Krauthammer on the Dover trial

Charles Krauthammer is putting in his two cents' worth on the subject of evolution, ID/IOT, and the trial in Dover.

The first point he makes is to deal with the assumption that science and religion are somehow enemies.

Einstein saw his entire vocation – understanding the workings of the universe – as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.

It's a pity modern religionists seem incapable of understanding this idea.

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Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design – today's tarted-up version of creationism – on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city."

As I mentioned in another post, Pat Robertson, in issuing his statement, has declared ID/IOT a religion. In particular, it's his religion. There's no other way to interpret his words. As for the claim that ID/IOT really is science, Dr. Krauthammer begs to differ:

Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge – in this case, evolution – they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science – that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution – or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase "natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying – by fiat of definition, no less – that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.