Televangelist Pat Robertson has apparently advised the good people of Dover, PA, who this week voted out a school board that had insisted on the introduction of "intelligent design" into science classes alongside Darwinian evolution, that they have also voted God out of their town. It seems that the not-so-good people of Dover, PA, are less than overwhelmed by Robertson's observation. Even one member of the voted-out school board had one or two unkind things to say about Robertson's warning.
Robertson, you will remember, recently called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez which, one supposes, would be an act of Christian charity (though perhaps Chavez wouldn't see it that way). I couldn't confirm a rumor, propagated through one or two blogs, that Robertson blamed the recent catastrophic tornado in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky on Warren Beatty for having tried to crash one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's pre-special-election rallies in California; but Robertson did warn the city of Orlando, FL, several years ago that it could be hit by hurricanes, tornadoes and even meteors if it allowed gay pride flags to be flown along its streets.
(Since that time, God has hurled a number of hurricanes at Orlando to punish them for their sinfulness in ignoring Robertson. Luckily for Orlando, His aim has been consistently bad. Or perhaps God has simply been punishing the rest of Florida for almost voting for Al Gore in 2000.)
I don't remember how many circles there were in the Hell that Dante described in the Divine Comedy; let's call the number N. I suspect that there are now N + 1, where the N + 1th has recently been created for the most vile and obnoxious televangelists. Need I name names?
This is the text of a letter to the editor of the West County Times. The letter was, ultimately, not published, since the letters editor tries to keep publications down to one letter per month per individual (they published another letter of mine on a different subject).
In yesterday's elections, the Dover, PA, school board appears to have been turned out of office en masse. So maybe this letter is no longer relevant. In Kansas, on the other hand ...
A scientific theory has to be testable, to find out whether or not it is wrong; "intelligent design" is not. Worse, and in line with testability, a scientific theory not only has to show why things work one way, it also has to explain why they don't work in some other way; "intelligent design", if you accept it as valid, introduces such a degree of arbitrariness ("miracles") into the functioning of the universe that things could work in any way whatsoever.
Finally, at the high-school level science classes generally concentrate on describing observable phenomena, not teaching theories of why things work in certain ways. Evolution, like gravity, is an observable phenomenon, as anyone who has encountered a strain of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis will willingly, though perhaps not gladly, testify. "Intelligent design" is, at best, not an observable phenomenon.
If the Dover school board wants to teach that Pan-ku the Nebula created the universe and the goddess Nüwa created the human race, that's fine with me. Just don't call it "science".