INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Intelligent Design is not a Theory—it is a Belief

Why should there be any objection to students "keep[ing] an open mind" and examining a respectable-sounding alternative to evolution? The Scientific Method is, after all, about testing alternative hypotheses. 

Because Intelligent Design is not a scientific alternative to evolution; it is a religious belief held by many sincere people. Unfortunately, it is being used in an attempt to insert broader but specific religious beliefs, in the guise of science, into the public schools. This violates the Constitutional guarantee of separation of Church and State (in the First Amendment).

"Intelligent Design" is simply a renaming of the biblical creationism put forward by William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes Trial of 1925 in Dayton Ohio.

To assert that because Darwinian evolution is a theory, it then follows that it is not a fact, is highly misleading. 

Why should evolution, alone among scientific theories, be singled out with the argument "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered"? 

Why haven't school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that the cause of gravity or the existence of electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. 

The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities, as did the Copernican theory (and its teaching by Galileo) that the Earth was not at the center of the universe.

In an article by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne entitled “One Side Can be Wrong,” that first appeared in The Guardian (September 1, 2005), the argument that evolution and intelligent design are simply two sides of a scientific argument is taken apart. Here is the link to that article:  http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/01/schools.research

(Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.)

The material that follows is largely drawn from that article.

Why is it unreasonable to accept the idea that it is “only fair” to teach both sides of the evolution vs intelligent design (ID) argument? 

The answer is: This is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. 

It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. 

But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. 

Its advocates bypass normal scientific peer revue by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and—with great shrewdness—to the government officials they elect.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. They never offer positive evidence in favor of intelligent design. 

Instead there is a list of alleged deficiencies in the theory of evolution: they criticize alleged "gaps" in the fossil record, or the amazing marvels and intricacies of living creatures, or specific organs such as the eye,  which, without supporting evidence, are judged to be too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

What is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. 

The gap means that we lack a complete "cinematic record" of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of animal deaths result in a fossil.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behavior on the day that he went to work on some complex animal organ or structure, such as the bacterial flagellum—the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such a divine record will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. 

And—far more telling—not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

Let's turn from the Dawkins/Coyne article now to consider a few other points.

Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution and the lack of evidence (argument is not evidence) for ID, how can intelligent people hold such views? Is their faith so strong that it blinds them to all evidence? 

It is a bit more complicated than that. After all, many theologians and religious people accept evolution. The real issues behind intelligent design—and much of creationism—are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God's creation but a product of natural selection, and so our existence lacks purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle.

Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this “jungle-centric” view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that "it couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."

No attempt is made to hide the evangelical Christian anti-evolutionist bias of the text recommended for teaching “biology” in the Dover schools (referred to in an earlier post). Of Pandas and People is a textbook designed as an antidote to the evolution segment of high school biology classes. 

It was first published in 1989. By repackaging and updating a subset of traditional creationist arguments while avoiding taking a stand on any issues that might divide creationists (such as the age of the Earth), it marked the beginning of the modern intelligent design (ID) movement. By presenting the case for ID, it is supposedly designed to give students a "balanced perspective" on evolution. (A third edition of Pandas, retitled Design of Life, is now available.)

Pandas carefully avoids mentioning God (except under aliases such as "intelligent designer," "master intellect," and so on); but a little digging reveals the book's deep religious roots. One of its authors, Percival Davis, wrote about his religious beliefs in his book A Case for Creation, co-authored with Wayne Frair:

"Truth as God sees it is revealed in the pages of Scripture, and that revelation is therefore more certainly true than any human rationalism. For the creationist, revealed truth controls his view of the universe to at least as great a degree as anything that has been advanced using the scientific method."

I am not presenting an argument in this post that deeply religious people do not have a right to hold their beliefs and teach them to their children. I am arguing that religious beliefs should not be taught in public schools.

The argument that Creationism is not a religious view does not hold water against the available evidence.

Pandas was originally published by the Haughton Publishing Company of Dallas, a publisher of agricultural books, but the copyright is held by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Richardson, Texas. Although the FTE website avoids mentioning religion, its articles of incorporation note that its "primary purpose is both religious and educational, which includes, but is not limited to, proclaiming, preaching, teaching, promoting, broadcasting, disseminating, and otherwise making known the Christian gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of our day."

Another argument against the theory of evolution

Creationists have always made much of the "Cambrian explosion" (essentially, the reflection of the Genesis presentation of the creation of all living things over a period of only a few days) and IDers are no exception. 

Returning to the Dawkins/Coyne article cited above:

Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640 million years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530 million years ago. At that time there was a sudden “explosion” of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10 to 30 million years. 

A sudden appearance of many groups of animals could be taken to support the Genesis view of creation. But IDers—and the text Pandas—fail to emphasize several facts. Foremost is that the Cambrian explosion was not "sudden;" it took many millions of years. 

Moreover, the species of the Cambrian are no longer with us, though their descendants are. But over time, nearly every species that ever lived (more than 99 percent of them) has gone extinct without leaving descendants. 

Finally, many animals and plants do not show up as fossils until well after the Cambrian explosion: bony fishes and land plants first appeared around 440 million years ago, reptiles around 350 million years ago, mammals around 250 million years ago, flowering plants around 210 million years ago, and human ancestors around 5 million years ago. 

The staggered appearance of groups that become very different (evolve) over the next 500 million years gives no support to the notion of instantaneously created species that thereafter remain largely unchanged. 

If this fossil record does reflect the exertions of an intelligent designer, he was apparently dissatisfied with nearly all of his creations, repeatedly destroying them and creating a new set of species that just happened to resemble descendants of those that he had destroyed.

Finally, Dawkins and Coyne in their article (cited earlier) in The Guardian address the importance of this issue.

“Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't matter—that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar, and instead just teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, and then get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false idea that there really are two sides. Worse, it would hand Creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognized as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.”

The issue of whether the Earth is the center of the Universe seems to be behind us. But we have probably not heard the end of the attempt to give Creationism equal status with the Theory of Evolution. And because our society is becoming increasingly dependent on the fruits of scientific theory, our legal system will become increasingly involved with questions of scientific “truth.” Since most judges and juries are untrained in (and indeed, increasingly unexposed to) the scientific method, we can expect the legal system to become compromised by this failure in our educational system. (See “When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces” by Cornelia Dean in The New York Times, December 5, 2006 for more on this.)