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.
You Hellbound spawn of evilutionary materialism!
Antitrust is just a theory! Didn't Hitler and Stalin use anti-trust?!! It takes more faith to believe in antitrust than it does to....
(do I even need sarcasm tags? lol)
lol!
People entering a work contract seldom agree that they can be beaten to death.
People entering a work contract seldom agree that they can be beaten to death.
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Cite?
"People entering a work contract seldom agree that they can be beaten to death." (js1138)
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"Cite?"
Does he really need a cite for that?
Nice post number. Here's your citation.
When a slave owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner's property. (Exod. 21:20-21)
The Bible does not teach that the earth itself is young, necessarily. It does teach that man has been on the planet for at least 6000 years. Genesis 1:1 states that God created the heavens and the earth. The very next verse, Genesis 1:2, indicates that the earth had become "waste and void" -- in other words, a wreck and a ruin. Something happened to the original earth that God made. God Himself did not create the earth waste and void (Isaiah 45:18). How long ago did God create the earth? The Bible does not say. What happened to the earth? The Bible gives us hints that the rebellion of Lucifer and probably a third of the angels was the cause for God's judgement and the subsequent catastrophic events that took place. How long did it remain in its wrecked state? Again, we are not told. We are simply told that at some point God moved to remake the earth, and that He did so in 6 days.
I'm just curious why people receive eternal damnation for disbelieving the six days of creation, but remain blissfully ignorant of the rules for acquiring and beating their slaves.
It is good to know that you accept the 10 commandments as being "God's Word." Now for the test. Do you really believe the 10 Commandments are "God's word"?
If so, then you must believe that "IN SIX DAYS" God "made the heavens and the earth and all that in them is."
Does that statement cause you any problem?
"BD, it seems that comment was directed at you."
Couldn't be. He said creationists and I am ignorant of the
meaning of that term.
Are you the Bible enforcer?
What's with all the insistence that we adopt *your* interpretation?
I'm not insisting on anything. If you don't believe my interpretation, then give me yours. Instead what you are doing is casting doubt upon the veracity of God's word. IMO that is a dangerous thing to do. Better to err on the side of caution than to accuse the Almighty of spreading falsehoods.
Did not God himself write the words on the tablets of stone? Or did Moses make up all that malarkey simply to appease and subjugate the ignorant Israelites?
I hear the sound of someone desparately googling for a loophole. It doesn't work. During thos periods when Christians owned slaves they justified it with scripture, both Old and New Testament.
Several of the American Founders -- jefferson, Franklin, Payne -- wrote of their admiration of Quakers for their stand against slavery.
I find it interesting that the Christian denomination that rejects doctrine and creed was the first to notice the evils of slavery. I would say there is a correlation between fundamentalism and acceptance of slavery. Certainly the Muslims are having a hard time giving it up.
I think it is very plausible to believe that some elements of the Bible might be true, others might be parable, and still others might have been made up by any number of the men who wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the Bible.
The "either it's all true or it's all a lie" approach you seem to be advocating is odd to me, considering that at least some of it is acknowledged to be a parable.
God does not condone sin, but that doesn't stop Him from giving numerous ways for the Israelites to deal with it. He does not condone slavery, but it exists, as sin does, in man's societies. Furthermore He set aside rules and years in which all slaves had to be freed.
"How can I trust someone who only behaves because he is frightened of a God that I don't believe in? What if you guys get a crisis of faith?"
If we had a crisis of faith then we would be no different than you, trusting ourselves as god, and that is more frightening than belief in the God of the scriptures who is open and honest about who He is and what He requires and the accounting that will last for eternity.
Did not God himself write the words on the tablets of stone?
Lol, a great historian and thinker
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