Bush and "intelligent design"

So Bush has endorsed the teaching of "intelligent design" in American schools, using the patently disingenuous justification, "so people can know what the debate is about." Look, if you want kids to know what the debate is about, then have a lesson about it in social studies, "current events," religion, or philosophy. The scientific arguments for evolution (and, implicitly, against creationism) are already well-covered in standard science textbooks. In science class, we teach science, and intelligent design is not science - it's a non-explanation explanation that relies simply on the God of the Gaps to claim that we will never know that which we do not currently know.

Actually, what's ironic is that even if "intelligent design" were true, this wouldn't technically prove Darwinism wrong. Daniel Dennett has pointed out that even if life on Earth actually does turn out to be "irreducibly complex" (a very dubious proposition), we might very well have been created by some alien life forms who themselves evolved by Darwinian natural selection. After all, "intelligent design" doesn't have the hubris to claim that it is theoretically impossible for life to evolved ever - it claims that it is impossible for life as it exists on Earth to have evolved. Who's to say the "intelligent designer" didn't itself evolve? The idea of Darwinian natural selection - blind, unintelligent, algorithmic natural selection - is not ultimately dependent on evolution-as-we-know-it-on-Earth being true (though, obviously, all available empirical evidence indicates that evolution as we know it on Earth is, in fact, true). That this conclusion is unacceptable to IDers only goes to show that "intelligent design" is merely a code word for "life was created by the eternal, omnipotent God of the Bible."

Update, 4 Aug: Post updated to get Google to link intelligent design here, as per Sean Carroll's suggestion.