I posted recently on the Dover School Board Case. I note a couple of interesting commentaries on the question of what is religion and what is science. John West weighs in at USAToday. John is the associate director of the Discovery Institute, a think tank largely devoted to promoting intelligent design theory. He is also a grad school buddy of mine.
Contrary to Judge John Jones' assertions, intelligent design is not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory that holds there are certain features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause. No legal decree can remove the digitally coded information from DNA, nor molecular machines from cells. The facts of biology cannot be overruled by a federal judge. Research on intelligent design will continue to go forward, and the scientific evidence will win out in the end.
While I find Intelligent Design arguments unconvincing, I think John is quite right they do not constitute a religious doctrine. I agree on a further point.
Evolutionists used to style themselves the champions of free speech and academic freedom against unthinking dogmatism. But increasingly, they have become the new dogmatists, demanding judicially-imposed censorship of dissent.
Now, Darwinists are trying to silence debate through persecution. At Ohio State University, a graduate student's dissertation is in limbo because he was openly critical of Darwin's theory. At George Mason University, a biology professor lost her job after she mentioned intelligent design in class. At the Smithsonian, an evolutionary biologist was harassed and vilified for permitting an article favoring intelligent design to be published in a peer-reviewed biology journal.
I have presented Darwinian theory to church goers, and have defended religion before Darwinists. On the whole, the parishioners were fairly open-minded, and the Darwinists, pig-headed. But of course that doesn't settle any important questions.
Philosophy Professor Alexander George argues, in the Christian Science Monitor web page, against the view that Intelligent Design is not science.
This week, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design may not be taught in the science classrooms of Pennsylvania's public schools. I agree with the verdict, but we need to be careful about our reasons for supporting it. Most critics of intelligent design seek to undermine it by arguing that the doctrine is not science. It's actually religion passing itself off as science. Hence, its teaching constitutes religious instruction. The Constitution disallows the state's establishment of religion. Therefore, intelligent design cannot be taught in the classroom.
The problem with this argument is that it requires making the case that intelligent design is not science. And the intelligibility of that task depends on the possibility of drawing a line between science and non-science. The prospects for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that.
I hesitate to endorse his view that a line between science and non-science cannot be drawn, but I agree that the line is murky. I also agree with his argument that Intelligent Design should not be taught in the biology classroom.
Let's abandon this struggle to demarcate and instead let's liberally apply the label "science" to any collection of assertions about the workings of the natural world. Fine, intelligent design is a science then - as is astrology, as is parapsychology. But what has a claim to being taught in the science classroom isn't all science, but rather the best science, the claims about reality that we have strongest reason to believe are true. Intelligent design shouldn't be taught in the science classroom any more than Ptolemaic astronomy and for exactly the same reason: They are both poor accounts of the phenomena they seek to explain and both much improved upon by other available theories.
Intelligent Design theory is better than most forms of Creation Science, but it is still bad science. That is enough reason to exclude it.
Recent Comments