Intelligent Design
September 3rd, 2005Everyone seems to be talking about the ‘Intelligent Design’ debate recently, which is a new spin on one of the oldest debates around. The Pastafarianism movement is fun, and John quotes Richard Dawkins saying, well, much what you’d expect Richard Dawkins to say.
I feel that Creationism shouldn’t be given much, if any, space in a science lesson. But it raises a couple of interesting points for me:
- The first is that it’s always very dangerous for scientists to have closed minds. We can say about any new or alternative theory, “On the evidence currently available this seems highly unlikely” but it’s foolish to rule things out as impossible. We should remember that some of the biggest scientific blunders of the past have come from believing that the current understanding is the only one. Intelligent Design is an old idea, so we assume that it has been superceded even though many people now seem to believe in it. This is probably what people a few hundred years ago thought about another old idea, democracy. I’m not defending ID, just warning against any assumption that what we now believe must be right.
- If a sufficiently large number of people believe something, presumably it should have some place in our schools. If you’re a teacher based in an area where the majority or even a substantial minority of parents value some particular viewpoint, whether it be the importance of ballet or the importance of democracy, then that viewpoint deserves to be at least examined, if not promoted, as part of their children’s education. That’s part of the bargain we strike with our teachers. And no religion is worth its salt if it doesn’t impact other aspects of its adherents’ lives. So if you’re in a country where there is normally no ‘Religious Education’ in schools, and yet a large number of topics are influenced by people’s religions, I wonder in which classes children ought to be taught about such things?
September 11th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
(1) It’s not true to imply that scientists have closed minds over “intelligent design”. It’s that ID doesn’t join in the scientific fray. It doesn’t have any falsifiable hypotheses. It pushes back the “how did this happen?” question as far as possible, so that when you say “but look, here’s some interesting COBE data on how the universe looked soon after the Big Bang, which fits with our hypotheses over here and over here”, the ID reply is: yeah, sure, that happened on its own, but before that, Something Intelligent Made it happen. Riiiight. Scientists respond: look, if you’re not going to play by the science rules, you can’t play here.
To teach ID in science classes would actually be anti-scientific. That’s why it drives scientists to chewing things, like their own arms.
And to say “lots of people believe it, let’s teach it!” is not a good way to construct a syllabus in the modern world. Lots of people believe the seasons are caused by the Earth’s elliptical orbit bringing it closer to the sun. Shall we teach that, then? ID is a religious viewpoint masquerading as science in order to undermine the rationality of science; the idiocy is that if you want to believe something, science won’t get in the way. It’ll just get on as it likes.
(2) supersede. Comes from the Latin super + sedere: to sit over.
September 11th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Hi Charles - I agree with you, that ID probably shouldn’t be taught in a science lesson any more than Shakespeare should. But I think it ought to be taught, or at least discussed, somewhere. And I gather that most US schools don’t include any form of religious education. Actually, I’m only guessing that we still do here, but I may be wrong; it’s about 20 years since I looked at a school timetable!
I’m not sure that the ‘elliptical orbit’ analogy is quite fair. In my experience, people quote that as a possible reason because they’ve never considered the question and must come up with something on the spur of the moment, not because they’ve considered the earth’s tilt and decided that isn’t a sufficient explanation.
Anyway, no real disagreement here. I just thought they were interesting questions. On the spelling of supercede, on the other hand… my OED allows either variant. That’s is a scientific response, but should it be given any weight in English classes?