In today's Chron (emphasis mine)...
Intelligent design is not science. It is not even a field of study. It is a belief system wrapped up in "scientific" language. Scientists have been studying the origin and nature of life on earth for at least 4,000 years. In that time, they have come up with a number of hypotheses. Then new evidence has been turned up, and the old hypotheses have been discarded, often reluctantly.
Scientists, like all humans, really hate to discard ideas that they have defended for years. The history of science is a history of unhappy people reluctantly changing their minds. Imagine the person who first realized that the sun was just another star. Terrible, terrible news. It's the universe saying, "You're not special."
The intelligent design people have never suffered such a crisis. They have never changed their minds based on new evidence. That's because they started with the desired results and worked backward.
Scientists have taken the time to study all forms of life -- mosses, flatworms, slime molds, fruit flies, sharks. What they have learned has been incorporated into the body of knowledge and sometimes has resulted in a change of assumptions.
The intelligent design people don't do mosses. They don't spend 17 years in a laboratory with a glass case full of earthworms. They are indifferent to the symbiotic relationships that create lichen. The intelligent design people are not interested in studying; they are interested in preaching. They do not present papers; they present sermons.
It's not an equal struggle. It's the world scientific community against a few guys with some Web sites and a lot of political clout.
Science has been wrong before -- the intelligent design people will stress that. Science cannot explain this bit or that bit. And it is true, science has been wrong, and science does not have all the answers. But here's the thing: In all the instances when science has been wrong and has had to change its mind to accommodate new data, never once has it done so because it failed to account for the intervention of a supernatural entity. Not once.
