More Fun with Church & State

Apparently Kansas is without a good theater group to perform a nice strong revival of Inherit the Wind, so the state board of education is holding hearings on how evolution should be taught in schools. New state teaching standards are being adopted, and some on the board of education want to deemphasize evolution to make room for the concept of "intelligent design." If you're not familiar with the term, intelligent design is the idea that the universe couldn't just happen but required some sort of intelligence to craft it into its current state. Scientists have boycotted the hearings, refusing to legitimize the argument, so the testimony is weighted entirely toward intelligent design.

As I understand it, intelligent design was intended to make the argument toward creationism a bit less religious. Creationism is the belief that life, the universe, and everything were created as described in the biblical story in Genesis. Intelligent design steps back from that a little bit, insisting that the Judeo-Christian God may or may not have been the intelligence in question. No, according to intelligent designers, God is not necessarily the author of creation, but if not, someone extremely similar to him is.

Making the whole series of hearings even more silly, many of the witnesses in favor of changing the educations standards admit that they haven't even read the document they're critiquing. Neither have two of the three board members overseeing the hearings (although one of those board members did have this to say in her defense: "I'm not a word-for-word reader in this kind of technical information"--so there!). If you want to be one up on the experts, here are links to the material. (I'm just a mildly interested observer, so add my name to the list of those who have only scanned the document.) Also, Kevin Drum helpfully points us to a writer in Kansas who's blogging the hearings.