Intelligent President, By Design

It's not every day when you are echoed by the President of the United States:

President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both ideas, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." [emphasis added]

Amen, brother. [rimshot]

The above is all I've ever advocated in my humble little slice of cyburbia. Since origins is, by definition, a topic beyond the realm of science to either observe or test empirically, there is nothing "unscientific" about including other theories in the curricular discussion besides evolutionary dogma - particularly when evolution is by far the least compelling of the major theories.

The President's comments will unleash the predictable sputtering, intolerance-driven outrage at this latest modest challenge to the extreme secularists' atheistic orthodoxy. Which goes to show only that they (apparently) fear a little honest intellectual competition in which they might actually have to defend their decrepit Darwinist orthodoxy. Which, even on grounds of statistical probabality alone, is a task I would not envy.

The political effects, as Hugh Hewitt observes, are even more salutary - blunting the Democrats' efforts to make inroads in "red" states:

When the President suggests that the religious view of evolution should be discussed at the same time the non-religious view of evolution is taught, he does not offend or insult anyone who is not already set against him and most religious believers. When the "outrage" erupts on the left over the suggestion that there is a watchmaker, voters notice. [emphasis added]

The only edit I'd make to the above quote is that whether or not an origins theory is "religious" or not is, in this context at least, irrelevant. Rather, the yardstick should be which theoretical construct better fits the facts. And by that measure, intelligent design wins hands down.

Small wonder that "scientists" are so resistent to the free flow of ideas; evolution is yet another ideological redoubt of Christophobic hard-leftism, the toppling of whose wall of monopoly looks to be just a matter of time.

UPDATE 8/5: And here is a dilly of a battering ram....