reason number 4,234,197 why i'm never moving back to the south...

selections from an opinion article appearing in friday's the mississippi press, my hometown's newspaper:

No room for intelligence in design debate

Friday, August 19, 2005

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It is offensive that the "theory of evolution" has become "evolution" despite the scientific requirement that facts must be reproducible in a laboratory. The "theory of relativity" is still called a theory, for example, because it hasn't been physically proven yet. But regardless of the lack of scientific proof for the theory of evolution, it is taught as gospel in classrooms across the nation.

Open hostility to religion is just as dangerous as state-sponsored religious teaching. In an interesting twist, the Louisiana ACLU is currently fighting a school board's prayer at the opening of each meeting.

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The other danger here is that a segment of the scientific community is now holding instruction hostage to only one unprovable theory and using threats to limit thought. Science isn't supposed to work that way; it should be a world of exploration, not limitation.

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Sadly, hostility to religion is driving otherwise intelligent people to do thuggish and unintelligent things. Their animosity is supposedly veiled by the notion that they are browbeating people for the right reasons. But it's all in the interest of spreading one gospel and excluding even the notion of another.

It's amazing that people think amoebas evolved into fish and that fish evolved into lizards and lizards evolved into rats and rats evolved into monkeys and monkeys evolved into people. It's amazing because it hasn't been proven and some folks are holding so tightly to the theory.

In the end, some scientists are expressing a faith rivaled only by the religious conviction they so casually dismiss and deride. But without the all-essential PROOF, they shouldn't be able to spread theirs without different points of view presented simultaneously.

um, wha? i like the use of the word "gospel" in this article. it really drives the whole constitutional notion of separation of church and state home.

as far as the necessity of proof, what proof do the intelligent design folks have?