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Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

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Originally posted by filthy

Heh, ID is to science as Chick tracts are to literature.

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Originally posted by Cuneiformist

An interesting point was made by a reader over at [url="http://www.americablog.org]AMERICABlog[/url]. By asserting that by rejecting ID, the Dover people are rejecting God, doesn't that strongly link ID and (Christian) religion? I mean, if we're going to posit that ID is just another scientific way to view the diversity of life on earth, then why should the Christian God care?

Indeed...

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It's possible that a perjury charge may be on the horizon for at least one witness.

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Originally posted by Chippewa

CNN can sometimes be a bit milquetoast about stories like this, but not their Jack Cafferty, who was quite sussinct in his opinion of Pat Robertson. After reading this story he looked up and said someting like: "Somebody get a net."

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"It shows he's evolving into a crankier fringe character than we expected," said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "God has better things to do than worry about the outcome of a school board election."

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No man of God is perfect, Pat Robertson included. All have their various weaknesses and peculiararities. But that doesn't mean God doesn't speak through them to issue dire warnings and calls to repentance.

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The teaching of intelligent design is neither faith-based, nor does it put religion in the classroom as its critics have suggested. In a recent address given to The Fellowship of Christians at Bucknell University, Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention explained that the theory of "Intelligent Design" was initiated by scientists, biochemists, physicists, and mathematicians, "whose research led them to conclude that the irreducible complexity of life can best be explained by the presence of an intelligent designer as opposed to nothing plus chance plus time equals nothing." "Their case," added Land, "is not based on the Bible or religion; it is based on scientific evidence...I am not saying that these scientist have proved that the intelligent designer was God...that is a faith affirmation. What they have done is to expose the scientifically unsatisfactory explanation that is the evolutionary theory of the origins of the universe."

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Still, the citizens of Dover would have none of it. Nothing that might even suggest God, the Bible, or faith should be allowed, they said. Never mind intelligent design wasn't meant to do that; we just don't want any possibility God could be a factor in our origins insinuated to our children via the science curriculum of our public schools. Though it takes more faith to believe in the Darwinian evolutionary theory of the universe's origins than it does to propose there could be an intelligent designer behind it all, we opt to listen only to the secular, scientific priests of our day and worship at the altar of naturalistic evolutionary orthodoxy. Any school board member representing the prospect of some other point of view shall not be permitted to keep their post.

Yes, that is in essence an official rejection of God. It's not to say that there are no righteous people in Dover. It doesn't mean that no good lies within its borders. But it does pose the question: What right does Dover have to look to God and yet deny Him by repudiating in an election those that would represent the slightest possibility of an acknowledgment of Him? Did not Christ articulate the principle when he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"? (Matthew 25:40)

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'Intelligent Design' Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, November 18, 2005; Page A23

Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous: that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.

Newton's religion was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and a member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," James Gleick wrote in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation -- understanding the workings of the universe -- as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.

Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.

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