richardf8 | A Thought on Intelligent Design, from someone who articulated it very well.

I was going to write a great big long thoughtful post on "Intelligent Design" but then

gil_liant wrote this big long thoughtful comment on this post of

chipuni's. It says pretty much everything I was planning to say on the matter, so I am sharing it.

Here it is quoted in its entirety.

My own 'aha' moment with ID took a different tack. I kept trying to understand why people wanted something that was not derived according to the principles of the Scientific method taught in Science classrooms. I didn't have any difficulty at all understanding why they wanted it taught, but why there.

'Science' purports to be a method by which we may discover 'Truth' about the Reality in which we live. (And, in my personal opinion, it's a pretty successful method.) 'Faith' or 'Belief' is alleged to be another path to understanding Reality -- one which does not depend upon experiment or evidence. (Specific faiths or beliefs, of course, have many different foundations -- accounts, authorities, experiences, visitations, etc. -- but not repeatable experiments and careful observations collected in the form of evidence to prove or disprove hypotheses.)

We teach a lot of good science in our science classrooms. (When the legislators allow us. We probably also teach a lot of bad science, too.) What (IMHO) most scientists aren't realizing is that we are teaching one crucial piece of non-science as well: The Scientific Method. And, more specifically, the belief that the Scientific Method does help the user to apprehend Reality.

To people accustomed to relying on Faith, rather than reason, this must seem a glaringly obvious attack on their beliefs. They probably can't conceive of the fact that most sincere scientists don't actually understand why the ID crowd takes such (on the face of it) ludicrous and ignorant positions about Science. They (the scientists) keep asking, "Where are your hypotheses? Where are your experiments? Where is your evidence?"

The point (again IMHO) is that, even though every science student is taught that "you can use the Method on itself to verify itself", that's a suspect and circular argument. It's like using a speedometer to calibrate itself. You can demonstrate that the Method gives self-consistent results, but you can't guarantee how closely those results correspond with the underlying nature of the Reality in which we live. That is a matter of personal belief. (Of course, people who adopt wildly unsuccessful personal beliefs tend to die off from walking off of rooftops or refusing needed appendectomies, so we can certainly say that Science is a successful belief, but it's obviously not the only successful belief.)

So, (and here I can only wildly conjecture) to the 'anti-Science' crowd, they must look at all the facts and history and results that Science has produced over the years as being fundamentally identical to their own creeds and rituals and texts: needful and useful outgrowths of their central tenets, but secondary to the central issue: What is Reality, and how can I align myself more closely with it? If we (i.e., the 'pro-Science' crowd) are teaching our 'belief' in Science class, they ought to be entitled to 'equal time'.

Of course, to my mind, Science is more like Accounting, or Physics, or even Law. It may have nothing to do with Reality, but it's a useful combination of techniques that have demonstrated their success at making things happen according to the user's wishes -- in this case the wish to understand more about how things are going to behave. (The best way, IMHO, to understand what something is going to do is to know why it does anything at all. Whenever a scientist figures out a new 'why' they get positively giddy, like little schoolchildren. It's so cute. ^_^) It has been deemed too useful not to teach to young children in order to prepare them for life in the modern age. Just like (only much moreso) 'Modern American History', it doesn;t matter if it's 'True' or not -- only that knowing it will help you get along as a citizen in today's world.

For that reason, I think Science class should remain the preserve exclusively of Science, and they should take the other stuff and put it back in the Philosophy and Religion classrooms in which it belongs. Ultimately, even, the two philosophies need not be incompatible. There can be some things we choose to believe without experiment or evidence, and other things we believe on the basis of evidence, because we have also chosen to subscribe to the Scientific Method. But for those whose beliefs reject the Method as a path to 'Truth', 'Science Class' is just a synonym for 'pagan Sunday School'. "And if you're going to teach 'theirs', you need to teach 'ours', too."

I don't know how to get them to go away and stop wasting everyone's time, but I do think the first step may be to clarify the distinction betwen what is and isn't Science, and get them to agree that only Science belongs in Science classrooms. Unfortunately, for the moment, Science classrooms are also where we teach the Method, itself, and that hampers our argument unless we can consciously recognize and address that issue.