Intelligent Design?

Today, the Kansas Board of Education approved new science stardards which attempts to poke holes in the theory of evolution. At the behest of a misguided religious right who neither understands the roots of the scientific method nor the implications of theology, six Republican board members outvoted their four colleagues to draft the new standards. The new standard states that basic evolutionary concepts must be understood by students but that recent biological research has questioned Darwinian assertions that all life started from a common origin and arose from natural chemical and biological processes. This opens the way for other ''alternative" explanations to be taught such as "intelligent design" which asserts that life is so amazingly complex that a "higher power" must have been responsible.

Now, let us put aside for the moment that while the theory of evolution cannot be tested directly, the scientific assertions that underly Darwin's naturalistic insight remain one of the bedrocks of modern evolutionary biology not to mention many other scientific disciplines. And, I suppose we can even put aside the dangerous theological problems of asserting that just because we do not fully understand some things about the nature of the beginnings of life, someday we might, closing God out of yet another sphere of authority, because we chose to stuff God into that lone sphere in the first place.

No, I think the most cogent argument against "intelligent design" is a theological one. While advocates of this view conveniently like to refer to their 'intelligent' higher power, the Bible in no place talks about a 'higher power." The witness of the Bible, to which these Christians ostensibly subscribe, is not to a nameless higher power, a faceless behind-the-scenes figure that somehow sticks a finger into the mirky soup of existence to tweek an atom here, a molecule there, to make the glorious creation that is our universe and of course, the potently proud humankind.

The Christian faith asserts that is God, the LORD, Yahweh of the Old Testament that created us. The Christian faith asserts that this God is a God we know by name, a God who knows us by name. The Christian faith proclaims our God that cares so deeply not just about us but about the whole of the created universe that this God came to us in a human child, a baby that grew into a man - a man with a face, with hair and hands and feet and eyes and a name; Jesus Christ.

Intelligent design is not only unscientific.

It's un-Christian.