George Will has a message for Rep. Bosma

(h/t Balloon Juice) — George Will has a message that Rep. Bosma and others who seek to introduce Intelligent Design into our school science classes would do well to heed.

he storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking reelection were defeated. This expressed the community’s wholesome exasperation with the board’s campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of “intelligent design” theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution “is not a fact.”

But it is. And President Bush’s straddle on that subject—“both sides” should be taught—although intended to be anodyne, probably was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives. Dover’s insurrection occurred as Kansas’s Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6 to 4 to redefine science. The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition of science these words: “a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena.”

“It does me no injury,” said Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.

I think there is a certain fanatical group of Christians who think that teaching evolution to our kids is the root of moral decay in today’s society; apparently harkening back to some mythical past when “moral decay” wasn’t proclaimed a dire problem by one blowhard or another. Those folks will certainly reward Bosma and his fellow travellers if they put on a good show of supporting the legislation only to have it fail in the end, darn it. I think most folks in our society like their religion, but they don’t think too hard about it. They like their science, but they don’t think too hard about it. They like fairness, so they generally nod when someone says “shouldn’t all ideas be given a fair hearing?” But, when push comes to shove, and they really have to think about it, they know that the scientific method is a pretty good way of figuring out how the world works. And if someone to ask them whether we ought to choose one of science or faith to figure out how the world works, most are going to say that science is the more practical approach. Don’t get me wrong, most would rather not choose. And most the time, you don’t have to. Religion addresses quite a bit that science does not, and vice versa. But, when you get folks trying to expand science to include more than, “a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena,” you’re asking them to essentially abandon science in favor of non-science. And that’s not something with which your average, practical, product-of-the-Enlightenment-whether-they-know-it-or-not American citizen is going to be comfortable.