From CNN:

TOPEKA, Kansas (Reuters) — Evolution is going on trial in Kansas.

Eighty years after a famed courtroom battle in Tennessee pitted religious beliefs about the origins of life against the theories of British scientist Charles Darwin, Kansas is holding its own hearings on what school children should be taught about how life on Earth began.

The Kansas Board of Education has scheduled six days of courtroom-style hearings to begin Thursday in Topeka. More than two dozen witnesses will give testimony and be subject to cross-examination, with the majority expected to argue against teaching evolution…

“I feel like I’m in a time warp here,” said Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray who has agreed to defend evolution as valid science. “To debate evolution is similar to debating whether the Earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.”

Irigonegaray’s opponent will be attorney John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, a Kansas organization that argues the Earth was created through intentional design rather than random organism evolution…

“We’re not against evolution,” said Calvert. “But there is a lot of evidence that suggests that life is the product of intelligence. I think it is inappropriate for the state to prejudge the question whether we are the product of design or just an occurrence.”

I rarely have “insights.” They’re time-consuming, for one thing. They can’t stand on their own, either - once you have one, it’s useless until you persuade a bunch of people that it’s right. This takes even more time, and while you’re explaining yourself you are left vulnerable to quips and jabs by people who aren’t burdened by insight. People like me.

So if this morning I happened to have an insight that explained the exact philosophical nexus between the Christian Right, the neo-cons, and the rank-and-file of the anti-judge movement… the wisest course of action would be to ignore it until it went away.

But I’ve got a free hour before a messenger arrives with my next bundle of Exciting Television Work, so I’ll share:

It all comes down to “proving a negative.” Logically speaking, you can’t. As I’ve noted before, if I asserted that the universe was created by a gigantic, multidimensional lobster, you wouldn’t be able to prove me wrong. Even if you produced a handsomely-bound billion-year-old tome entitled “How I Did It, by God Himself” which featured a dust-jacket photo of the bearded, white-haired Deity in a contemplative pose and several flattering blurbs from other celestial beings (like “This guy really did it - Vishnu,” and “Makes me wish I’d written it - a real page-turner! - Lucifer”), even then I could ask you to prove that this “God” fella wasn’t Himself created by a gigantic multidimensional lobster, and we’d be back to square one.

That’s why science, logic, and our judicial system are engineered so that you never have to prove a negative. And that’s the philosophical and rhetorical widget that the religious and secular camps of conservative America have united behind. I think it was best summed up by noted philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, on the subject of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction:

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

That’s true, of course, but only because “evidence of absence” is a logical impossibility when it comes to the existence of god or WMD’s in Iraq or deep thoughts going on inside of Terri Schiavo’s head or celestial crustaceans. That’s why real-world pursuits have built-in protections like Occam’s Razor and justice’s axiomatic “innocent until proven guilty.”

Remove those, and you get… well, look around.

The Intelligent Design game, which we’re about to see played out in that Kansas courtroom, works something like this: An I.D. guy points at some part of a plant or animal and says, “Whoa! Look at that thing! That’s really amazingly complicated! Where in the fossil record or in your tales of ‘evolution’ is there anything that shows that this incredibly complex thing could’ve come about by ‘natural selection?’ Huh? Where?”

If a fossil is subsequently discovered or a suitable explanation is provided, the minds behind Intelligent Design then say, “Okay, so how about this thing over here, then? Look at this! Now this is truly a mind-bogglingly complicated thingie right over here, isn’t it? Where in the fossil records or…”

The above might seem like an oversimplification. I kind of wish that it was.

So who are the guardians of the simple principle that you can’t keep a ball in the air indefinitely unless there’s a table underneath it? I can think of three. The scientific community, the media, and the judiciary.

What do those three institutions have in common? I’ll give you a hint: It rhymes with “shmarget of the gronservative poovement.”

The world’s an imperfect place, as anyone who’s ever carried a ballpoint pen in their pocket can tell you. Real-world systems are always open-ended and incomplete. In fact, the fact that this is a fact is a mathematically provable fact. It took a few thousand years to overcome this, plug up the holes, and build a society that could use words like “truth” and “justice” and really feel like they knew what they were talking about. It’s only taking a decade or two to tear it down, and the only tool it seems to require is the liberal use of the word “liberal.”

Somewhere on a hillside of such unimaginable size that it is dotted with “dandelions” that are in fact galaxies, stands a gargantuan, omnipotent lobster. The light of a billion suns sparkles off his benevolent thorax, and his cosmic antennae receive the information from a trillion worlds at speeds that make “light” look like the crosstown local. He is looking at us right now, and if you were to look closely you’d see that a single tear is currently dropping from one all-loving eyestalk.

Prove that it’s not.