's draft mentioned the fossil record, radioisotope dating, and plate tectonics. CSA would have fought all three references. IDnet affirmed them and asked only for a revision to limit their implications: "Certain aspects of the fossil record, the age of the earth based on radioisotope dating and plate tectonics are consistent with the Darwinian theory. However, this evidence is not inconsistent with the design hypothesis."
Furthermore
Two years later, in a bioethics journal, Calvert and an IDnet colleague, biochemist William Harris, summarized the differences between Biblical creationism and ID. "Creation science seeks to validate a literal interpretation of creation as contained in the book of Genesis," they explained. "An ID proponent recognizes that ID theory may be disproved by new evidence. ID is like a large tent under which many religious and nonreligious origins theories may find a home. ID proposes nothing more than that life and its diversity were the product of an intelligence with power to manipulate matter and energy."
Scientists also fear that letting this camel stick his nose under the tent would lead to the whole camel later, and I sympathize with this argument. I don't believe, though, that the dogmatic insistence on deity free explanations is either wise or justifiable, constitutionally or intellectually. To my mind, atheism is just another religion and the state is no more entitled to establish it than Hinduism. Students do need access to the facts - let them make up their own minds about theories. They will anyway.

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