Ok, I figure I should finally blog a little on this topic since I have talked on many other people's blogs on the Intelligent Design.I wholeheartedly agree with the court decision on the matter in seperating ID from a science class - since I am a science teacher that should not be a big shock. But this does not mean that I do not believe in God, quite the contrary actually because I feel I have a great relationship with Him.
I once had a student argue with me that since I am teaching science, I should also teach "other religious beliefs". That actually stunned me at first. I believe that science and religion should be more seperate than the supposed "seperation of church and state". Science is merely what we are able to test and prove with the best knowledge that we currently have. True these "facts" might change in the future (a-la "the earth is flat" craze) but as of today we are pretty darn sure of what we have tested. And natural selection (dare I say the "e" word - evolution) falls into that category. Religion on the other hand is and should always be based on a belief system. I do not think it is fair to try and match up a battle between science and religion because that is kind of like comparing apples and oranges since they reach conclusions in totally different ways.
But personally I do not know why this has to be totally black and white. Personally I actually believe in "Intelligent Design" in so much that God is designing things THROUGH evolution. We actually have the fossils of pre-historic people - but who is to say that these neanderthals did not actually evolve into what the church believes was Adam and Eve. The bible gives no detail in how long it took God to come up with everything at the time of that hip first couple so is it that hard to believe that evolution lead up to that point?
PLEASE leave me your thoughts....
(P.S. one of my new hobbies is photography and I took this picture of a 250 year old church in the Old Town area of Albuquerque, New Mexico)
16 comments:
I have a hard time believing that "Intelligent Design" is anything other than the religious right attempting to turn the Book of Genesis into science.
I have no problem with a belief in God. I think humanity, by it's very nature of existence, needs to believe in a higher power. It forces us to grow, to test limits and to question, "What is out there?"
My problem is that the religious extremists are tying to circumvent this country's policy of separation of church and state by renaming the bible as "an alternative evolutionary theory," which is just a bunch of crap.
Religion is NOT a science and can never be a science. God can never be quantified, by His very nature. Religion can ONLY be a belief...a matter of faith.
Intelligent Design is a lie, a rip-off and it cheats the faithful by trying to quantify their beliefs into a tangible, testable system.
Teach it in courses on religion, Sunday School and in the home if you must...but NOT in science classes. It doesn't belong there. And NOT being there takes nothing away from it, except that it respects the beliefs of those who do NOT agree with its tennents.
Joe
I cannot disagree with a thing you said...it drives me crazy when people think that scientific theory can be compared to religion. I find it important to tell all my students that "you absolutely do not have to believe in what we are talking about [evolution] but you do need to know about it so you can make decisions based on everything that is out there. But what we are going to talk about is only things that we have actual, physical proof of and what most of the scientific studies believe has happened."
Thanks for taking the time to post!
Paul
I, personally, have similar beliefs, Paul. However, I do see some weaknesses in your argument. You mention that science in school is designed to teach students theories and laws that can be proven through the "best knowledge that we currently have". Unfortunately, there are two things keeping this from happening in the public school system. The first problem is that you cannot actually prove anything based on a decision criteria that changes with time. This being said, we can suggest strongly, through statistics and models, that our theories hold water. This would be just fine if our second problem did not exist. Children are not receiving up to date information in the public school system. Science is, currently, advancing at a rate that inhibits even the most affluencial schools from presenting the most current material. In addition, many new current high school texts continue to include material that has been proven scientifically false. Additionally, science is developing a qualitative cancer. There are more and more cases of data tampering coming to the surface these days. This is a whole new subject on it's own. Because of these factors, one must have faith in the data being presented in the scientific literature.
Unfortunately, I lost my faith in science while getting my master's of "science" degree, because of the lack of honest professionalism in many "scientific fields".
I cannot disagree more. Certainly, I am a Christian and have a vested interest in ID. But, the facts of evolution are far (very far) from proven. At one time, I did believe in evolution, and felt very much that God could have caused evolution and used it to get to where we are today.
