Idea not Based on Religion is an editorial in USA Today. The closing paragraph says,
"Efforts to mandate intelligent design are misguided, but efforts to shut down discussion of a scientific idea through harassment and judicial decrees hurt democratic pluralism. The more Darwinists resort to censorship and persecution, the clearer it will become that they are championing dogmatism, not science."
I don't believe ID should be mandated, nor do I believe ID to be a scientific theory. (If a theory can't be falsified, it isn't science. You can't prove a negative, namely that an intelligent designer didn't do something. All you can say is that when X happens, Y follows. Repeated enough times, you can come to reasonable certainty about the relationship between X and Y and theorize about related variables. From there, you begin to build scientific paradigms.) Science requires a kind of methodological atheism. The operative word here is methodological. You have to assume a natural cause. Otherwise, why would you go looking for one? You can't do science without this assumption.
The problem is that many scientists take this methodological tool as an ontological reality. That is unscientific! By definition, the scientist, speaking as a scientist, has to remain silent on matters beyond the natural world (i.e., intelligent design, God, etc.)
ID backers are right to be angry about being dismissed as stealth religious fanatics. Based on evidence from science and reason, ID is a reasonable conclusion. It just isn't a testable one in the scientific sense of theories. On the other hand, scientists have a right to be angry about mandates to teach non-scientific ideas as science.
I don't think most people on any side of these issues are even trying to listen to what others are saying. This is about overreaching ideologies. Such are the days we live in.
For another interesting take on the topic, check out What's wrong with intelligent design, and with its critics at the Christian Science Monitor. We may differ about the ability to define science, but I think he has good insights into the topic.
Leave a Reply