Imagine going to physics class, ready to learn all about forces and kinematics and Newton’s Laws, but when your teacher begins class, she tells you that Newton’s Laws are only theories, and that forces actually exist to make things move rather than cause changes in movement. The entire class consists of your teacher explaining how according to Aristotle, for an arrow to fly, the wind in front rushes around behind the arrow and pushes it forward. What would your reaction be? Would you wonder, “How could they let her teach us that?” Would you argue with the teacher, assert that Newton’s laws have in fact been proven and that that is exactly what a theory is: a hypothesis that has enough scientific evidence to be considered true? Luckily, the Laws of Motion are untouched by this kind of desperate attempt to teach something that is not supported by scientific evidence. But there exists a realm of science that is threatened. Evolution by natural selection has fought a hard battle to be the accepted theory for the origin of life. The teaching of evolution was actually illegal in America up until less than a century ago; teachers like John Scopes in Tennessee were put on trial for teaching children material that might undermine the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible.
Thankfully we’ve moved away from that extreme. Schools now teach evolution as the only theory for the origin of life, which means that evolution is no longer threatened by those who would put an end to it, but rather by those who would advocate alternative hypotheses which have no scientific backing. Evolution stands against an onslaught of people, politicians included, who believe that evolution threatens their beliefs so much that they need to masquerade religious faith as scientific theory. That mask is called intelligent design, and should not, under any circumstances, be included as core content that is taught to America’s future generations, generations that need to be prepared to embrace science, logic, and reason.
Intelligent design holds that life and reality can only be explained by the presence of an intelligent creator because the complexity of the final result cannot have come about without something or someone to design it. The default argument against this notion is that the statement contradicts itself by assuming that the intelligent designer itself spontaneously appeared. But that argument always fails to advance debate because the very concept of an all-powerful designer means that the designer transcends the restrictions of logic and reality. Rather than disprove intelligent design (which cannot be done yet, unfortunately) the only way to fight it being taught in schools would be to attack its validity as a scientific theory.
The first thing that sets intelligent design apart from other theories that it is entirely non-falsifiable. Every scientific theory ever presented is subject to the scientific method. There can be overwhelming evidence for a hypothesis, but if there is one experiment that disproves it, it’s done. This is what allows scientific progress to be made. In chemistry, the Dalton Theory of Atomic Structure morphed into the Plum-Pudding Model, then the Bohr Model, the Lewis Model, and now the Quantum Model. Intelligent design’s claims about a divine creator are far too abstract to be falsifiable, and as such it would fit better as a school of philosophy or theology rather than biology.
Intelligent design is also non-predictive. Evolution makes countless predictions; it predicts a sequence of intermediate forms, which have been found in fossils living in nature. It predicts vestigial remnants of ancestral animals that exist in modern animals. It predicts similarities between related animals that have been found, and in growing detail. It predicts a biochemical basis for heredity, which was spectacularly confirmed a hundred years later when Watson and Crick discovered DNA. Intelligent design however makes no predictions about the world around us, has no evidence to be found that supports its claims, and therefore serves no other purpose then to shield religious fundamentalists from the growing threat of secularity. That is not science’s purpose.
Science teaches young people how to think critically more than anything else. Of course they need to be taught things that are true but more importantly they need to be taught why they are true so that the future of humanity is prepared to make new scientific discoveries that will further the prosperity of the human race. Newton’s Laws, evolution, and other valid scientific theories are backed by the scientific method, thus teaching students those theories not only gives them solid foundations on where to begin scientific research later in life, it gives them concrete examples of what a claim needs to be considered a scientific theory.
Imagine Nick Pearson grows up and becomes a chemist, but he was taught since elementary school that scientific theories can be considered valid if the only thing they have going for them is that they can’t be proven wrong. Are Nicks’s hypotheses going to be of any benefit to society? Will they hold any merit at all in the scientific community? Not at all. An overwhelming majority of the scientific community doesn’t accept intelligent design as a valid theory, and it won’t accept it even if children grow up being taught that intelligent design is valid. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that in teaching children the wrong way to draw conclusions we would be depriving them vital skills necessary for critical thinking. Again, it’s not the fact that ideas based in faith would be taught as scientific fact that would ruin students’ critical thinking skills; it’s the fact that we would be teaching children hypotheses that cannot be proven or disproven and don’t provide any kind of basis for future scientific discoveries. If we teach them the wrong way to theorize, students’ perception of what science is and of what a theory is would be diluted with philosophy to the point where scientific discoveries are not conclusive enough to be applied to anything.
When one looks at intelligent design beyond the mask of twisted facts and circular reasoning, all that’s there, is religion. America is a secular country, and that secularity was intended to free America from restrictions based on religion, restrictions that in the Dark Ages held the human race in a state of constant war and disease. As scientific development moves us away from that, we cannot let secularity be defeated because certain people feel that their beliefs are threatened by the truth. Bill Nye the Science Guy said, “Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. The main idea of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.”
Bibliography:
- Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. Dir. Joseph McMaster and Gary Johnstone. Prod. Paula S. Apsell, Richard Hutton, Joseph McMaster, Gary Johnstone, and Vanessa Tovell. By Joseph McMaster. PBS, 2007. DVD.
- Dawkins, Richard. "Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion." The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 349-88. Print.
Scott, Eugenie C., and Glenn Branch. ""Intelligent Design" Not Accepted by Most Scientists | NCSE." NCSE | National Center for Science Education. NCSE, 12 Aug. 2002. Web. 7 Aug. 2011. <http://ncse.com/creationism/general/intelligent-design-not-accepted-by-most-scientists>
Coste, Rick. "Why Evolution Is a Fact." No Gods Allowed. Rick Coste, 31 July 2011. Web. 8 Aug. 2011.
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