“Since Intelligent Design is a bankrupt idea,” Kyle Bergen asks in the letter column, “why should the University offer a class in it?” Well, I think it’s a great topic, but not for a science class. It belongs in marketing. The ID movement is a brilliant example of how to marketing something worthless.

ID isn’t a science, but it plays one on television. The movement – through a well-funded Seattle “opinion shaping” organization called the Discovery Institute – takes a particularist religious stance, wraps it with a layer of laughably bad science jargon, and then convinces non-scientists that it’s the real scientists who have things wrong. And a lot of good people, some of them legislators and school board members, have been fooled.

The Discovery Institute’s secret marketing plan – which, to their chagrin, became public – describes their intent to take their self-admittedly religious stance and disguise it as purely secular science. To do so, they had to airbrush out their links with the established creationist movement and pretend they were a completely new, completely independent, completely secular organization, despite the fact that they plainly weren’t.

That’s right: a central facet of the Discovery Institute’s whole scheme is to disguise its true nature and intent. This stuff is straight out of “Thank You For Smoking.”

The vast, vast majority of the scientific community opposes ID, for two excellent reasons. Since it depends on supernatural explanations, it inevitably goes outside the realm of the scientific method. And the pseudoscience – the jargon that fools school boards and legislators – is scientific nonsense. That’s why, when objectively examined in the Dover, Pennsylvania courtroom recently, ID came apart at the seams like a Kleenex in the rain.

David Gehrig

Urbana resident