This might cause a stir with some of my readers. I pulled this off of P. Phillips blog. I don't think I can say it any better. It is regarding the topic of religion being taught in public schools.

Way too much material in the last thread, but there is one point I would like to hit on. There was also a subthread about school vouchers in there that you might find worth reading.

wi1lyloman wrote: You say evolution is fact. Why? Because you believe it to be. You've read about the general outlines of the theory and it made sense to you, it explained the world in a way you found appealing. But plainly, you are not a scientist, nor are you even vaguely familiar with science's precepts or methods, much less the minutia of evolutionary theory, its weaknesses and strengths.

Epistemologically, your faith in evolution has a great deal in common with extreme fudamentalists' faith that the Bible is literally true and the world was created in six days. Your religion is evolution.

This is absolutely true and worthy of some real thought. In fact, a huge percentage of what we "know" to be true rests on our faith in the word of others. However, what separates us is who we choose to believe. You don't have to be a scientist or know much about science to determine to your satisfaction that scientists are far more likely to be right than any other group. Nobody can be an expert in more than a very few topics. For everything else the real skill is in identifying who is likely to know what they're talking about and who isn't. That's why I can be forgiving of someone who feels strongly about the theory of evolution without knowing anything specific about the theory: because what they're really supporting is not the theory of evolution, but the supremacy of the scientific method.

And that highlights another problem I have with the supposed "evolution vs. ID" faux debate. When it is spun that way the IDers have already won, because it positions them as competing theories. They are not. The REAL conflict here is between science and anti-science: nothing more and nothing less. Evolution just happens to be the most prominent scientific theory that threatens deeply held superstitions. Once upon a time it was heliocentrism, and perhaps in the distant future it will be some branch of cosmology. The details change but the battle is always the same. One group wants to find the truth and one group wants to protect their idea of the truth, and these approaches will forever be irreconcilable.

I have no tolerance for ID because no matter how innocuously its supporters may paint it, its entire reason for existing is to undermine the scientific method in the minds of the impressionable. It isn't that it particularly matters whether someone holds false beliefs about this or that scientific theory, it is that once people surrender their minds like this they become far easier to control. Most of the horrors and injustices perpetrated throughout the world would not be possible but for the ignorance and irrationality of the larger population. It's unfortunate enough that this is to some extent the natural state of affairs among the uneducated, but to TEACH it when we have every reason to know better? It's stupid and offensive on a scale that few ideas can reach.