n Regarding your staff editorial (“Unintelligent Design,” page 8, Oct. 4) I am left with one question. Why do people continuously get Intelligent Design so incredibly wrong? If one reads Darwin’s Black Box, the only (and I cannot express this enough), only legitimate book regarding the subject, one can see that the argument for Intelligent Design is not based in religion, Christian conservatism, family values or anything like that.

The argument is as follows: If there are irreducibly complex organisms (the author proposes the intricacies of singular cellular structure, or functions like blood clotting) that exist on earth, then Darwinian evolution, having the presumption of scientific materialism, cannot sufficiently explain the phenomena and thus we are left with skepticism. Now, this argument is a very serious problem for science if the premise is true. However, Intelligent Design considers rethinking the point about the presupposition of materialism.

This is not talking about God, magic or his holiness the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It is the presumption of skepticism, and an evaluation of all the possible options of what to do in the face of skepticism, that’s all. The most frustrating thing about this, however, is that the proponents of Intelligent Design do not want to teach this. Rather they want to teach about God, magic and flying pasta monsters. So any skeptic, like myself, is left with nothing but frustration, because both sides insist on having the wrong argument.

Matthew Schoolfield GRS ’06