Chesterfield and Dover

Was no one in Chesterfield, Virginia paying attention to the Kitzmiller trial? The Chesterfield School District recently discussed this issue of why none of the textbooks discussed intelligent design. According to Donna C. Gregory of the Chesterfield Observer

At issue was the concept of intelligent design, and why none of the proposed textbooks offered an alternative to evolution for how the universe came to be.

The lack of coverage of intelligent design was obviously no surprise…intelligent design isn’t an alternative to evolution – it’s an untested, untestable hypothesis, with absolutely no supporting evidence. There are thousands of equally bad hypotheses which are not covered in textbooks.

It says something about the success of ID that people ask about things like this in good faith. Granted, I strongly suspect that people who believe in ID do so because they want to believe, not because they have studied the evidence and have come to their own conclusion. Quite frankly, I find it hard to believe that even the proponents of ID came to their beliefs through a careful examination of the evidence. All these people who said “I believed in evolution until I saw how flimsy the evidence was” are probably saying (at best) “I never really believed in evolution, and as soon as I got a ‘theory’ that reinforced my pre-existing beliefs, I ditched reality and ran with it.”

(See Ed Brayton’s Dover the Sequel? over at ScienceBlogs)