Much ado about I.D.

You may have heard about a little scuffle they're having out in Kansas. Some school governing body is holding 'hearings' to decide whether a "theory" called Intelligent Design should be taught along with Evolution in Kansas schools.

Your first question, if you aren't familiar with the issue, is: What's Intelligent Design? It's a mercifully simple idea. I.D. people note that there are certain flaws in the evolution theory, or more accurately, things we haven't explained yet. I.D. people say that these issues are, in fact, insoluble, and cannot be explained without some sort of designer. Even in millions of years, they say, random mutation cannot account for the development of life.

I should note that the ideas of Intelligent Design are not far off from my own. I believe there is a divine being running the show, and I believe that being designed, created, and is testing that design around us as we speak. I think some amount of evolution is just about undeniable, but I also can see the holes in our current theories. There are questions to be answered.

Having said that, I can say with absolute certainty that I.D. does not belong in our science classrooms, and I'll tell you why: It's not science. At best, it's very very bad science, and very bad science is the last thing we need in classrooms.

Arguments like the one about I.D. are able to happen, I think, because most people, having spent at least a few years in high school studying it, don't have a clear idea of what science is. High school doesn't touch this topic too much. The main issue is to learn facts and formulas. Philosophy of Science must seem a bit of a waste to most teachers. And with the horizons of science expanding so rapidly every day, it must seem like a hopeless battle. But understanding philosophy of science, I would argue, is the most important thing in science education. The particulars can be learned at leisure. But to do so, an understanding of what science is and how it works is critical. We're going to consider two questions: What is science, and what is good science? And why is I.D. neither?

Put simply, science is the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of ideas that can be proven wrong. There is a great myth, encouraged, I'd say, by the media, that science "proves things". Nothing could be further from the truth. Many a bleary eyed dieter has suffered this effect trying to decide if a particular food is "good for you" or "bad for you". So you turn on the news, and some sound-bite pedlar tells you "Scientists today say bran is good for you." Anyone who's read a real piece of scientific writing or research knows this is simply not so. When a scientist wants to demonstrate something, they go through a simple, rigorous process. We look at things in the world, and we have ideas as to how they work. So far, we have no science. To cross that threshold, we must construct a test. For instance, gravity. We all know that when we jump up, we come back down, but why? The greeks thought there were two forces, one called levity that helped birds fly, and gravity, which kept is down. But why is levity not working so well on us? Newton had a better idea. Matter (i.e. Stuff) has gravity. Every bit of matter has a certain amount. The more matter, the more matter. It's a force of the universe between atoms. Einstein had an even better idea: Gravity is the result of stuff actually bending space and time. Lots of matter bend space and time a lot.

Now, why did people like Newton's explanation better than its predecessor? Well, Newton made up a formula for gravity describing how much gravity a given amount of matter should have. So many years later, scientists were looking at the planets. They looked at Uranus and Saturn and Jupiter, and something was wrong. Given the known planet's size, speed, and calculated gravity, they weren't moving right. Scientists figured out that for those planets to move as they did, there would have to be another planet of a certain mass at a certain position moving at a certain speed. So they figured out where such a planet ought to be, they pointed their telescopes thither, and lo and behold, there lay Neptune!

This is an example of good science. What makes it good? Well, when Newton wrote up his theory of gravitation, he didn't know about Neptune. He was just writing about what he saw. But he predicted how things would work elsewhere. Years later, those tests were tried out in a novel situation, and worked like gangbusters. This is how we decide that a theory is a good one. If it predicts things for which it has no knowledge, and proves right, it's good.

I.D. does not predict anything. It simply notes flaws in the current theories regarding the development of life, throws up its hands, and says "Can't explaining it! It must be a designer!"

It's at least possible that this is so. But no method is provided to prove the idea wrong. If we had pointed our telescopes at where Newton's laws predicted a planet would be, and found nothing there, we would have had reason to believe that Newton was wrong. As it turns out, we do find little cracks in Newtonian gravity, and have built better explanations to account for them. But the important thing is: There was a test. I.D. provides no such thing. In fact, I.D. is symptomatic of a deeper issue in the sciences that cuts both ways.

To illustrate this issue, lot's consider a piece of cheese. (Bare with me.) Imagine we cut it in half, then again, and again. How small could we cut the cheese (snicker) before we could no longer cut it. What, in other words, is the smallest particle? Well, eventually, we'd reach cells. and then we'd reach molecules, and atoms, and protons. Then we'd find things like quarks, muons, bosons, and even more strangely named particalia.

Are these the smallest? Who knows. Indeed, how would you know when you'd reached the bottom? It's certainly plausible that you could reach the bottom, smallest piece, but there's no way you could know for certain that you had done so.

Our ability to have as good an idea of the situation as we do is thanks largely to superior tools of observation. Powerful telescopes, microscopes, and gauging devices give us an ever sharper picture of what is out there. But the tools could certainly be sharper, and one hopes, they one day will be. It's possible, indeed probable, that one day our future tools will shake up all our current ideas. And in the goodness of time, those tools and ideas will be shaken as well. It's a game that probably never ends, because much though the media, and even scientists themselves might like you to believe, science has no real end game we know of. Science is very bad at fingering ultimate truth. Instead, science chops off bad ideas, and makes an educated guess with what is left. As an ecology teacher told me in college "Science never proves, it disproves."

Most people find such a notion supremely disappointing. It is in this utterly human attitude that religion and philosophy find their stock and trade. Religion and philosophy grow ideas like a majestic vine, as science follows along, chopping off the bad branches. Without imaginative ideas, there could be no science. Without care and grooming, the vine would become a sick and tangled mess, which might not be so bad, but often tends to be.

Which brings us back to I.D. As I said in the beginning, the ideas of I.D. are closely aligned with my own. It's a fine idea. But it makes no testable claims, and that is why it is science. As we have seen, to say that because an idea doesn't have all the answers, it is therefore invalid is simply wrong. Science isn't designed to bring the answers. It's designed to narrow the pool of possibilities. Ideas that do so should be taught in a science classroom. For anything else, there are many, many venues. Hand throwing theories that say anything "must be true" belong elsewhere. Here's hoping the board in Kansas comes to understand this.