The Kansas School Board has opened a bag of worms. Most schools instruct the theory of Evolution in their classrooms -- the current accepted thinking how humans evolved from apes, and how the Neanderthals fit in. They may or may not touch on Creationism (religious) teachings on how the Earth was made.

I attended a Catholic School, and was presented with both. I personally believe that Evolution is accurate, but with a touch of God's grace and luck.

Anyways, the Kansas School Board is considering another approach to evolution using theories of "Intelligent Design". According to Wikipedia, Intelligent Design (ID) is: "Intelligent Design (or ID) is the controversial assertion promoted by a movement denominated by the same name, that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent. Most ID advocates state that their focus is on detecting evidence of design in nature, without regard to who or what the designer might be."

Another definition of ID is from Access Research Network: ID is the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by a pre-existing intelligence.

I see ID as a really weird way of looking at the world around us. I believe there is life on other planets besides Earth, but do not think that other life has influenced our natural upbringing. We have let ideas of other life forms enter our culture -- look at all the science fiction movies and novels, and those types of entertainment may have certainly inspired creation of technologies, but I do not think they have affected the biological process of evolving from apes into humans.

To see how out-of-this-world the ID theorists have gone, one may look at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for a really solid discussion on how absurd some of this ID stuff is.

For further reading, check these links out:

http://www.venganza.org (Flying Spaghetti Monster)
http://www.arn.org (FAQ on Intelligent Design, lots of read-me articles)

I am most curious on what you guys think of this.

Christian