Intelligent Design is not Science
Many people who know me will agree with what I say here; yet many will not. It is for the latter that I write (yet another obvious fact stated so that people who know better will know that I know that what I'm writing is obvious).
It is a testament to the abysmal American education system that nearly 200 years after the birth of Darwin, a majority of Americans believed in "Creationism" or "Intelligent Design" (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223.shtml). Many scientists I know feel that to argue with these people is futile, and those people might be right... I guess that's just a chance I'm prepared to take...
I recently saw a "documentary" called "Expelled" by Ben Stein. This is a documentary in the same way that Fahrenheit 911 was a documentary, i.e., it was an editorial. In this case, it was a pro-Creationist editorial by Ben Stein. Despite claiming to interview a wide variety of scientists, pretty much every argument in favor of evolution presented in this movie comes out of Ben Stein's mouth. I don't think any scientist gets more than 15 consecutive seconds of air time.
Despite it's total failure as an objective documentary, this film correctly makes the point that legitimate scientists are absolutely closed to the idea of intelligent design. It's true: Intelligent Design is off the table for discussion as a scientific theory. If a "scientist" at a University proposes it as a viable scientific theory (in the absence of new phenomenological evidence), then that University has a right to take a second or third look at that person and deny tenure or whatever. The movie proceeded to cast that fact as academia being "blinded", "closed-minded", and "violating intellectual freedom".
In truth science does dramatically restrict intellectual freedom in the sense that only theories which are scientific can be considered viable. That is precisely the power of science! It allows us to focus our attention on only the most plausible hypotheses given the evidence. This is in contradiction to religion and other superstitions which allow anyone to believe anything just because it was written down in a book or carved onto a tablet by some dudes thousands of years before their descendants discovered that the earth rotates about the sun.
Why is Intelligent Design not a plausible hypothesis? The "simple" answer is that it does not answer any questions that a much simpler theory (evolution) does not already answer. Science is not just about posing hypotheses and testing them. The most important principle in science is that of parsimony: in order for any theory to be worthy of consideration by a scientist, it must explain some phenomena that is not already explained by a simpler theory.
Why is Intelligent Design less simple than evolution? Maybe I can answer with an allegory:
Imagine you are detective driving during a thunderstorm in a neighbourhood with your partner. All of a sudden a flash of lightning appears, and a second later all the lights in the houses around you go out. You are pretty sure you understand what happened, yet your partner speaks up with his own hypothesis: A malevolent electrician, somewhere in a power station, cut the power to all the houses. You as police should begin an investigation to test if this is what happened. The fact that your partner proposed this doesn't surprise you one bit because he's been obsessed with malevolent electricians ever since he had a life-changing encounter with a wall socket.
Would you consider launching the investigation? Of course not. What then is the general principle guiding that decision?
The reason that hypothesis is off the table is because it's much simpler to say that the bolt of lightning that occurred just before the outage struck some power lines and caused the power to be cut to the neighborhood. That instinct to prefer simpler theories is fundamental to human ability to understand our world, and it is one of the core principles of science. It allows us to avoid considering every crazy possibility that could be causing the evidence we see, even ones written down in old books. That's not to say that your partners' hypothesis is wrong. It COULD be correct, but science does not allow you to pursue it nonetheless.
Your friend argues with you: Having a single intelligent actor is a much simpler theory than imagining that the electricity went out in each of these houses separately and simultaneously. What is the probability that the lights went out in all of these houses at precisely the same time just due to random chance? It's impossible! There must have been some intelligence at work. You counter that all the data you see has just one common cause (the lightning bolt), and in fact only that one cause had to happen by chance, all the rest of your observations follow from what we already know about electricity and the electric grid.
The argument of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design follows a similar course. Evolution does not require an omnipotent being who simultaneously created all the diversity of life we see on the earth. It only requires a single random event (the formation of some primitive amoeba-type life form). After that point, everything we already know about the process of evolution explains all the diversity of life.
Ben Stein argues: but the Intelligent Design hypothesis also explains how life got started; whereas evolution only tells us how life changed once it got started. However, in reality, Intelligent Design does nothing like that. It explains how life got started by creating an even harder problem to explain. Namely: how did that intelligent force come into being? If you answer that the being "always existed", then a simpler overall theory is that the whole universe just "always existed" without the intelligent being.
