My old pal Attila Girl is a fan of the upcoming film from Ben Stein entitled "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" which was recently screend at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting in Washington D.C. I haven't seen the film, but a longish preview is available online. It purports to tell the story of how academics at American universities are suppressing discussion of Intelligent design creationism, which they claim to be a legitimate scientific theory.
Now, I don't rant that much, but every once in a while, one is called for. So here it goes.
Hostility to evolutionary biology has been a feature of certain parts of the American political and religious landscape for many years, although it has been much less of an issue in most other countries. Most religious denominations and indeed most Christian leaders have made their peace with the basic tenets of evolution: that all present life on Earth derives from a common 3.5-billion-year-old ancestor, and that living things change slowly through a random process of genetic mutation coupled with natural selection. Indeed, Pope John Paul II made this point in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled “Truth Cannot Contradict the Truth.” He said, “Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical [a previous statement from Pope Pius XII in 1950 that said there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith], new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.”
But fundamentalist Christians adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis and have for many years sought to have this biblical view taught in American public schools. When these attempts were repeatedly banned by the courts on the basis of the Constitutional separation of church and state, a new strategy was born called “scientific creationism.” A group of fundamentalist American Christians attempted to claim that careful examination of the geological and biological record supports the story of Genesis—that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that all species were created simultaneously, and that mass extinctions seen in the fossil record were caused by the Noah’s flood. But this argument also failed. Not only was it impossible to marshal the evidence to support these claims scientifically, but, in the words of the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, “American courts clearly spied clerical collars beneath the lab coats” and struck down teaching of so-called scientific creationism in schools.
In the 1990s yet another strategy was developed. Recognizing that explicit references to religion would always be rejected by the courts, a group of fundamentalist Christian academics took a step back and sought to devise a theory that would challenge evolutionary biology but would appear to be scientifically reasonable. This movement, dubbed “intelligent design,” does not try to provide support for such obviously scientifically untenable points as a 6,000-year-old Earth, Noah’s flood, or other aspects of the Genesis story. In fact, when talking to the world at large, the supporters of intelligent design are careful not to mention God or religion at all. Rather, they claim that living creatures are just too intricate and clever to have arisen by random mutation and selection. These forms, they say, are too elegant and too complex to attribute to anything other than a very clever designer. Therefore, an unspecified intelligent designer must be at work. In this way of thinking, gradual change of living things is admitted and the fossil record and the genetic relationships between living organisms can be accounted for, but the engine driving this change is challenged.
The crux of the matter is this: intelligent design purports to be a scientific theory, but it isn’t. Pope John Paul II hit one out of the ballpark when he offered the following definition. “A theory is a metascientific elaboration distinct from the results of observation but consistent with them. By means of it, a series of independent data and facts can be related and interpreted in a unified explanation. A theory’s validity depends on whether or not it can be falsified. It is continually tested against the facts; wherever it can no longer explain the latter, it shows its limitations and unsuitability. It must then be rethought” (address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 23, 1996).
Evolution is a true scientific theory. It can be falsified by particular findings, such as a hominid skeleton dated to the Jurassic Era. Intelligent design is not. It rests on a subjective inference of design that is not subject to a falsifying experimen or observation. It is not surprising that despite lavish funding from certain religious and political groups, the intelligent design movement has provided no fieldwork or laboratory experimentation to bolster its claims. Yes, books are written, papers are presented and published, and even mathematical models are constructed. All the trappings of science are there, but there is no science at the core.
Is the goal of the intelligent design movement really to do legitimate science to challenge the theory of evolution, or is its goal merely to craft a sufficiently watered-down view of creationism to appear scientific and thereby gain a placeat the debating table and fly under the radar of the courts? Although intelligent design proponents are careful not to mention religion in public hearings or debates, quite a different picture emerges when they are addressing fundamentalist Christian audiences. Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley, one of the founders of the intelligent design movement, said, “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools” (American Family Radio, January 10, 2003). William Dembski of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, another well-known intelligent design proponent, has stated, “Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory” (Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July 1999).
In its public face, intelligent design has been cleverly crafted to appear as a legitimate scientific theory with no ties to a specific religious agenda. This gives political cover to politicians and school board members who can adopt a tone of fairness in saying, “Let’s present our students with both sides of this fascinating scientific debate.”
Intelligent design creationism is a perfectly legitimate topic of academic discussion, but not in science class or in scientific journals. It should be taught in comparative religion class alongside accounts of the Judeo-Christian Biblical flood, Native American origin tales, astrology, healing with crystals and other expressions of faith.