Christianity Today has this story on the progress of Intelligent Design in the Kansas public school system:
Eighty years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial," Kansas has reopened a national debate over school science standards. Hearings were convened on May 5 by the state board of education to determine whether current criticisms of evolutionary theory may be taught in public schools. Proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) had the stage to themselves.
A pro-evolution group, Kansas Citizens for Science, boycotted the meetings, saying they were a thinly disguised assault on atheism. Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka attorney retained by the board to defend the current science standards, characterized Intelligent Design scientists as repackaged creationists.
The theory of evolution holds that all life developed via natural selection to its present diversity over billions of years. Intelligent Design holds that natural selection cannot account for the complexity of life.
"An intelligent design by definition requires a designer," Irigonegaray told CT. "I just disagree that science should involve a supernatural answer. I think it is essential that science remain neutral."
Board chair Steve Abrams told CT that while the subject has obvious religious implications, "the objective is to minimize the religion and politics and focus, as much as possible, on the science education." This summer the board is expected to approve teaching critical of evolution.
At least 13 states are looking at legislation requiring a more critical stance toward evolution in the classroom, or allowing alternative theories to be taught.
Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that advocates Intelligent Design, told CT that he does not favor teaching students about ID because the theory is not fully developed yet.
Wells is correct that ID is not yet a fully developed scientific theory, but that's no reason not to present in the classroom the reasons why many people accept it. Neither the Big Bang nor String theory are completely understood, but we don't hesitate to teach their main points in the appropriate science classes. Nor is the incompleteness of ID a reason why students should not be taught the difficulties with Darwinism as well as its strengths. Indeed, Darwinism itself is a theory that has been mutating continuously since Charles Darwin first published Origin of Species in 1859, and, it could be argued, is itself still not fully worked out.
Viewpoint recommends that both ID and Darwinism be taught in high school biology classrooms as competing theories in the philosophy of biology. Teach students the difference between empirical investigation and the philosophy that undergirds it and show them how philosophical assumptions permeate all that scientists do and why science cannot be practiced or taught without bringing those philosophical assumptions into play. Students will find the controversy between the two explanations of origins fascinating, and they'll learn a lot of science and philosophy along the way. So will their teachers.