That's why Intelligent Design is not Science and has no business in a High School Science class let alone at a scientific research institution.
It is a testament to the abysmal American education system that nearly 200 years after the birth of Darwin, a majority of Americans believed in "Creationism" or "Intelligent Design" (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223.shtml). Many scientists I know feel that to argue with these people is futile, and those people might be right... I guess that's just a chance I'm prepared to take...
I recently saw a "documentary" called "Expelled" by Ben Stein. This is a documentary in the same way that Fahrenheit 911 was a documentary, i.e., it was an editorial. In this case, it was a pro-Creationist editorial by Ben Stein. Despite claiming to interview a wide variety of scientists, pretty much every argument in favor of evolution presented in this movie comes out of Ben Stein's mouth. I don't think any scientist gets more than 15 consecutive seconds of air time.
Despite it's total failure as an objective documentary, this film correctly makes the point that legitimate scientists are absolutely closed to the idea of intelligent design. It's true: Intelligent Design is off the table for discussion as a scientific theory. If a "scientist" at a University proposes it as a viable scientific theory (in the absence of new phenomenological evidence), then that University has a right to take a second or third look at that person and deny tenure or whatever. The movie proceeded to cast that fact as academia being "blinded", "closed-minded", and "violating intellectual freedom".
In truth science does dramatically restrict intellectual freedom in the sense that only theories which are scientific can be considered viable. That is precisely the power of science! It allows us to focus our attention on only the most plausible hypotheses given the evidence. This is in contradiction to religion and other superstitions which allow anyone to believe anything just because it was written down in a book or carved onto a tablet by some dudes thousands of years before their descendants discovered that the earth rotates about the sun.
Why is Intelligent Design not a plausible hypothesis? The "simple" answer is that it does not answer any questions that a much simpler theory (evolution) does not already answer. Science is not just about posing hypotheses and testing them. The most important principle in science is that of parsimony: in order for any theory to be worthy of consideration by a scientist, it must explain some phenomena that is not already explained by a simpler theory.
Why is Intelligent Design less simple than evolution? Maybe I can answer with an allegory:
Imagine you are detective driving during a thunderstorm in a neighbourhood with your partner. All of a sudden a flash of lightning appears, and a second later all the lights in the houses around you go out. You are pretty sure you understand what happened, yet your partner speaks up with his own hypothesis: A malevolent electrician, somewhere in a power station, cut the power to all the houses. You as police should begin an investigation to test if this is what happened. The fact that your partner proposed this doesn't surprise you one bit because he's been obsessed with malevolent electricians ever since he had a life-changing encounter with a wall socket.
Would you consider launching the investigation? Of course not. What then is the general principle guiding that decision?
The reason that hypothesis is off the table is because it's much simpler to say that the bolt of lightning that occurred just before the outage struck some power lines and caused the power to be cut to the neighborhood. That instinct to prefer simpler theories is fundamental to human ability to understand our world, and it is one of the core principles of science. It allows us to avoid considering every crazy possibility that could be causing the evidence we see, even ones written down in old books. That's not to say that your partners' hypothesis is wrong. It COULD be correct, but science does not allow you to pursue it nonetheless.
Your friend argues with you: Having a single intelligent actor is a much simpler theory than imagining that the electricity went out in each of these houses separately and simultaneously. What is the probability that the lights went out in all of these houses at precisely the same time just due to random chance? It's impossible! There must have been some intelligence at work. You counter that all the data you see has just one common cause (the lightning bolt), and in fact only that one cause had to happen by chance, all the rest of your observations follow from what we already know about electricity and the electric grid.
The argument of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design follows a similar course. Evolution does not require an omnipotent being who simultaneously created all the diversity of life we see on the earth. It only requires a single random event (the formation of some primitive amoeba-type life form). After that point, everything we already know about the process of evolution explains all the diversity of life.
Ben Stein argues: but the Intelligent Design hypothesis also explains how life got started; whereas evolution only tells us how life changed once it got started. However, in reality, Intelligent Design does nothing like that. It explains how life got started by creating an even harder problem to explain. Namely: how did that intelligent force come into being? If you answer that the being "always existed", then a simpler overall theory is that the whole universe just "always existed" without the intelligent being.
That's why Intelligent Design is not Science and has no business in a High School Science class let alone at a scientific research institution.