In this Issue
Definitions
Court History of Creationism
Is Intelligent Design a Science?
Intelligent Design Not Accepted
Does Intelligent Design Fit in School?
Frequently Asked Questions about ID
Wedging Into the Academy
HML Officers and Directors
• Evolution: Maintains humans and all other
organisms have a common ancestry, beginning with one-celled creatures almost 4
billion years ago. Differences in organisms are a result of mutations and the
process of natural selection, where desirable traits are passed on to future
generations.
• Creationism: Maintains a supreme being or deity created the universe,
the Earth and human beings. Many variations exist under that umbrella.
Young-Earth creationists say the Earth is a few thousand years old and came
about as described in the Bible's Book of Genesis. Old-Earth creationists
agree that God created the universe but say the Bible can't be taken literally
when it comes to details such as the age of the Earth. They generally accept
what astronomers and geologists say about the Earth's age.
• Intelligent design: Maintains an intelligent cause rather than the
random process of natural selection and mutation best explains some features
of the natural world, particularly in certain organisms that are "irreducibly
complex" and that could not have existed in a simpler form. Identifying the
intelligence behind the design is not a prerequisite, but many supporters
point to God.
Sources: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Discovery
Institute, Wikipedia.com
• 1925 -- Scopes "Monkey Trial" lays groundwork
A Tennessee law public schools from teaching any theory that denied the
biblical creation story or asserted that humans evolved from lower animals.
Teacher John T. Scopes willingly tested the law and was convicted. The
Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law on appeal but set aside the conviction
on a technical matter.
• 1968 -- Bans against teaching of evolution struck down
Arkansas had a version of the Tennessee law used to prosecute Scopes. A
biology teacher in Little Rock challenged the law, and the U.S. Supreme Court
struck it down, saying a prohibition against teaching evolution violated the
First Amendment.
• 1987 -- Requirements for equal time for creationism rejected
Louisiana had a law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools
unless it was accompanied by instruction in "creation science." The Supreme
Court said creationism was a religious belief and violated the First
Amendment's prohibition against the establishment of religion.
• 2005 -- Textbook disclaimers questioning evolution illegal
The Cobb County, Ga., school district in 2002 began placing stickers on
science textbooks stating that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." A federal
judge in January ordered the removal of the stickers, reasoning that they were
an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because they were created to
appease religious objections to evolution. The district is appealing.
• 2005 -- "Intelligent design" in the curriculum
A school district in Dover, Pa., said in October 2004 that it would include
teaching on intelligent design in its ninth-grade science curriculum. Eight
families filed suit in December, claiming it violates the separation of church
and state. The case is pending.
Sources: Wikipedia
By Jill Lawrence, USA Today
That's the question a U.S. district court judge in Harrisburg will consider starting Sept. 26, and Dover voters will weigh Nov. 4.
The two tests arise from a long struggle to discredit evolution, the theory that life forms evolved over billions of years through a natural process. Though broadly accepted by scientists, evolution has long been challenged by creationists who say God created the universe.
Courts repeatedly have found that teaching creationism in public schools amounts to promoting a religious viewpoint, in violation of the Constitution.
Now come intelligent-design advocates. Hoping to avoid church-state conflicts, they don't discuss the identity of the designer, and they deny any link to creationism. But Eric Rothschild, the attorney leading the challenge against Dover schools, says intelligent design is “a new form of creationism” that still violates the separation of church and state.
The Dover school district requires that biology classes, in addition to teaching evolution, include a one-minute statement that explicitly mentions intelligent design and a book on the subject published by a Christian foundation. That policy — believed by activists on both sides to be the only one of its kind in a U.S. school district — goes on trial Sept. 26 in a federal lawsuit filed by 11 parents against the Dover Area School Board
Intelligent design has a network of passionate scholars and supporters who have helped four states write science education standards critical of evolution. Intelligent design is a prominent topic in newspapers and magazines. President Bush recently heartened advocates when he said it should be taught along with evolution.
The Center for Science and Culture (CSC) and its parent, the Discovery Institute, are leading promoters of intelligent design. Their goal: “to see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life” by 2018.
by Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch
What is Intelligent Design (ID), and does it have a legitimate place in the high school science curriculum?
ID parallels but is not identical to creation science, the view that there is scientific evidence to support the Genesis account of the creation of the earth and of life.
ID and creation science share the belief that the mainstream scientific discipline of evolution is largely incorrect. Both involve an intervening deity, but ID is more vague about what happened and when.
Indeed, ID proponents are tactically silent on an alternative to common descent. Teachers exhorted to teach ID, then, are left with little to teach other than "evolution didn't happen."
An ID high school textbook, Of Pandas and People, mentions "creationism" only once, but this text is recognized by teachers and scientists as being very similar in content to creation science. Since Pandas was published in 1986, the two major innovations in ID have been Michael Behe's concept of "irreducible complexity," presented in Darwin's Black Box in 1996, and William Dembski's "design inference," presented in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology in 1999.
Dembski contends that he has developed an algorithm -–an "explanatory filter" -– that can distinguish the products of "intelligent design" from the workings of natural law and chance. Behe proposes that there are certain biochemical structures that, being "irreducibly complex," cannot have arisen through unguided natural processes.
