Intelligent Design?

I'm watching a show on PBS (Nova) about intelligent design and a lawsuite that revolved around it. And the only things I can take away from it is that, not only is it not intelligent, but that its proponents show a startling lack of faith. After all, it takes much more faith to believe that God works things out in his own way and time than it does to simply conscribe things you don't fully understand and can't explain to the junk heap.

It's certainly a simpler explanation that some higher being poofed the entire universe into being 4000 years ago than to argue that our universe is the product of billions of years of development. Most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around a concept like "billions of years." And I am among them.

The more complicated explanation, that life developed on Earth by way of an infinitely enormous number of mutations that favored one creature over the other, is more difficult to try to understand. Humans, by their very nature as temporal creatures with limited life spans, will never be able to fully comprehend the concept of infinity.

Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or fully understood. Faith requires us to accept things that we cannot grasp the totality of because all reasonable evidence points at them.

Faith and science have little to do with each other, except where accepting that the science one doesn't understand is an accurate explanation for a phenomena that we cannot comprehend fully.

Intelligent design is faith masquerading as science, and not particularly good faith, at that. It requires that you constrict God to a little box. It doesn't allow for the truly amazing and awe-inspiring: that we got here from where the whole process started.

Faith and science need not be enemies or even uneasy bed-fellows. They are not mutually exclusive and can coexist in peace.

In fact, science can reinforce faith, if you let it. If you think about how incredibly complicated our universe is, you should be awed. And many scientific laws and principles are so elegant that, if you understand them, reinforce the idea of some power we don't understand and will never fully comprehend.

That's faith, baby.