Eugenie Scott

Three of intelligent design’s most damaging constitutional problems: its singling out of evolution education for reform, its explicitly religious background, and it status as unsuccessful science.

In special creationism, living things do not share common ancestry….common ancestry is the fundamental difference between special creationism and evolution.

To be scientific in our era is to search for solely natural explanations.

In the creationist concept of created kind—and the creationist demand to “Show me macroevolution”—we have a classic example of the movable-goalposts strategy for winning. Any amount of evolution that can be demonstrated to the creationists’ satisfaction is effectively by definition microevolution within a kind. No matter how extensive the documented change is, the macroevolution goalposts are always out of reach. The inviolable biblical kind is protected with strategic vagueness.

The first problem with this argument (“teach the controversy”) is that there is no scientific controversy about evolution, and the second problem is that intelligent design doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory.

The proponents of the latest tactical assault on evolution simply invent a new spin to describe their position or find new legal attacks. The rhetoric is designed to cover up the unquestionably religious motivation they have.

To anyone familiar with the history of the antievolution movement, the attacks on evolution are perhaps the most obvious link between ID and earlier forms of creationism.