I don't like science fiction

In fact, I might go as far as saying that I hate science fiction. The mere mention of a Hobbit sends me into a semi-catatonic haze. Oh yes, I can anticipate, some of you will argue, this is fantasy not science fiction. However, I know this much—the Hobbit book and its offspring involve many new species from an unknown planet searching for some ring that makes its wearer all-powerful with a hint of evil. This is a literary and film genre in which I cannot personally invest time. Though I will say that I have nothing against lovers of sci-fi/fantasy, in fact I find its followers endearing—my father and brother trained me that well.

Lately reading certain mainstream journalism has been giving me chills, heightening my daily anxiety level and sending me toward the familiar Hobbit-coma-state. To be more specific, I am trying to understand how the theory of "Intelligent Design" seems to be making enough news to find a home in The New York Times almost daily.

I was raised in the Church of Science. When I was small, my family lived in West Virginia. We had a huge yard on all sides of the house and a long driveway that my dad re-tarred every other year. One summer he took two rolls of computer paper from the old dot-matrix printers (the kind with the pages linked together with perforated seams and the edges lined with hole-punches.) We stretched the paper out the length of our very-long driveway and made a time-line of well, time, as we know it. I spent the day drawing shelled animals from a book on fossils and at the very distant end of the dot-matrix scroll, my brother and I began to understand how little time humans had spent on earth.

This week The Times began to cover the lawsuit in progress in Pennsylvania; a debate about whether introducing I.D. in public school science classes simultaneously introduces religion. The article summarized that Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University "projected slides that he said contradicted the core of design theory: that organisms are irreducibly complex. He also denigrated intelligent design as 'a negative argument against evolution,' in which there is no 'positive argument' to test whether an intelligent designer actually exists. If the theory is not testable, he said, it is not science."

It is this simple, Intelligent Design, is not science. I'm not sure if it is even science fiction. Well maybe on a good day it's science fiction with a really shitty underdeveloped plot-line. I suppose in some sense I'm beginning to understand what it feels like for government to make decisions that completely undermine my religious grounding...in the Church of Science. I can't even imagine the confusion that will breed if all glosses of Darwin are preceded with a "keep in mind, you might just go to hell if you support this guy." Maybe we should all just give up and form mini expedition parties in search of Frodo's ring to meld the future of the human race to our own personal whims.