Not just bad science

An article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer (registration required) looks at the Intelligent Design debate going on to its west from a less common perspective: that it makes for bad theology too.

[U. Penn. anatomy professor Peter] Dodson, who has lectured on the relationship between religion and science, said the intelligent-design argument falls into an old philosophical notion called "God of the gaps" - the search for signs of the supernatural in otherwise unexplainable natural phenomena.
. . .
The trouble with this as theology is that when science fills these gaps in, Dodson said, it can squeeze the role of God out. Just as physics later found natural explanations for what Newton attributed to God's outreach, so biology may more fully explain complex cellular machinery in the future.

Those who seem most insistant on forcing their religion on the masses seem also to be those whose grounding in it is the most fragile...