Posted on 11/10/2005 4:43:24 AM PST by Nicholas Conradin
In an election in Pennsylvania this week, voters tossed out eight members of the Pittsburgh school board who wanted Intelligent Design theory to be taught alongside evolution in school. But should Intelligent Design -- the theory that living organisms were created at least in part by an intelligent designer, not by a blind process of evolution by natural selection -- be taught in public schools? In one way, the answer to this question is simple: if it's a scientific theory, it should; if it's not, it shouldn't (on pain of flaunting the Establishment Clause). The question, however, is whether Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory.
Opponents dismiss ID's scientific credentials, claiming that the theory is too implausible to qualify as scientific. But this reasoning is fallacious: a bad scientific theory is still a scientific theory, just as a bad car is still a car. There may be pedagogical reasons to avoid teaching bad scientific theories in our public schools, but there are no legal ones. The Constitution contains no interdiction on teaching bad theories, or for that matter demonstrably false ones. As long as theory is science and not religion, there is no legal barrier to teaching it.
To make their case, opponents of teaching ID must show not just that the theory is bad, but that it's not science. This raises a much more complicated question: What is science? What distinguishes genuinely scientific theories from non-scientific ones?
In one form or another, the question has bothered scientists and philosophers for centuries. But it was given an explicit formulation only in the 1920s, by Karl Popper, the most important 20th century philosopher of science. Popper called it "the problem of demarcation," because it asked how to demarcate scientific research and distinguish it from other modes of thought (respectable though they may be in their own right).
One thing Popper emphasized was that a theory's status as scientific doesn't depend on its plausibility. The great majority of scientific theories turn out to be false, including such works of genius as Newton's mechanics. Conversely, the story of Adam and Eve may well be pure truth, but if it is, it's not scientific truth, but some other kind of truth.
So what is the mark of genuine science? To attack this question, Popper examined several theories he thought were inherently unscientific but had a vague allure of science about them. His favorites were Marx's theory of history and Freud's theory of human behavior. Both attempted to describe the world without appeal to super-natural phenomena, but yet seem fundamentally different from, say, the theory of relativity or the gene theory.
What Popper noticed was that, in both cases, there was no way to prove to proponents of the theory that they were wrong. Suppose Jim's parents moved around a lot when Jim was a child. If Jim also moves around a lot as an adult, the Freudian explains that this was predictable given the patterns of behavior Jim grew up with. If Jim never moves, the Freudian explains -- with equal confidence -- that this was predictable as a reaction to Jim's unpleasant experiences of a rootless childhood. Either way the Freudian has a ready-made answer and cannot be refuted. Likewise, however much history seemed to diverge from Marx's model, Marxists would always introduce new modifications and roundabout excuses for their theory, never allowing it to be proven false.
Popper concluded that the mark of true science was falsifiability: a theory is genuinely scientific only if it's possible in principle to refute it. This may sound paradoxical, since science is about seeking truth, not falsehood. But Popper showed that it was precisely the willingness to be proven false, the critical mindset of being open to the possibility that you're wrong, that makes for progress toward truth.
What scientists do in designing experiments that test their theories is create conditions under which their theory might be proven false. When a theory passes a sufficient number of such tests, the scientific community starts taking it seriously, and ultimately as plausible.
When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, the first thing he did was to make a concrete prediction: he predicted that a certain planet must exist in such-and-such a place even though it had never been observed before. If it turned out that the planet did not exist, his theory would be refuted. In 1919, 14 years after the advent of Special Relativity, the planet was discovered exactly where he said. The theory survived the test. But the possibility of failing a test -- the willingness to put the theory up for refutation -- was what made it a scientific theory in the first place.
To win in the game of science, a theory must be submitted to many tests and survive all of them without being falsified. But to be even allowed into the game, the theory must be falsifiable in principle: there must be a conceivable experiment that would prove it false.
