After a long discussion about intelligent design and evolution while dining at the only good American restaurant in Scotland, The Filling Station, I ran across a splendid bit of question-raising at LeanLeft, where an "Alternative Intelligent Design Theory" has been proposed which basically posits that when man became aware of the world outside of his cave, he noticed the stars, and being unable to reach them, decided a greater power put them there. Later on, religions and deities were further developed to maintain order in societies.

I find it a fascinating take, which fits with the author's statement that the ability to discuss and question notions such as these in schools is important for furthering education. While I still believe that evolution is the only purely scientific theory of substance, meaning that it should remain the primary source in science courses, which rarely deal with theory (esp. at the high school level), I would love to see schools offering a sort of history of religions course that questions belief systems and challenges theories such as evolution by discussin non-scientific theories like intelligent design. As Prof. David Helfand of Columbia University has noted, intelligent design theory, in its more basic "God created the world" form, is not scientific because it cannot be proven right or wrong, which is what scientists like him take as a basic tenet of science, the ability to set boundaries on what is known and what is unknown.

The link to the lean left article is below: