Kansans, remember to get out and vote today—a low turnout is expected for the primary election for the Kansas school board, and you really want to dump Connie Morris, right?

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Evolution is the only story backed up by science. You don’t really want a school board run by ninnies who don’t know that, do you?

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Oh, yeah…there are other races besides the school board.

Catch ’em quick before they get deleted. In a post on Dembski’s blog that is discussing their Kansas ad campaign to falsely portray the IDist’s efforts as solely about teaching good science, there are a couple of interesting comments. Keep in mind that the Discovery Institute has declared that they aren’t trying to sneak intelligent design into the classroom, they just want an “honest” discussion of the weaknesses in evolutionary theory.

Here’s the first revealing comment, which plainly states that the goal of the Kansas science standards is to teach ID:

My hope is that ID will be taught properly in Kansas. Having been born and raised there I would love to claim to be from the first state to teach ID. There is a lot of movement among science high school teachers to never teach ID, even if it becomes a law because “we don’t know how to teach philosophy.”

It would be nice to see them learn. I worked in a school and grew tired of hearing them speak of how it’s wrong to point out the weaknesses in Darwin’s theory because, “even if it is weak, it’s still the best theory out there.” (Shades of Dawkins anyone?)

Comment by Joel Borofsky — July 30, 2006 @ 10:08 am

Bleh. How dishonest can you get? What informed teacher of biology would say of Darwin’s theory, “even if it is weak…”? It isn’t weak at all.

After being asked about this comment, take a look at his response, which digs an even deeper hole.

It really is ID in disguise. The entire purpose behind all of this is to shift it into schools…at least that is the hope/fear among some science teachers in the area. The problem is, if you are not going to be dogmatic in Darwinism that means you inevitably have to point out a fault or at least an alternative to Darwinism. So far, the only plausible theory is ID.

If one is to challenge Darwin, then one must use ID. To challenge Darwin is to challenge natural selection/spontaneous first cause…which is what the Kansas board is attempting to do. When you do that, you have to invoke the idea of ID.

Comment by Joel Borofsky — July 30, 2006 @ 9:04 pm

You may be saying, “So what? Blogs aren’t accountable for the random ravings of their flibbertigibbet commenters.” (I certainly don’t feel that way about mine.) There’s one important additional piece of information you need, though.

Joel Borofsky is Dembski’s research assistant and co-moderator of the site.

(hat tip to Richard Hughes.)

John Rennie deconstructs an IDist’s own definition of Intelligent Design. Here’s that definition:

ID is the claim that there exist patterns in nature that are best explained by intelligent agency. ID doesn’t claim to be a default explanation. It is claimed to be a legitimate hypothesis, supported by a large body of evidence, that deserves consideration without being rejected on principle because of a preconceived metaphysical bias.

Sentence by sentence, that definition is untenable. Read Rennie for the big picture, but I just want to focus on that last clause: the “preconceived metaphysical bias.” That’s a common creationist code phrase that you’ll hear a lot in this debate, and it can be translated as “scientists reject supernatural explanations.” That IDists claim to have a “best” explanation or that they actually have evidence in support of their beliefs becomes completely irrelevant when they cap their definition with the idea that you shouldn’t need rational, logical, tested explanations or any kind of empirical, natural evidence—the first part of the definition is a tacit admission of the need to meet the standards of our “metaphysical bias,” science, and that last bit is a rejection of science!

I think they need to cultivate a little more honesty and consistency, and lay out in detail what their metaphysical bias might be. Mine is that the processes of the natural world are sufficient to explain physical reality, and that what we require to understand the natural world are natural explanations. I’d like to see a summary of their biases and a list of the supernatural evidence that IDists want to use to support their contentions.