Thoughts in a Haystack

Okay, one thing more about Stein and his interview with that bastion of "intellectual freedom," the American Family Association (who the movie producers felt the urgent need to assure "objectionable language had been removed from the film"). Stein shows the real intent of the Intelligent Design creationists when he was asked if ID involves "issues that are best left to the philosophy class or the religion class," and he responded:

I'm saying that maybe all these classes should not be so clearly separated from one another. Maybe all of them belong, to a certain extent, together. When Issac (sic) Newton was doing his study of the laws of physics and motion, he said he was trying to understand how God had ordered the universe and what the work of God had been. He was showing God's handiwork. Maybe when people say they are working on intelligent design, they are just expressing God's handiwork. Maybe when the Darwinists are explaining evolution, they're explaining God's handiwork. I'm a little suspicious of putting everything into neat pigeon holes.

First of all, as Ken Miller, Francisco Ayala and Theodosius Dobzhansky have shown, a person can be respected, even revered, member of both the scientific and academic communities and still express a belief that science reveals "God's handiwork." Contrary to Stein's and the movie's accusations, that's not what the alleged "victims" were "expelled" for. The ill effects, to the extent there were any, that the ID advocates felt were for attempting, as Stein admits, to illicitly blur the lines between philosophy and religion on one side and science on the other. The reason that Stein is "suspicious of putting everything into neat pigeon holes" is easy enough to see in his recent babblings about science ... he lacks the intellectual rigor to understand science and/or the honesty to differentiate between it and religion.

That sort of confusion of ideas is bad enough in academia, fully warranting derision and an unwillingness to confer lifetime jobs on the perpetrators. But in K-12 education, deliberately blurring the lines between religion and science is an unconstitutional assault on the freedom of religion. I suspect Stein's sanctimonious and saccharin screeds to patriotism hide, at heart, a deep distaste for the American form of government.
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