But, I have studied this issue for two years. As a lawyer, I tried to punch holes in both sides. While I conceed that ID cannot be proven, I cannot find sufficient evidence that evolution (is it is taught today) is anything close to fact.
I have one issue that no one has been able to overcome, which leads me to give at least some benefit of the doubt to the Genesis account. That is, the Bible refers (fairly specifically) to scientific facts that were unknown to the human race for at least a thousand years after the writing. The Bible refers to the earth as a sphere, talks specifically about other planets orbits, refers to hydrology (sp?), wind patterns and several other scientific areas of study. Until the 1500s and 1600s, none of these "facts" were accepted (even by Christians). But, the Bible is correct on these issues (as we understand them today).
Well I can totally appreciate both of the desenting comments but I cannot say that I see things the same way. Science is definitely a moving target from the stand point that the whole purpose of scientific testing is not to prove something IS true but rather to try and prove it FALSE. So where we are at today is that the overwhelming scientific belief is that evolution is the closest thing to fact that there is based on the overwhelming majority of tests and evidence. Is it guaranteed 100% that a giaraffe at one point looked more like a horse? Not at all, but the fossil evidence and other supporting fossil evidence does lead to that conclusion.
Just by sheer numbers there will always be scientists who will show they have evidence showing the other way and that is why scientific theory is based on what the majority of scientists believed until the majority of tests prove otherwise.
Even with all of that taken out of the argument, something like Intelligent Design really has no basis in being in a science classroom because by every definition it is not scientific basically by definition. That argument really has not judgement in which side is right and who is wrong it is just an apples and oranges comparison. I would have no problem with ID being taught in school but that should be done in a reglion course because, well it is based on religion (what I would refer to as a "well, duh" kind of argument).
Definitely there is flaws in the materials that I have available to teach from but even as bad as it is, I take it from the approach of teaching my students how to think critically and independently and if they do not believe in what I am covering I hope (and pray) that they become a scientist to help prove it wrong.
Thank you folks for your input - I love engaging in INTELLIGENT discussions. I always hate arguments based just on emotions so I totally respect what you are saying.
Paul
P.S. Let me ask this of you folks in favor of ID, I am not going to argue the correctness or soundness of the ID argument, but do you personally feel that ID is something that should be taught in a science class? Does it meet the standards of science?
I am honestly asking the question...
I, too, appreciate the attitude of this debate (great testament to Brotherhood). To answer directly, yes, I believe ID should be taught in schools. First, it cannot be taught under the guise of religion class (unconstitutional, without doubt). To what extent it is taught, that is another question. I would prefer to see it taught in the context of an argument against specific points of evolution. For example, as pointed out above, there has been numerous instances of fabrications of evidence supporting evolution. Second, evolution defies the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (ie: things go organization to disorganization). Third, there has yet to be a transitional animal/human remain to actually link change from one type of animal/human to another.
Given that, and the fact that the probability analysis makes evolution less likely than a house being built by a tornado, I think ID could at least be given as an alternate theory and a cursory explanation of the flaws in evolutionary theories. Unfortunately, the absence of any competing theory does not achieve the goal you stated (teaching students to think critically). The problem I see is not that evolution is taught, but that it goes completely uncheck and its strongest opponents simply don't want the competition.
PS - Paul, if you would like to engage in some friendly discussion on some of the points I made regarding Biblical statements, my email is in my profile. Given your sincere interest in the ID debate, I'd be happy to give you chapter and verse on those scientific Biblical references.
I cannot find your profile - is it here through blogger or are you reffering to The Gentleman's Circle? (I am assuming your "brotherhood" comment brought you here through SAE site)
P
You are correct. I'm in the Gentleman's Circle. I don't have the references with me, but would be happy to just give you the citations and let you do with them as you will.
Paul, you sure know how to kick up a debate.
