I’ve spoken at Scripps (and many other bioscience research places), and I doubt that researchers there would welcome ID in the schools, regardless of any personal beliefs.

My father was a devout Christian, Deacon of the local church, and a 20-year President/VP of the local public school board. He would have been rather scornful of ID, but for reasons of both science and faith. As an educated farmer, he perfectly well knew that evolution worked, having studied genetics, plant & animal breeding.

Regarding faith, he’d say: “God gave us brains to think with, and the parable of the talents says we’d better use them. If someone’s faith is so weak they need to distort the evidence of science to maintain their faith, they might want to think about their faith some more.” Our schools had fine science programs, no trace of creationism. I don’t know if anyone ever tried to introduce it, but it certainly didn’t get very far.

Too bad Dad wasn’t leading the Dover effort, in place of William Buckingham, who seemed to have read the Bible rather selectively. He seems to have missed the ninth commandment (not bearing false witness), an unwise move in a videotape era.

Many people (most in the Scientific community) who believe in ID believe that God created many if not all things via evolution. The thing that I find most offensive about only teaching evoluation is only when its done in a way to exclude faith in God. Evolutionist cannot explain ultimate orgins and so it’s fair to at least acknowledge the possibility if not the necessity of a higher power at some point in the process.

Though science is not a religion, religion is politics, and religionists treat any challenge to their absolutist dogma as a political equivalent and rival. The context and motivation of the current confrontation is politically congruent with that of the historical former. As long as scientists delude themselves that the ‘man on the street’ can be swayed by logical argument, they fight a losing battle. Who, then, is to save the world from another ‘Dark Ages’ of inane mysticism?

Name one example of research in which ID ‘theory’ has played a pivotal role in generating new knowledge, technology, or productive lines of inquiry. What, if anything, is reproducible in any sort of lab which ID propounds?

ID is simply a game of “give up searching for a natural explanation, and just believe God used supernatural power” there will never be useful scientific outcomes or lines of investigation leading from it.

Scientists who pray and believe in God don’t pray, let’s just find that God did it and give up and go home. They pray for new insight into the operations and laws of Nature. They pray for the insight to penetrate the natural mystery and to understand the mechanims and processes at work. They hope to find the formulas and math that describes the processes. They hope to find the experiments which disproves or supports a hypothesis. They may care about a hypothesis, but they expect to find improved and better ones as the scientific efforts by many smart, disciplined people progress.

For starters, can you name an alternative scientific theory regarding the diversity of species? I’m a biologist, and i sure can’t. If there was one that was supported by any scientific evidence, we’d know about it by now (as described above, Intelligent Design is not scientific). Given the absence of scientific alternatives, there is nothing to teach other than evolution in science classes.

Incidentally, if you doubt that the generation of new species has been observed, and for more detail on the above, i recommend you check out http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/. You should be able to see that it’s all pretty scientific, and very little faith is involved.