I have been mildly tolerant of the whole Intelligent Design movement under the theory that, as long as religious people accept the principles of evolution, I don’t care if they believe the fundamental rules were designed by God. In fact, being an agnostic, I kind of think of God that way. The Maker of Rules.
The creationism thing does seem to be getting more aggressive, however. There was a movie out last summer called Expelled , which seems to be a rather mean spirited attack on science, biological science anyway. I’ve not been happy with some of this, and I’m not the only one. In 2005, there was a full scale trial on the merits of Intelligent Design and the judge is interviewed here in a very nice article and summary of the case.
The conclusion is that Intelligent Design, rather than a way to link a Creator with the evolution of life, is just creationism in a new package. It is extremely cynical for people as intelligent as Ben Stein to get mixed up in this and I would very strongly advise the Republican party to keep this stuff at arm’s length. It came up a bit with Sarah Palin’s nomination although it seems that she did NOT advocate creationism in the classroom. She did suggest that it could be mentioned. Alaska has a lot of fundamentalist families and I can see where that was an attempt at compromise.