My question to the group is if we can include ID in the teaching of science, than is it also acceptable to teach other theories on the exsistance of life on the planet? There must be a plethera of various issues (personally I have not studied this) that could be added as well. Further more, when do you start leaving theories out? Who gets to decide which theories are taught and which aren't?
Personally, I believe that this is a slippery slope to start walking down and those who encourage the inclusion of specific theories which are not scientific in nature will wish in the future they had.
Richard,
I think you hit the nail on the head. That is the uniqueness of "science" - it is centered around TESTABLE theories and ideas. It may not always be perfect but at least things are TANGIBLE. In order for a Scientific Theory to be accepted in the scientific field it must be fully documented AND be such that the experiment can be duplicated resulting in the same conclusions.
If we do not fallow these basic steps then yes indeed, where would we draw the line?
Thanks for the feedback.
P
I believe that ID should be taught in class...to the degree that it is testable. The foundation of ID is that body changes attributed to random mutation are not possible, given the fossle record's timeline. This is testable through basic biology and statistics. In other words...creating all 34 phyla during the cambrian period is simply too much directed change.
Now I am in no way an expert on ID but as far as I know, that is the the whole problem with including it in a science discusion - it is not testable.
I maybe way off base here but the main premis seems to be to find all the gaps in the current evolution theory and simply attribute those to a devine presence. Again, I am not discounting that and it may be true but by the very definition of science, it cannot be tested so it must be handled differently.
It truly may be the "hand of God" or it may just be gaps that have not been found yet. This is similar to when Mendeleev had created the first Periodic Table of the Elements and knew that he was right even though there were gaps in where elements would go. He was able to almost exactly identify all the properties of those elements even though they had not yet be discovered and when they eventually were, they fit to a "t".
I teach physics, and not biology, but I still have a vested interest in the ID debate. As I see it, proponents of ID are primarily coming from a faith-based background. That is, they already presume (1)there is a creator/designer/force superior to us in the universe and (2)that entity has essentially creacted/designed/sculpted/directed the universeso as to create life as we know it. To say that the existence of complex life forms supports the existence of a designer seems to me to be circular reasoning, and hardly scientific. Wouldn't one need independent verification of the existence of such a designer to make ID a scientific theory?
Evolution at least has some independent verification for its claims. Genetic theory and the discovery of hitherto unknown lifeforms in the unlikeliest of places seem to confirm evolution quite well.
As for the second law of thermodynamics, it applies to systems in which no external energy is being added (a messy room gets messier if no one cleans it up). Organisms retain their organization by taking in energy. Otherwise they die. Evolution is not at all contrary to the 2nd law. In fact, looking at it from another perspective, the 2nd law would lead one to accept the idea that one organism could "splinter" into millions of lifeforms given sufficient time, say 3.5 billion years. Simplicity to complexity.
Cosmologists and physicists say the same about the evolution of the universe, too. At one time early in its development, the universe was very simple, one force, no complex atoms or molecules, no structure. Now it's less simple.
The real issue here is that many are confusing "religious theory" with "scientific theory." Intelligent design is a religious theory that some are trying to masquerade as a scientific theory in order to have it taught in classrooms. If someone can show that intelligent design is possible without appealing to religion, then it is fit to be taught in classrooms. Unfortunately for the proponents of intelligent design, it is simply not mathematically possible.
A common argument for intelligent design is that the universe is too complicated to have emerged by random mutation via evolution. However, the exact opposite is actually true. The universe is far too complex for a designer to have possibly intelligently architected the universe. In truth, there is no known mathematical algorithm for predicted the results of a complex system interaction, without actually running the interaction. Therefore, there is no way that a being could have designed the universe and known the current outcome before actually running and implementing it.
Bottom line, Intelligent Design can be argued out of science classrooms without even mentioning evolution.
I want to give credit to Dr. Tony Beavers at the University of Evansville (also an SAE), who presented this argument in a lecture.
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