| Intelligent design not designed intelligently |
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| Friday, 18 August 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The race between Sally Cauble and Connie Morris is going to be close. Chill out a little though, we have to remember not to get too distracted by the glamour of just one of the heats. Cauble and Morris aren’t the only ones running. There are five seats on the Kansas State Board of Education up for grabs this year. Why am I pretending to be clued-up to the Kansas SBE race when I can’t even tell you who’s running in Idaho? I’m (semi)-familiar with this obscure bit of heartland political arcana, because the outcome of those elections may unfortunately be consequential to the future of national social policy. If enough of the seats are won by people with the sagacity to appreciate our Constitution, Supreme Court rulings and make use of a little bit of logical historical perspective, the board would win the power to reverse a ridiculous ruling. Kansas’ current board is the one that drew much national, though particularly international, condemnation by promoting Intelligent Design in public schools as a (some feel more) legitimate accompaniment to evolution. That this has to be addressed in the 21st century is frustrating, but it’s been a frustrating time for opponents of the encroachment of religion into the public sphere. So here it is: Intelligent design does not belong in public schools. Period. This is not an issue of religious freedom or something because religion simply has no place in the science class. Science does. Based on the scientific method, an idea must meet most, if not all, of the following criteria to be considered a viable theory. To qualify it must be: consistent, parsimonious, useful, empirically testable and falsifiable, based on multiple observations, correctable and dynamic, progressive, and provisional or tentative. The final criterion resolves that the theory’s proponents acknowledge their assertion may not be correct, rather than conclusively insisting that it is. Intelligent design just doesn’t stack up. It lacks internal and external consistency. ID defies Occam’s razor and therefore parsimony. It is entirely un-testable. The ID idea (it cannot be called a “theory” in the scientific sense of the word) is neither correctable nor dynamic as it asserts a static and un-provable supernatural designer. It intrinsically violates the conditions of being provisional (tentative) as the proposal defines itself by its own insistent righteousness. For the United States federal judiciary to declare a theory scientifically sound, the pertinent doctrine must meet the four following criteria of the Daubert Standard. They are as follows: The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified, the methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal, there should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating results and the methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community. Here too, ID fails on all counts. The first and third criteria have already been shown to be incompatible with ID’s scientific legitimacy as they correlate to the scientific method. As for the other two; to this day, not a single pro-ID article has ever been published in any peer-reviewed journal. William A. Dembski, one of ID’s leading and most outspoken promoters, said that he won’t submit any articles because it takes too long for them to get published and he makes more money writing books. Concerning “general acceptance within the relevant scientific community,” there is essentially no acceptance of ID, much less general. The suggestion that an Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate is being waged between scientific camps is a myth. The only debate existent is between those attempting to promote ID as science and the whole of the established scientifically educated world insisting that it is not. Basically, the only arguments assigned to promote the veracity of ID that are even superficially glazed with a veneer of pseudo-science and are the concepts of reducible complexity and specified complexity. Science-y sounding designations aside the argument is that nature, biological systems in particular, are so complex they couldn’t possibly be the result of any natural processes and, therefore, must have been created by an intelligent designer. In most cases, the intelligent designer is the Christian God. Although there are a few of them, you won’t find too many ID campaigners advocating for aliens or anything. Scientifically, this contention is iffy because it’s based exclusively on ignorance. The line of though being: “Since we have yet to explain precisely how this complexity came about, we won’t ever be able to, so it must be the result of a creator.” Unfortunately for ID, feasible theories are built on evidence rather than the lack of it. The declaration that because something is as of yet unknown, that thing is therefore unknowable and must have some supernatural precursor is fallacious at best. Confusion and ignorance, historically, have not made the most stable foundations for the support of a hypothesis. The theory of evolution, like life itself, is a dynamic, changing and continually… well, evolving concept. Although its total scope has yet to be realized, the fundamentals are nearly universally accepted and its applications regularly reinforced, provable and proven. However people choose to reconcile this reality with their (and their children’s) faith is their business, but creationism, under whatever fashionable euphemism, has no more justification being pushed in science classes than evolution does in Sunday school.  Add as favorites (100) | Views: 2316
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