WASHINGTON (ABP) — Teaching the alternative to Darwinian evolution known as “intelligent design” in American public schools would require fundamental shifts in one or both of two things — the way scientists generally understand the basic philosophy of their profession, and/or the way the nation’s courts interpret the First Amendment. But that hasn’t stopped proponents of the movement rom trying.
“While supernatural explanations [about the origins of life] may be important and have merit, they are not part of science,” wrote United States District Judge Stephen Jones III in a groundbreaking 2005 decision on the teaching of intelligent-design (ID) theory in a Pennsylvania school district. “ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world — forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test — which have produced changes in this world. While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory.”
Jones’ decision came in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which he declared unconstitutional a disclaimer the school board in the central Pennsylvania town of Dover had attempted to force biology teachers to read to their classes. It claimed there were flaws in evolutionary theory and suggested students interested in an alternative read Of Pandas and People, a textbook that promotes intelligent-design theory.
Jones — an appointee of President George W. Bush — concluded that intelligent-design theory asked questions and proposed answers that were fundamentally non-scientific, because they were theological in nature. The Dover policy was conceived by proponents of ID theory and promoted an ID textbook. Because of that, he said, the school district’s policy violated the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion.
The relatively small number of scientists who promote intelligent design propound it as a scientific challenge to some of the fundamentals of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which underpins modern evolutionary theory. ID proponents cite certain biological systems that they find too complex to have arisen from random mutations in living structures. They posit that such “irreducible complexity” points to an intelligent designer.
In scientific contexts, at least, they don’t argue that the designer is God. But virtually all of the scientists and organizations behind the ID movement have deep ties to conservative Christian groups.
The leading organization for ID proponents is the Discovery Institute, a conservative Seattle-based think tank. The organization has, in the past, pushed for the teaching of ID theory in schools at the secondary and university levels. More recently, the organization has backed away from support for ID teaching, instead calling on schools to “teach the controversy” that ID proponents claim exists over the validity of the overarching theory of evolution.
But an internal Discovery Institute document, leaked and published by ID opponents in 1999, said the organization’s goal in the ID debate was ultimately “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
ID proponents have tried — in the Dover case and through legislative attempts or attempts to revise statewide teaching standards — both to get public schools to teach ID or to at least raise doubts about the validity of overall evolutionary theory.
But almost all of the nation’s major scientific organizations have issued statements saying there is no scientific controversy about the overall validity of evolutionary theory.
“Some bills seek to discredit evolution by emphasizing so-called ‘flaws’ in the theory of evolution or ‘disagreements’ within the scientific community. Others insist that teachers have absolute freedom within their classrooms and cannot be disciplined for teaching non-scientific ‘alternatives’ to evolution. A number of bills require that students be taught to ‘critically analyze’ evolution or to understand ‘the controversy.’ But there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution,” read a 2006 statement by directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a coalition of the nation’s major scientific societies. “The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”
What legitimate scientific controversy exists over ID and purported flaws in evolutionary theory regards whether the basis of modern biology should be what the Discovery Institute has called “the materialist world-view that has dominated Western intellectual life since the 19th century.”
Materialism is the philosophical term for the idea that the only things that can scientifically be proven to exist consist of matter.
In a 2004 article on the backlash against ID theory, prominent ID proponent William Dembski wrote, “From our vantage, materialism is not a neutral, value-free, minimalist position from which to pursue inquiry. Rather, it is itself an ideology with an agenda. What’s more, it requires an evolutionary creation story to keep it afloat. On scientific grounds, we regard that creation story to be false.”
Hal Poe, the Charles Colson professor of faith and culture at Baptist-affiliated Union University, interviewed in response to the 2005 Dover decision, said he thinks neither intelligent design, in its current form, nor the aspect of evolution it challenges qualify as science.
“My view is that intelligent design at the present moment is philosophy of science rather than science,” he said. “With natural selection, you have the argument that mutations [in life forms over time] occur by random chance. The argument of intelligent design is that mutations occur through some intentionality.”
But both are predicated on competing philosophies of science, Poe said. Evolutionary theory predicates that natural selection is the process by which evolution takes place, and that its effects are scientifically measurable and observable. ID theory, meanwhile, is predicated on the philosophy that a non-natural explanation — the existence of an intelligent designer — is a legitimate form of scientific inquiry.
But he sees both as being different fundamental frameworks for viewing the results of scientific inquiry.
Not being able to question one’s own philosophical framework is “a major problem in the academy, because most scholars, most professors have no training in philosophy to recognize it when they see it,” Poe said.
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.
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