It seems the Florida legislature hasn’t evolved since I left

You gotta love the Florida legislature.
It’s the kind of legislature that generates stories simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. Like the champion of Gulf of Mexico drilling who asserted that if the oil runs out, God will make more.
Given that it’s a right-wing body, currently running even more to the right, it’s no surprise that we have legislators pushing, once again, to teach creationism and intelligent design in schools. Stephen Wise, one of the legislators, raises such time-honored questions as well, if we evolved from apes, why do apes exist? And why wouldn’t anyone want to present both theories and let students compare them?
I know if any of you reading this are creationists, I’m unlikely to sway you. For those of you who are not and want to know why the creationist/ID side is dead wrong, here’s some basics.
•The reason we don’t present both theories is that ID isn’t a theory. A theory is testable; it enables you to say “If X is true, the theory is true; if X isn’t true, the theory is false.” With evolution, rabbit fossils in precambrian rocks, as one scientist put it, would end the whole enterprise.
With creationism, there’s nothing: 150 years of evidence haven’t convinced creationists to budge. Many creationists openly acknowledge that nothing will ever convince them the Bible account is wrong because, well, it’s the Bible account. Which they’re pefectly entitled to believe, but faith isn’t science.
As for ID, its supporters, such as biochemist Michael Behe, have made a number of testable claims: ID must be true because it’s impossible for biological process X, Y and Z to have evolved. Behe’s claims have been demolished—scientists have found possible evolutionary processes for the unevolvable examples—but the ID response is “Well, nobody’s explained this process yet, have they?”
As long as there’s any evolutionary pathway that hasn’t been identified, they’ll keep this up. Because as some of its advocates, such as the Discovery Institute, have admitted, the issue is establishing the primacy of Christianity over facts, reason or science, not the truth of evolution per se.
Behe, by the way, has admitted that the same standards he uses to class ID as a theory would make astrology a scientific theory.
If creationists/IDers really wanted to get their beliefs into the classroom, it would be simple. Make some serious predictions. Do some research. Find scientific proof. Except there isn’t any, and I suspect most anti-evolution activists know it. So instead, they make it a political issue and spend their money on lobbying instead of science. They talk about scientists being afraid of an honest debate to distract the public from the fact that the debate’s been going on for 150 years, and they’ve lost every round. They can’t win in science, so they fight in the field of public opinion.
As for Wise’s question, we didn’t evolve from apes—and in point of fact, the prehumans we evolved from are indeed no longer around. Not that it would disprove evolution if they did: The fact that one branch of an animal line develops and evolves doesn’t mean that all members of that species do the same.
For some people, I know, the issue is more existential: If we’re evolved rather than created, life is meaningless and God has no plan for us. But the truth is, we’re all the result of one random event—a random sperm meeting a random egg—and that doesn’t prevent God having plans or designs for us.
Evolution is just a few million more random events; I think God can handle it.