On Intelligent Design

A US court recently ruled that public schools in some town or other in Pennsylvania may not use science classes to teach the account of the universe known as Intelligent Design, and in specific may not teach Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinism.

I have no desire to associate myself with the people behind the Intelligent Design movement. Nevertheless, I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being. As long as there is not one of us who has the faintest idea of how to go about constructing a housefly from scratch, how can we disparage as intellectually naive the conclusion that the housefly must have been put together by an intelligence of a higher order than our own? If anyone in the picture is naive, it is the person who elevates the operating rules of Western science into epistemological axioms, arguing that what cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true (or, to use the more timid word preferred by science, valid) cannot be true (valid), not just by the standard of truth (validity) use by practitioners of science but by any standard that counts.

Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee