Friday, April 14, 2006
Missing Pieces
.
Cornell University will be offering a summer class on intelligent design.
The course will include texts that oppose and support the theory of intelligent design and will be offered through the undergraduate biology program. It will be a history of biology class that looks at ethics and philosophy.
"I'm not going to be bashing (intelligent design), but I'm also not going to be advocating it," said lecturer Allen MacNeill, an evolutionary biologist who will teach the course. "I'm going to be using it -- and evolutionary biology too -- to think about these very complicated ideas."
There's nothing wrong about that. First of all, it is not being offered at a public school subject to the limitations of the Establishment clause of the Constitution and, in any case, ID is not being taught as science per se but as part of historical, philosophical and ethical issues.
But as to this:
But as to this:
Hannah Maxson, president of the Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness Club at Cornell, said she is glad the issue is being taken seriously.
"We'd just like a place at the table in the scientific give-and-take," she said.
She and the rest of the ID advocates have one little stumbling block to overcome: in order to get a place at that table, you actually have to be doing science.
.
