Utah legislature: (un)intelligent design

"That ruling won't affect my bill at all. . . . My bill isn't written in that manner," Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said about yesterday's ruling on intelligence design in Pennslyvania. Buttars wants ID tought in an humanities or philosphy class. That sounds like making a philosphy class a theology class. But, wait it gets worse.

"It does challenge the school board, that they're going to have to rewrite their position on evolution to some degree," Buttars said. "Let me put it this way: There is no consensus in the scientific community regarding how life began . . . (so) to have a teacher teaching how life began and calling it fact really offends me. . . . I'm going to stop that. That's all I'm going to say right now."

From yesterday's Kitzmiller decision: "Despite the scientific community’s overwhelming support for evolution Defendants and ID proponents insist that evolution is unsupported by empirical evidence...[Plaintiff expert and paleontologist] Dr. Padian’s demonstrative slides, prepared on the basis of peer-reviewing scientific literature, illustrate how Pandas systematically distorts and misrepresents established, important evolutionary principles." Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, --F.3d -- (M.D.Pa. 2005) pp.83-84 of Document 342.

I guess Buttars really didn't have time to read this through debunking of ID as any sort of science and that ID backers distort and misrepresent any dispute amoung scientists about evolution. There are no "gaps in the fossil record" and the book "Of Pandas and People" is bad science, even the Defense experts acknowledged that.

Slate's William Saletan, argues that, "Scientifically, [Judge] Jones settles the issue. Culturally, he fails." Perhaps this is a better explaination for why Buttars insists on going forward, despite there being scientific consensus on how life began and developed. There is still cultural debate about how allegorical or literal the Book of Genesis is. Yet the whole ID movement is premised on the idea that you can either believe in God or Darwin, and not both.

One of the Plaintiff's experts, Brown Biology Professor Kenneth Miller, is an ardent Catholic, yet he is one of the leading defenders of Natural Selection and doesn't see it as conflicting with his beliefs. "Certainty of outcome means that control and predictability come at the price of independence." Miller explained to Brown Alumni Magazine. "By being always in control, the Creator would deny His creatures any real opportunity to know and worship Him. Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation." That freedom, Miller concludes, "is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature."

Miller has even written books about this very notion, called Finding Darwin's God.

But let's get back to public policy. "The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the board who voted for the ID policy," Jones wrote, "The students, parents and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

And yet, Buttars was well recieved by his GOP collegues behind (of course) closed doors. This is the same group that thinks it is ok for LDS Institutes of Religion to be across the street from High Schools, and to get course credit for it (this has since stopped). Or who stop everything to ban all High School clubs and groups because of gay-straight alliance clubs. The culture wars are winning issues for Utah Republicans, but a losing issue for the progress of society here.