Intelligent design belongs outside science class
Intelligent design is on my mind. According to the National Center for Science Education, 10 states promoted anti-evolution legislation last year, and Oklahoma added its name to the list just last month.
House Bill 2107 passed by a 77-10 vote, with Republican Tad Jones offering the immortal words, “Do you think you come from a monkeyman? … Did we come from slimy algae 4.5 billion years ago or are we a unique creation of God? I think it’s going to be exciting for students to discuss these issues.”
If so, they’ll be discussing an old, thoroughly debunked doctrine, dressed up anew and trotted out by folks who seem determined to turn America into the new Iraq – that is, a fundamentalist theocracy.
I have no problem with its teaching, but it properly belongs in a comparative religions class, or Philosophy 101. It most assuredly does not belong in a science class.
Let’s figure out why not. Intelligent design is a repackaging of the old “argument from design.” It states that if such-and-such a physical fact weren’t so, there would be no life; ergo, the existence of conditions so perfectly suited to us proves that they were designed, and God was the designer.
The number of facts used (appropriately or not) to support this assertion can appear daunting: the existence and nature of carbon or oxygen or hydrogen; the earth’s distance from the sun; the amount of oxygen in the air or the temperature at which it burns, etc.
It all sounds pretty compelling until you realize that it’s simply another way of placing us at the center of the universe. But types of life relying on something other than a carbon-based system might well exist elsewhere. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, for instance, suggests that there are other universes besides our own, with their own laws and tolerances for life.
In any case, design implies purpose, and purpose implies that the creator made things just so, just for us, or at least in accommodation of us. Further, if the universe had to be made a certain way in order for us to exist, and you claim that God made it, then you have to conclude that God has no free will and isn’t all-powerful, to boot.
An all-powerful God wouldn’t be constrained by certain physical laws that had to be obeyed. On the other hand, if the universe could be made in some other, more random fashion, then why postulate that God created it? (This is not to argue whether God exists, but rather to examine whether intelligent design does an adequate job of making the argument.)
Here’s a nice quote from the philosopher Keith Ward: “The old dilemma – either God’s acts are necessary and therefore not free (could not be otherwise), or they are free and therefore arbitrary (nothing determines what they shall be) – has been sufficient to impale the vast majority of Christian philosophers down the ages.”
In short, if you argue for intelligent design, you’re arguing against an all-knowing, all-powerful God.
Will Rogers, as pithy a philosopher as ever there was, once said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that counts. It’s what you know that ain’t so.”
And if intelligent design is so, then the image of God held by most of its proponents ain’t. God could, of course, be constrained by certain physical laws, then free to work within them, but that makes God, well, an awfully lot like us, doesn’t it?
Science doesn’t answer everything, and makes no claim to do so, but what it does do is bring a rigorous methodology to the study of the observable. Its methods – hypothesis, experimentation, verification and duplication by a jury of peers – have supported the process of evolution to the point that to attempt to place intelligent design alongside it as a legitimate theory should just be a bad joke.
This has absolutely nothing to do with one’s belief or lack thereof in a God, or with spirituality in general. Intelligent design just doesn’t belong in the science classroom. It’s bad philosophy and bears no relation to science whatsoever.
The doctrine of intelligent design simply isn’t very smart.