A God of Science

"[I]t takes a half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean." -- Patricia Pricehouse, on inroads Intelligent Design theory has made into high school pedagogy.

The October issue of Wired has an excellent look at how proponents of Intelligent Design are using the public arena, not rigorous scientific methodology, to push their agenda and talking points into the nation's public high schools. The piece centers on the Ohio State Board of Education's recent debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates from the Design Institute, a conservative think tank and lobby group, based in Seattle. The Crusade Against Evolution is biased against Intelligent Design, as you'd expect a science and tech magazine piece to be. The editors do the smart thing, though, and let one of the intelligent designers, George Gilder, write an op/ed piece on the pitfalls of evolutionary theory.

The controversy is nothing new; it has been raging since Darwin contradicted Paley in Origin of Species. In American educational pedagogy the Scopes Monkey Trial was the culmination of a long-stewing desire to teach what the rest of the world already was, the doctrine of Darwin, to high schoolers.

Now it's just the opposite. The Design Institute claims that evolution has become so entrenched in the biology curriculum that criticism is squelched and science suffers. There may be truth to this, but the Design Institute has bigger fish to fry. They have a system of their own: Intelligent design. ID is all about probability--the probability of complex systems arriving from random mutation and environmental stressors being statistically vanishing, if not altogether impossible. Unlike the similar "creation science" movement, ID-chums proclaim God has nothing to do with it.

That's the official line anyway.

After the Ohio board voted to scrutinize the curriculum, Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution and one of the pro-ID panelists, "barnstormed Ohio churches soon after notifying congregations of a new, ID-friendly standard."

God has everything to do with it. And, with God effectively removed from the scientific equation by definition, the battle for ID will be fought in the fierce memetic feeding ground of public opinion.

There is no question that scientific rigor is important, and that theories that become universally accepted are in grave danger of becoming obsolete. The backers of ID talk like they're exposing this truth for the first time, when in fact it is a central tenet of science. They love to selectively quote Steven Jay Gould--the prominent Darwinist--as examples of how evolution doesn't work. What they fail to admit is that Darwinists are constantly and forcefully scrutinizing the theory in ways that makes the singular ID claims against evolution seem trite.

"The probability is statistically insignificant--from a scientific standpoint."
"No shit. The numbers are staggering. What's your solution?"
"The solution is obviously an intelligence at work in our design--a God . . . or Aliens."
"Fine. What can you say, scientifically, about this God, or these aliens?"

They can say nothing, because the pivot-point of their theory lies in some kind of noumenal other-worldness that is, at least for now, and probably forever, outside the realm of observable phenomena.

The thing is, Science, by definition and praxis, is the study of observable phenomena and the theories developed from such. It is nothing more.

To say that evolution is statistically improbable is a fair scientific assertion--though the actual math the Design Institute uses to argue for it is controversial. What is most certainly not a valid scientific assertion is the pronouncement with certainty that since complex systems from random processes is improbable, God [or aliens] must exist. One does not necessarily follow from the other.

The funny thing about the aliens argument is that it presupposes an infinite regress, which even Aristotle believed was crap. If aliens created us, who created them? Other aliens? This will go on, with successive alien species creating, for whatever reason, other alien species forever until, at some point, in the experiments of these wacky aliens, there was a first alien, an alien who wasn't created by other aliens.

That alien sounds a lot like Aristotle's God, the first mover.

So whether it be God or Aliens, the essential starting point is still God. Last I heard, God wasn't scientifically demonstrable, though I haven't been keeping up with current events.

If God can not be demonstrated scientifically, he is out of bounds to science. The Discovery Institute knows this, which is why they make no effort to prove his existence, the way Creation Science nuts of the past have. Instead, they attack the prevailing theory, and argue from there. They employ a logical fallacy called the "false dilemma," pretending that evolution and intelligent design are the only choices. If evolution is improbable, they argue, ID must be correct. But that's a false conclusion. Invalidating Evolution is not the same as proving Intelligent Design. For a better explanation of false dilemma, go here.

They are trying to pass off what is essentially faith as the heir apparent: "information age science". They do so only by attacking the prevailing thoughts, not by offering any concrete proof of their own theories.

That's not just bad science, that's not science at all.

Evolutionists, like Pricehouse from the quote at the beginning of the blog, are treating this as a thorn in science's side that will be a mess to clean up. Hopefully it will be only that. But with our nation's children as the target and a faith-based President in the white house, the stakes are high, and I'm a little worried.

Faith is faith and faith is a great thing, but faith doesn't put men on the moon and it doesn't teach us how the planets rotate or how cells divide.