flying spaghetti monsters

Some time back, I wrote that I was reading Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator . This is a survey book of many fields of scientific research that explore the claims of the Intelligent Design movement. The basic premise is that while not discounting natural selection and adaptive mutation, the scientific conditions necessary for randomly creating life as we know it are so infitesimally small that there must be a superior intelligent agent at work to set the first building blocks of life in place.

I'm not about to do a review of the book, but I will summarise to say that the book makes a compelling case for intelligent design. And while the jury is still out on whether it is a better theory than evolution, it certainly cannot be discounted as a possibility. So now I'd like to explore the other side of the debate. Coincidentally, there has been a great deal of hoo-haa in the US recently about whether or not it should be taught in schools as a competing theory to evolution (went to the Technorati top ten for a while), so I'm sure there must be lots of information on the net, if only I could take the time to find it.

I'd like to invite anyone who surfs by to leave a comment and link to any interesting articles on this. Here is a really good article to start off with from the IHT.

Of course, we cannot misconstrue Intelligent Design to directly imply the truth of any single religion. In fact, there are at least two explanations that have been gathering large followings that support intelligent design as well. The first is FSM and for the second, you'll have to go read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.