Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn has got to credit President Bush with consistency-- he rejects reality wherever he finds it. Most recently, it is the science of biology that has had to yield before Bush's "faith-based" beliefs.

W has endorsed teaching our kids something called "Intelligent Design" (ID) along side evolution in high school biology classes. ID is simply Biblical creationism repackaged to be more politically palatable. According to ID proponents, it wasn't billions of years of evolution shaping and reshaping the Earth's infection of DNA that produced the amazing panoply of life all around us. Instead, it was God-Majick.

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Now, Dawn is all for freedom of thought; anyone who wants to believe in God-Majick may do so. But it seems ill-advised to teach our kids that it stands on par with science. Science is testable, open to falsification; indeed, such testing-- weeding out theories that don't work, refining those that do-- is what defines science. But God-Majick is not falsifiable; indeed, such challenges are forbidden heresy.

Science thrives on dissent. God-Majick forbids it. And since Dawn generally likes dissent, Dawn finds compelling political reason to side with science.

But even those who take a more authoritarian view should consider the wisdom of allowing religion to masquerade as science; while students in the rest of the world learn real biology, our kids are being taught creation myths.

What's next? The Bible has the sun and stars revolving the Earth at the whim of the Almighty; if the motion of the heavens are directed by God-Majick, shouldn't our kids learn astrology alongside astronomy? Shouldn't teachers-- to use the mantra of the ID movement-- "teach the controversy"?

The Bible has any number of stories about miraculous transformations of materials that violate the laws of chemistry. But what are the laws of science compared to the laws of God-Majick? Shouldn't students be given a chance to learn alchemy on par with chemistry?

Perhaps, though, there is an upside to Bush's "no facts, please" approach to science instruction: soon, US engineers won't have the knowhow to build the bombs with which enemies are to be smitten....