Last week's issue of the New University featured an opinion piece titled "Intelligent Design Has No Place in Public Schools." Like myself, the author of the article is an ICS major (in fact, I believe he and I were in the same C++ class), so he is obviously intelligent . However, his main argument is not based on science; rather, it is based on an assumption that ID is inextricably linked to religion:

The problem of teaching intelligent design is not that it is scientifically unsupported. Rather, it inevitably favors the unofficial religion of the United States: Christianity. Stating that the universe was intelligently created crosses the line that separates church and state.

What he does not realize is that ID actually abstracts out religion from the discussion by simply asking whether or not there are detectible artifacts of design in nature. Software engineers are familiar with the principles of abstraction, modularization, and separation of concerns. ID is a separate concern from creationism. ID asks "Is there design?" while creationism goes further and attempts to answer "Who is the designer?" It is important to note that there are many non-Christians, like Antony Flew and David Berlinski, who support ID on scientific grounds.

The article also brings in the tired Flying Spaghetti Monster. But since the author and I are both computer science majors, the only FSMs we should be worrying about are the finite state machines that we have to draw for ICS 142 (Compilers) or 151 (Digital Logic Design).