What's The Deal, People?

If you want to take a look at my previous post regarding "I Believe In Nothing I'm Told By Authority Figures", I've discussed that some pretty horrible people in power make decent decisions sometimes. Not everything they produce is utter crap. Case in point: President Bush's recent highlight of Intelligent Design.

Far too many people have immediately attacked the argument, calling it "bad science" or "not science at all", but I think their actions are a bit premature. Darwinian evolution has permeated far too deeply into our culture--so far that any challenging theory that might have credence is immediately shunned. Imagine the harsh reactions to Special Relativity or the Quantum Theory, and multiply them by at least ten. You'd think a fundamental challenge to the nature of time and reality would be presented with more criticism than the operation of life.

Intelligent Design is all about how organisms are irreducibly complex. That's it. Some attatch religious connotation to it, but I would assume that by the time it would reach the classroom, the theory would be boiled down to its truest identity. It says that scientific observation implies living things have a complex design that could not be simpler. It begs further observation and analysis of biological entities, and theories as to how their designs may have surfaced. Just because a God could be a designer doesn't make ID religious. It simply opens up that option. Intelligent Design is evolution expanded. It does not limit the researcher to purely materialist or by-chance creation as Darwinian evolution does.

I think that Intelligent Design is only in competition with evolution on the grounds that it is not as limiting. It encourages further exploration into the nature of species and the complex structures they possess. It looks for a better way of explaining things. I don't know about you, but that sounds like good science to me.