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May 15, 2005
Intelligent Design and Unintelligent Teachers
This is just stunning. Stunning in its stupidity, actually.
You see, in Kansas there is once again debate over whether evolution should be taught in schools. Given the mass of evidence for evolution - particularly micro-evolution - it is odd to even be having a debate about whether it should be taught as the primary probability of how life came to be as it is today. That said, the teachers in Kansas deserve to have their clock cleaned, because they are clearly idiots. And here is why: their definition of science is "a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." That is crap.
Science is a human activity, certainly. But there is nothing in it about seeking natural explanations for what we observe. Science is all about what is provable and what is not provable. What is "natural" simply doesn't enter into it. I'm a Pagan, after all, and for me the Divine is natural. It does not matter whether or not the Divine enters into it: can any given theory be proven false? If so, the process of developing and of attempting to disprove that theory is science. If not, it is at best a critique, and usually less than that.
It may well be that life was a creation of a Divine being. But the "intelligent design" theory is not science even if it is correct, because it does not attempt to formulate a disprovable hypotheses, and then test it. Without that, it is nothing more than a notion - even a theory has the prerequisite that it provide a disprovable hypothesis.
So part of the problem is that the science teachers in Kansas apparently don't know what the core difference is between science and non-scientific belief. Part of the problem, too, is that our culture has (in the name of technology, really) turned "science" into a religion unto itself. Can you explain how we can know the mass of stars hundreds - thousands - of light years away? Neither can I, though I've studied physics enough to guess at it. But I take it on faith that we can know that, and so (likely) do you. And the reality is, we take most of what we think we know on faith. A scientist or a teacher says it's true, and we simply accept that because it's too hard to know for certain that it is so. It's provable, but it's beyond us to prove it. (I use proof here not in the mathematical sense, which is a wholly different animal.)
So it's not science, but Scientism, that most of us believe in. We simply accept that a process was scientific, because it was claimed to be so, and thus that the conclusion it arrived at is reasonable. Look at the hundreds of studies that are reported each year. How many of them are believable? A small fraction? Yet we don't take the time to examine these studies to see if they are reasonable; it's a study so it must be scientific and thus true.
Here's a hint: ad hominem is not always wrong. Sometimes, the fact that a drug maker funds a study on a problem really is a conflict of interest that leads to bad results. And frequently, what we take to be scientific consensus is no more than a passing fad with questionable antecedents.
The truth is, we are all to blame for the debacle in Kansas, because we have are collectively willing to believe just about anything if the alternative is to work hard to know the truth - or as close as we can approximate to the truth - for ourselves. It's simply an economic problem: we have limited time, so what shall we accept and on what matters will we demand proof or at least strong evidence?
The problem in Kansas is that the educators responsible for passing on the notion of what science is have failed to understand it for themselves, and are thus incapable of communicating it. As a result, they are unable to defend against plausible-sounding beliefs which have no evidence behind them.
The science teachers in Kansas deserve to lose this fight. Their students deserve better.
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I've written before about the discussion in Kansas about teaching "intelligent design", and now the decision has been made. What bothers me about this is not that Kansas has decided to teach critiques of evolution alongside evolution; we in fact intend... [Read More]
Tracked on November 8, 2005 10:32 PM