Thank you Ray for not quote mining Richard Dawkins

Thank you, Ray, for not quote mining Richard Dawkins.

Even though Ray will probably never read this, I thought it would be nice to quote mine Richard Dawkins for laughs since it seems Ray went out of his way not to quote mine Richard Dawkins which is appreciated. This seems like something Ray might enjoy as well as the atheists here. :)

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."... Everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)?

What is wrong with the... sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"?

Why are we so sure that intelligent design is... a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? ... It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy?

The argument the ID advocates put... is always of the same character... They offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design... [We also get] a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated... to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

If Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it.

- Richard Dawkins