A sensible voice
For another sensible voice on the debate about Evolution and Intelligent Design in schools, check out this Mark Davis piece.
posted by G.Rap | 1:22 PM
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4 Comments:
I see nothing in the article to disagree with except for its implication that I ought to disagree with it.
I'm one of those pro-science "hard-liners," after all, and the article seems to imply that it is staking out a middle ground between me and the Discovery Institute types. But it isn't. In urging discussion of the idea that our universe was designed (intelligently or not), but treating the idea honestly, as a philosophical or religious idea rather than a scientific one, the author is squarely in the same camp as us pro-science hard-liners he purports to distance himself from.
I don't know anybody who thinks the idea shouldn't be discussed. Many pro-science hard-liners even think it should be discussed in science class -- albeit as an example of an untestable hypothesis rather than a testable one.
What we pro-science hard-liners object to, and have always objected to, is the dishonest smuggling of the Intelligent Design idea into ninth-grade biology texts masqueraded as science. (And if you have followed the recent ID trial in Dover, PA, you know that the adjective "dishonest" is warranted. An excellent summary of the whole trial can be found here.)
As Nick Matzke wrote over at the Panda's Thumb, if ID were a serious scientific endeavor, its proponents "would stop trying to make their case in the media, and instead take the only legitimate route to academic respectability -- winning the scientific battle, in the scientific community. IDists have made much of comparing ID to the Big Bang model [insofar as the Big Bang model was initially rejected by the scientific community but later accepted] -- but did Big Bang proponents kick off their model in a high school textbook? Did they go around the country mucking with kiddies' science standards to promote their view? Did they ever lobby legislators? I don't think so."
In any event, my point is that Mark Davis's position is not only sensible, but is right in line with what the ACLU types have been arguing for all along.
Maurile's point would be a bit more persuasive if he and his fellow "pro-science hard-liners" were as exercised about preventing the religion of atheist materialism from pervading the science classroom as they are about Intelligent Design. Of course sneaking biblical fundamentalism into the science class under the guise of Intelligent Design is fraudulent and wrong, though I see nothing wrong with an honest discussion of what is and what is not scientific about the concept of intelligent design itself. But why is it less fraudulent and wrong to pretend that science and materialist philosophy are identical, as so many anti-I.D. polemicists and plain old science teachers do? Surely one underlying cause of the fundamentalists' attempt to invade science classes with I.D. is the years and years of unacknowledged materialist religious indoctrination masquerading as science in those same classes. We need a way to discuss these differences in fundamental beliefs, whether in or out of science class, without polarizing polemics. More to come in a future post.
I'm unaware of any examples of "atheist materialism" being championed in the science classroom; but if you can alert me to a few such examples, I promise to become appropriately exercised. (Are you perhaps conflating methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism?)
I reject ID because I have seen the media war that Maurile refers to and I am disgusted by the arguments used to support it. I agree with you, Dr. Rap, it is possible for science to study the effect and mechanism of evolution, but not possible for it to rule out God's role in the process, just as science cannot disprove the claim that God influences the movement of every particle in the universe. Perhaps he does, and is OCD, accelerating objects towards the earth at 9.8 meters/second every time. I do not know. What i reject is the claim by the "ID Camp" that humans and other current lifeforms are too complicated and developed to be left to chance (Showing a complete misunderstanding as to the mechanics of probability and randomness) as well as the claim that evolution is unproven and theoretical. Evolution exists: It has been witnessed both in nature and in simulation. Why do the proponents of ID claim that it does not? No discussion, honest or otherwise, will settle the debate. The loophole is that, as I described earlier using Gravity as an example, both ID and evolution can theoretically be true, consistent with the 4 types of causes.
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