How many bloggers do you know would dare use a heroin euphemism to describe a religious movement? Well, it's early and I'm cranky. Those awaiting geekier and gamier bits should wait until tomorrow.
I'm talking about Intelligent Design for a moment. Simply because I keep hearing it on the news and to be honest, it's one of the more annoying things in this particular hemisphere right now. For proponents of this philosophy to deny it's religious in nature is simply disenginous. It's only a few steps away from declaring that "God" doesn't actually reference a Judeo-Christian deity (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). The fact is that there's a fervent minority in America who seriously want it to be an official Christian country. There's bible colleges teaching lawyers how to turn biblical law into real law, political action committees to spin their ethics into legislature, etc., etc.
Personally, I'm an agnostic. I try earnestly to be respectful of all beliefs because I believe the divine and supernatural is, by definition, somewhat incomprehensible to us mortals. I understand that faith crosses this divide and am generally, if anything, impressed by people's beliefs. Course, I also think faith is a personal thing and get really annoyed when people try to sneak it into the water supply.
For those who haven't been watching the story unfold, Intelligent Design is essentially Creationism minus any specific God. Whereas Creationism teaches that God and only God has the authority and contract labor to create the stars, the moon, you and me ... Intelligent Design merely says that the stars, the moon, you and me are too complicated not to be the result of an intelligent agent. What that agent may be, ID doesn't suggest.
And that's why Intelligent Design is not a scientific concept.
Carl Sagan once purposed that one limit of accepting a hypothesis is that it must have a testable parameter. His example was having someone come over and say "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage". OK, so you ask to see it. But the dragon is invisible. OK, so have it breath fire. Well, the fire is invisible too. Maybe we could try to see it infrared? Well, the dragon ... and it's fire ... is heatless. And so on down the road until this person denies any actual method of testing for the dragon, but insists on it's existence.
ID actually takes a step backwards from the dragon example. It just says there is something in the garage, but they won't even tell you what. You don't know if you're looking for dragons, elves, aliens, thunder gods or whatnot. They say, "there is a rock in my garage and something really smart made it". Instead of applying new facts to explain it's potential untestability, the ID proponents merely say "we don't know, because we don't really know what it is".
Accepting that as scientific thought is nothing less than taking steps back towards the Dark Ages. Imagine being able to hand in a Chemistry exam explaining that in fact, it's phlogiston all along that creates the fire. Your chem teacher would rightly ask for your evidence to prove you right, but by ID's train of thought - you simply say, "No, you prove me wrong". Your chem teacher would probably explain about energy tranfer, exothermic reactions, etc., and your response would be "but phlogiston makes that happen. Because clearly all that is too complicated to happen on it's own."
I for one hope my country hasn't gotten to the point to let that into the classroom.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Chasing the Dragon
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8 comments:
This Intelligent Design debate (amongst all the other things) makes me so angry. How can these religious activists seriously think that they can insert this nonsense into schooling when it's not even based in science, nor is it scientifically testable? Where has the common sense gone?
They do it because they think we live in the United States of God. Everything else is secondary.
When the dark lord Tchernabog returns and demands credit as Designer (in addition to his unholy requests for virgin sacrifice and palaces built with slave labor in dessicated wastelands), these people are going to be severely disappointed.
damn you, lack of an editing feature!
Yes, in some ways blogger is unintelligent design :)
As ever, I feel like the lone flower-carrying fool in a crowd of villagers with pitchforks - bear in mind that my chrysanthemum is no match for your farm tools if you choose to attack me! :)
Intelligent Design is not strictly a scientific concept, but its themes can be seen as a legitimate issue for discussion in philosophy of science. I believe that it could be enormously beneficial for everyone if philosophy of science was taught as part of the scientific curriculum - perhaps this approach could be pursued as a solution acceptible to both camps?
If you're at all interested, there's a post on my blog entitled 'The Penguin Crusade' that covers my thoughts on the issue of teaching Intelligent Design in US schools. (You can find it under 'Key Posts on Philosophy' in the margin).
Take care,
C.
For the lazy but curious, Chris's Penguins may be found here.
And were we talking on purely philosophical issues, I would be inclined to agree. If we were talking about philosophy classes I might be inclined to agree.
But the case that is brewing in Dover isn't about philosophy, or even the philosophy of science - but science itself. They're insisting that high school kids are told that evolution is flawed and that intelligent design is science. ID is, at best, a philosophical standpoint and not a scientific one. A Cartesian demon may be an interesting philosophical concept, for example, but if a biology class were instructed to learn perception as if they were all brains in a jar ... I'd have some concerns.
Sagan had pretty distinct views that there's nothing wrong with religion, but it's good to keep them straight. The movement at foot here is busy trying to intermingle them.
To follow up on Chris's Penguins:
No-one would insist that you can't mention Intelligent Design in the classroom, even (though it galls me to say) in the science classroom. But it should not be taught as an equivalent to the massive preponderance of evidence for evolution. Intelligent Design isn't even a theory. It's an expansion of the "God in the gaps" tautology taken to ridiculous extremes, and frankly doesn't even make logical sense.
By all means, we should teach it as (bad) philosophy. But ID is not, and should not be treated as equal to, actual science. And that's the goal of the religious right.
In fact, if I were to editorialize in seriousness as opposed to my jests above, I'd say that ID is really part of a splinter movement that would like to eliminate all concept of an objective, shared truth in favor of enshrined holy texts. The originalism movement with regards to the Constitution is another form of this initiative. They seek to turn all facts into a matter of debateable opinion, because that brings everyone down to their level. At that point, the fundamentalist-interpreted Bible becomes just as valid as the historical and scientific progress they seek to replace.
And that's where it really rubs me wrong. If someone wanted to just discuss it as a concept, I don't think I would ever raise a hackle.
But I hear about people training lawyers because the Bible isn't fairly represented in law, or how the Founding Fathers really meant for this to be a Christian nation all along, or that judges/pharmacists/etc. shouldn't be accountable for anything but their "Higher Authority" ... and I just want to cringe. It's chilling to listen to people and realize that they're walking to the realm of radical fundamentalism in the same tone that they would ask for milk with their coffee.
ID is theology which has been stripped into philosophy and masqueraded as science. It's getting too close to burning people at stakes for my liking.
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