Let students decide fate

Unless someone invents a time machine soon, academic institutions should stop teaching the theory of evolution as the only explanation for the origin of life. \nWithout time travel, neither intelligent design theory nor evolution theory concerning the origin of life can be empirically disproved or tested. The theory of evolution, although it seems just harmless speculation, has serious flaws that can have negative consequences if taught as the only theory. \nIntelligent design, unlike its predecessor creationism, which referenced the Bible as a source of data, does not involve faith in a deity. Intelligent design doesn't even offer suggestion for who started this whole thing we call life. It just acknowledges the evidence for design and works from there. It removes the string of unrealistic assumptions that evolutionists use to support their theory and says that someone, not chance, began this complex world. \nEvolutionists are in a bind as more and more research reveals the complexity of living beings, such as DNA or the human brain. Intelligent design theorists realize the surmounting scientific evidence for "irreducible complexity" or "specified complexity" in our living world can only be attributed to an intelligent designer. \nIntelligent design, then, seems legitimate -- but is evolution also a scientific theory?\nCredible science involves analyzing phenomena and then postulating a supporting theory. Evolutionists first formed a theory and are now scrambling to find supporting evidence. Clearly, then, evolutionists are operating with a bias; they are not in a position to dub intelligent design as unscientific. Real science also involves altering a theory to match new evidence. Evolutionists, though, fervently maintain their fairytale theory despite new evidence of intelligent design and the lack of finding evidence to support evolution (not even one fossil record). Darwinists have excluded reason from their "science," making evolution just another god for them to chase. \nEvolution theory also leads science into a gravely different worldview, disturbing basic legal and political rights. According to Jay Richards, who is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute\'s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle, "If we are nothing more than the sum of chance, impersonal law and environment, then we are not free and responsible individuals, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights," he said on www.discovery.org. "Because we are not free, we are not responsible; so, paradoxically, we can do whatever we 'want.'"\nUnder the assumption that we all have rights endowed by a creator, we are all friends. Under the hierarchy of Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest competition, we are all enemies looking out for number one. This selfish competing attitude has detrimental effects on human cooperation.\nAlthough it may stimulate theological questions, intelligent design theory is not a religious theory and poses no threat to those who fear religious indoctrination in the classroom. Darwinists' real concern lies in the social consequence of a nation who believes there is a higher order of things other than nature. According to Darwinists, a national belief in a divine creator might have new implications for public policy regarding abortion, sexual promiscuity, and homosexuality, for example. That may be true.\nWhether true or false, neither evolution theory nor intelligent design can be tested without time travel. Students should therefore be presented with both theories and decide for themselves from the real evidence available whether they want to attribute the beginnings of life to the chance of nature or the design of a creator.