why limbo is crowded

A while ago I forwarded to students in my sf class a news article about evolution not being taught in US public schools. We’d been talking about The Time Machine and the influence of evolutionary theory on H.G.Wells’s text. I also couldn’t resist throwing in a link to some textbook stickers made in response to the ones briefly applied to Georgia science texts. Anyway, I was thinking the sf students would be sympathetic to the whole science thing. But as it turns out some of them, at least, are more into the fiction side of sf. The only student to actually respond to the email told me he was shocked, shocked about the failure to teach evolution, but that he himself believed in intelligent design.

Argh. I mean, really. It’s creationism tarted up as science. Argh. Current events make me feel less and less articulate. But at least the reality-based community still has some members not as dumbfounded as I feel. A piece on the unintelligence of "intelligent design" in the Sunday NYTimes points out how badly designed many biological systems are. For instance, the human reproductive system:

Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

Okay, enough. I have way too much work to do to be venting here about this stuff.

But I mean, really. Argh.