If we examine ID in this light, it becomes pretty clear that the theory isn't scientific. It is impossible to refute ID, because if an animal shows one characteristic, IDers can explain that the intelligent designer made it this way, and if the animal shows the opposite characteristic, IDers can explain with equal confidence that the designer made it that way. For that matter, it is fully consistent with ID that the supreme intelligence designed the world to evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. Given this, there is no conceivable experiment that can prove ID false.
It is sometimes complained that IDers resemble the Marxist historians who always found a way to modify and reframe their theory so it evades any possible falsification, never offering an experimental procedure by which ID could in principle be falsified. To my mind, this complaint is warranted indeed. But the primary problem is not with the intellectual honesty of IDers, but with the nature of their theory. The theory simply cannot be fashioned to make any potentially falsified predictions, and therefore cannot earn entry into the game of science.
None of this suggests that ID is in fact false. For all I've said, it may well be pure truth. But if it is, it wouldn't be scientific truth, because it isn't scientific at all. As such, we shouldn't allow it into our science classrooms. At least that's what the Constitution says.
The writer teaches philosophy at the University of Arizona.
So, what exactly is the major difference between a chimp and a human that cannot be seen from a skeleton?
"AFAIK there are no statements in the US Constitution speaking to scientific theory. Maybe the author means some other constitution."
congress is authorized by the constitution to promote the advancement of the sciences and the useful arts.
ID is neither science nor a useful art.
that about covers *that* aspect of what the constitution has to say on the matter, no?
Well you won't get any argument from me there.
Sadly, a lot of folks even today are stuck back in the 1600's when it comes to how they try to find the truth about how the world works.
Do you believe that God literally wrote the 10 commandments on tablets of Stone, or is that a fairy tale?
Did God create the heavens and the earth? Did he create the life forms as noted in Genesis, or did they just evolve without any divine intervention?
Of course it does. It posits that everything came into being through the mechanism of enormous amounts of time, endless combinations of chance/probability, and the presence of matter, which is apparently deemed eternal.
How would we know?
Why is there the law of gravity and the law of aerodynamics? Why is there light wave and sound waves? There is no evolutionary reasons for TV, radio, computers, airplanes to work.
Why isn't deformity the rule with life? Shouldn't we see more people and animals with two heads or three eyes or 6 fingers? Evolution precludes that chance gets it right. It is sort of like the wind building a dam. It is possible but usually we find living things like beavers and people build dams.
Yes, they try to classify the remains by species. But that is not the same as classifying something as "ape" or "man."
Are any scientists out there willing to scientifically test the hypothesis, or are they going to take natural selection on faith, as with "human-induced climate change"?You'd think that the ID big-shots would be keen on testing their own 'hypothesis', but they're not. In court Behe said he prefers to spend time with "more fruitful endeavors" (like writing books he can sell, I guess). In other words: they want others to do the job for them.
But hypothetically, if a scientist proves that a feature thought to be irreducibly complex could evolve by natural selection, they could still point to another feature and say "well, THIS one IS irreducibly complex". This happened when the irreducibly complexity of the bacterial flagellum was debunked (part of it has a different functions in other organisms).
I believe what the Bible says. Moses did not come down from Mt. Sinai with metaphors in his hands.
Did God create the heavens and the earth? Did he create the life forms as noted in Genesis, or did they just evolve without any divine intervention?
Yes, God created the heavens and the earth. This is stated clearly in Genesis 1:1. And yes, God created the life forms as noted in Genesis.
Do you believe the Bible, or not?
Now how are those "problems with evolution?" You haven't even addressed anything in the theory yet. Do you honestly know anything about it other than what the creationist sites spout?
Just check out my forum page. :-)
Are you giving up on your original challenge to it?
You cannot have it both ways. You say it teaches that the existing diverse life on earth originated from common ancestry. Very well. By what process, I ask? By a mechanism which no one has ever seen in action, no one can explain, for which no evidence exists, etc...?
If you propose this irrational explanation, why should I or anyone else believe what you say regarding what evolution supposedly does or doesn't say about the origin of life? Change over time is but one facet of the grand lie of evolution.
Where did the common ancestral life forms come from? Did they evolve too? From what?
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