Intelligent Design should not be taught as science.

Hmm. I have a theory that every species originated from a refrigerator placed in Africa. Every species that has ever existed just crawled right out of the refrigerator. I will call it Causal Fridge theory. Should that be taught in textbooks? In public schools? No. It's a crackpot theory I just made up! Of course not! It has no basis in science. BUT, it can't be proved wrong. You cannot prove that to be wrong. I may not be able to prove it right, but you also can't prove it wrong." Well, okay, I guess some random theories don't deserve to be taught. However, the idea of intelligent design is one that has been with humanity for many millennia. Macroevolution is not set in stone, and neither is intelligent design. Furthermore, the concept of intelligent design is present in nearly every religion on Earth, and many scientists are also religious. Intelligent design is far from a "crackpot theory". "ID may not be able to be proved wrong, but that has nothing to do with its scientific merits. In fact, it has NO scientific merits. It is not based in science and therefore, cannot be taught as science." No scientific merits? How about the creation of life? Evolution does not explain how life suddenly appeared in the first place. Intelligent design DOES. "You sidestepped my criticism that it is religiously motivated. It very much is and you seem to actually agree with that by saying 'People have used the Bible to predict the time of the beginning of the world to the very hour.' Firstly, the predicted time from the Bible is that life started 6000 years ago. 6000. How old is the earth again? That's ridiculously recent and entirely inaccurate." And what is the proof that 6000 years is incorrect? We've used scientific tests to predict an age of 4.5 billion years, but trying to test things that happened years ago has its flaws. Here is an excerpt from Phil Phillip's "Dinosaurs, the Bible, Barney, and Beyond": "The Age of Dinosaurs supposedly spanned the length and breadth of the Mesozoic Era. That era is divided by evolution scientists into three major periods.... Where did those periods and dates originate? In the 1700's, James Hutton and Charles Lyell proposed a system of life development that "predated" known history. The Geologic Column or Geologic Time Scale was produced by Lyell, who also wrote the 'Antiquity of Man', a book in which he conjectured that man as a species was much older than believed at the time. Lyell's system of geological dating was based on what he observed in a nearby formation that showed layers of rocks in stratas. The DATES (such as 225 million years ago) were placed on the column by Lyell as a guess! He did not have evidence to back up his dating on the column, other than his own theory of 'uniformationarianism' that suggested that the earth has experienced a uniform rate of volcanic activity over time, that the earth's atmosphere has remained constant, and that the chemical proportions of the earth have remained the same from the beginning of time to the present. Many people have come to regard the Geological Column as fact. From its outset and remaining to this day, it is a theory." (89-90) Another excerpt: "Fossils are dated usually by the radiometric dating of the ROCKS immediately surrounding those life forms. Thus, material supposedly takes on the age in which it was encapsulated. Lava taken from a volcano known to have erupted in the period 1800-1801, was dated as being millions of years old. Any creatures "captured" in such a lava flow, however, are not necessarily that old! CARBON DATING. A different form of dating is used to date organic material. The assumption has been made that all living things contain carbon-14. By measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a fairly elaborate formula, scientists measure the 'half-life' of an organism. The method hinges on one basic principle: carbon-14 has remained constant in the earth's atmosphere for the entire history of the earth. That simply isn't true. Scientists have found trees that were apparently alive during a comet shower. The carbon-14 level in those trees doubled in one year. Solar flares also change the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. The assumption is also made that the initial ration of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in plants and animals has always been similar to what it is today. Maybe not. The main thing to know, however, is that this method is not always accurate. Using this method, freshly killed seals have been dated to be 1300 years old. LIVE mollusks have been dated as being 2300 years old!" (90-91)" These are examples of how what we believe to be fact is mostly theory, including the age of the earth. I have not conceded that ID is the Bible in disguise. It is merely a popular theory of life's existence that all religions besides atheism and maybe a few others believe. The schools don't have to teach ID as fact; they can teach it as yet another theory in addition to the many we already have. Do vestigial organs really need to have a reason of existence? Maybe ID just used the same "floor plan" in an altered way for each organism. Language distribution, and people distribution, is in the story of the Tower of Babel. The flood is the story of Noah's Ark. "Evolution explains all of these things quite easily and is a very comprehensive scientific theory. It IS science. ID is not. It is a thinly veiled religious doctrine that has been forced upon public schools in the hope that this faux-science will keep children from believing in evolution." ID is not being "forced upon" children to keep them from learning evolution. It is being presented as an alternate theory. Science includes theories, and ID is one of them. It gives an explanation for the origin of life. Evolution apparently does not have such an explanation. Explanations are apparently a form of science. Thus, ID is valid science.