Where Does Obama Stand on I.D.?

Ironically, up until now, I never bothered to think about it. I just assumed he would regurgitate the old cliche that "there's no conflict between faith and science," but since young people aren't mentally equipped to make their own own judgment, discussion about the weakness of Evolutionary Theory should be kept out of the classroom. And sure enough - while doing research for my previous post - I found this news story from last year...

The York Daily Record (known for its coverage of the Dover ID trial) interviews Barack Obama:

Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design. What's your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?

A: "I'm a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there's a difference between science and faith. That doesn't make faith any less important than science. It just means they're two different things. And I think it's a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don't hold up to scientific inquiry."

This fills a hole in our knowledge of Sen. Obama's views. In January, Ron Bailey summarized the positions of the Presidential candidates for Reason, and found:

An extensive search could find no explicit statement on evolution from Democratic frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). In June 2006, Obama gave a keynote talk at a Sojourners conference in which he noted, "Substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution." Obama declared in that speech that the single biggest political gap in America was "between those who attend church regularly and those who don't." He then excoriated "conservative leaders" for exploiting this gap by suggesting that "religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design." At the very least, this implies that Obama believes intelligent design is unnecessarily divisive.