So, the controversy is on again.
What is “Intelligent Design” (ID)? It’s nothing more than a marketing plan to disguise Creationism as a science. Never mind that it doesn’t have anything to do with the scientific method at all – science is based on hypotheses, which are then tested and proved or disproved. But Creationism can’t be either. “Proof” would perhaps include God popping up and showing people how He did it; disproving it is ineffective, because, no matter what the observation of reality tells us, creationists will always reply by saying “God made it so”, or “God disguised His actions to test our faith”.
To creationists, it’s a question of faith. So far, so good – I don’t share it, I think it contradicts too much of what I see and I think it’s a “crutch”, but, fine, to each his own. Most Christians accept the idea that the Bible tells some stories as metaphors, and they have no problem at all with the idea of God creating a universe with Evolution. Creationists aren’t like that, though: to them, every word in the Bible is to be believed literally.
What really irks me is when they try to pass Creationism off as a science (by calling it “ID”), as an “alternative” to Evolution. And now, the guy who is probably the most powerful man in the world is doing it too.
These people believe that the world is about 6000 years old, that it was created exactly like it says in the book of Genesis, that there was a flood and Noah had to collect a pair of every species in the world (how many thousands of insect species are there, anyway?). If analysis of fossils show them to be 75 000 000 years old, they will just say something like “it’s like that to test our faith in the Bible”, or “science has shown itself to be fallible many times” (true, but it’s still the best thing we’ve got – it certainly beats the alternative of accepting things as dogma without proof, even when reality contradicts them). Or they will just use the best escape exit in the world, “God works in mysterious ways”. That really answers everything, doesn’t it?
Really, how some people can say things like “God created many things in the world that contradict the Bible, in order to test our faith“ with a straight face is beyond me…
For ID to be a real science, it would have to be studied scientifically. But that is impossible – as I said, it can’t either be proved or disproved. In this case, it’s not a science, since it doesn’t fit the requirements. Therefore, it’s OK for it to be taught in a religion class, certainly. Or in a history class, or a philosophy class. But never in a biology class, and never as a science, as an “alternative, but equally valid” alternative to Evolution. That is, as someone once said, like teaching the “theory” that babies are carried by storks as a “valid” alternative to sexuality, pregnancy and birth.
In a rational world, a certain president would be declared unfit, and replaced. Unfortunately, people aren’t rational…
Related posts:
Tags: intelligent design, religion
Subscribe to this blog
The problem with what you’ve written here is that most of it is simply false. ID is quite distinct from creationism; it operates within the sphere of scientific method, generating and testing hyphothesis; it is falsifiable based on those hypotheses; many of the scientists who are promoting ID do not believe in the Bible; I don’t think there is any ID theorist who believes in the “young earth”; ID scientists have hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to their credit; and your post here is quite misinformed overall.
But I don’t hold that against anyone except for the media and commentators who have also been spreading this kind of misinformation.
Thanks for the reply (and it’s nice to have one which completely disagrees with me! What took you people so long?
).
I can accept that ID isn’t necessarily the same as Creationism, but Bush’s version of it certainly is. Sometimes, though, people say “aliens” instead of “God”. They can’t, anyway, accept that maybe things occur and have ocurred naturally, that Occam’s Razor means that, if it could happen both with and without a designer, then the hypothesis with the least number of elements is the most likely one.
Anyway, there’s more about this here – and said much better than I could.
Didn’t we already do this with Galileo?
Sean: not the same thing. They persecuted Galileo for religious reasons, because, well, they could. Now that they really can’t (though that doesn’t stop them from trying), they try other ways. It’s not enough to have creationism taught in religion classes, they want it in science classes as well. So they give it another name and call it a “science”…
Perhaps the panspermia or exogenesis theories are a better example of the testable scientific method, I suppose?
Even the best evolutionary theories, at some point, rest on untested and unverifiable hypothetical assumptions. It takes as much faith to believe in life out of choas as it does life from a design.
Regards,
Rich.
Well, the problem is that originally ID was the theory that evolution and all science was working side-by-side with some higher power, just by the great complexity and chance involved with creating life. There’s alot more to it than that, but it would take along time to explain. The fact is, Intelligent Design, in its original and true form, did not discount any theory in science whatsoever.
But the second the religious extremists heard about a theory that combined credible science with a belief in the higher power, they jumped on the bandwagon and bastardized it into what it is now, which is a thinly veiled guise of creationism.
It’s a shame to the moderate christians, who are the majority of christians, by the way, that ID was not allowed to remain as it was, and be a way for people to reconcile their beliefs with science and religion.
Also, any moderate christian does not want in any way shape or form, to have ID taught in schools. That is ridiculous and benefits noone.