Neither Dembski's design inference nor Behe's irreducible complexity has fared well in the scholarly world, however.
A search of scientific databases, such as PubMed or SciSearch, reveals that scholars have not applied the concept of irreducible complexity or the design inference in researching scientific problems.
ID has been called an "argument from ignorance," as it relies upon a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: Lacking a natural explanation, we assume intelligent cause.
Most scientists would reply that unexplained is not unexplainable, and that "we don't know yet" is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside of science.
A third important book of the ID movement is Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution, published in 2000, which claims that biology textbooks promote fraudulent and inaccurate science. Although the reviews of Wells' book by scientists have unanimously regarded it as dishonest and devoid of scientific or educational value, it is being widely circulated among creationists and cited at school board meetings around the country.
ID also includes a "cultural renewal" component, which focuses on ideological and religious rather than scholarly goals.
The Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) serves as an institutional home for virtually all of the prominent ID proponents, including Dembski, Behe, and Wells. The goals of the CRSC, as stated by the Discovery Institute's director Bruce Chapman, are explicitly religious: to promote Christian theism and to defeat philosophical materialism.
The sectarian orientation of the ID movement cannot be ignored in decisions about whether to include ID in the curriculum.
Courts repeatedly have held that the public school classroom must be religiously neutral and that schools must not advocate religious views. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that teaching creationism in the public schools is unconstitutional.
ID proponents may argue that a neutral-sounding "intelligence" is responsible for design, but it is clear from the "cultural renewal" aspect of ID that a deity -– in particular, God as He is conceived of by certain conservative Christians -– is envisioned as the agent of design. While schools can take no position on this view as religion, it cannot be regarded as science.
Thus, school board members and administrators would be ill-advised to include ID in the public school science curriculum.
If the scholarly aspect of ID becomes established –- if ID truly becomes incorporated into the scientific mainstream -– then, and only then, should school boards consider whether to add it to the curriculum.
Until that day, proposals to introduce ID into curricula should be met with polite but firm explanations that there is as yet no scientific evidence in favor of ID, that ID supporters are wrong to allege that evolution is intrinsically antireligious, and that the sectarian orientation of ID renders it unsuitable for constitutional reasons.
And school board members
should be aware that introducing ID into the curriculum is likely to lead to
strong opposition -– up to and including lawsuits -–from those, including
parents, teachers, scientists, and clergy, who do not want science education
to be compromised.
Reprinted with permission from School Board News, Aug. 13, 2002.
Science class?
Hmm. No testable hypotheses, no provable theories. Nope, it's not science.
History Class?
Hmm. It was started recently as a stealth option to sneak creationism in.
Sorry Charlie, it doesn't cut it as history; stick with the Scopes trial.
Religious Studies?
Hmm. Maybe. But with its substitution of a "designer" for "creator," it
takes God out of the picture and replaces Him with an entity that could be
Aliens, or Lovecraftian mutuants, or any powerful intelligence. Nope.
Gym? Maybe.
That's the only place where intelligent design can shape your body.
Q: What is
intelligent design?
A: Intelligent design (ID)
is a pseudoscientific set of beliefs based on the notion that life on earth is
so complex that it cannot be explained by the scientific theory of evolution
and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural entity.
Q: Is ID a scientific theory?
A: No. A scientific theory must be testable
and based on observable evidence. A scientific theory makes predictions about
occurrences in the natural world that can then be tested through scientific
experimentation. ID makes no predictions and cannot be scrutinized using the
scientific method. So although proponents of ID couch their views in
scientific terms, their assertion that ID is a scientific theory is false.
Q: How is ID like and unlike
traditional creationism and creation science?
A: ID is the most recent incarnation of the
evolving strategy that began with creationism and creation science. Unlike
creationism, ID does not openly state that it relies on a literal
interpretation of the Bible. ID does not discuss publicly the age of the
earth, and accepts some scientific evidence as fact. ID is like creationism
and creation science in that it assumes the existence of a supernatural
entity, but it does not declare that the entity is “God.”
Q: What is biological evolution?
A: Biological evolution is a scientific
theory that explains how life on earth has changed over time. The belief that
species have evolved existed before Darwin, and was first stimulated by
finding fossils of animals that no longer exist. Evolution has undergone many
important developments since Darwin's time, most notably the incorporation of
genetics. We know, though Darwin did not, that evolution is largely managed by
DNA.
Q: Why isn't ID a possible alternative
to evolution?
A: ID is not a scientific theory and
therefore cannot be put forward as an alternative to the scientific theory of
evolution. ID has no explanatory power or predictive power. It simply says
that some things that seem very complex could not have happened based on
natural causes. So where it sees complexity, it declares that it must have
been created by a supernatural entity. This is not science.
Q: Who is behind the ID movement?
A: The ID movement is led by a small group of
activists based at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture
(formerly Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in Seattle, WA. There
are very few credentialed scientists among the group's leadership, and those
who are scientists typically studied in fields unrelated to biology. Most
legitimate scientists who are people of faith accept the overwhelming evidence
supporting the scientific theory of evolution and see no conflict between the
two.
Q: What is the “Wedge Strategy?”
A: The
Wedge Strategy is an internal memorandum from the Discovery Institute that
was leaked to the Internet in 1999. Although ID proponents publicly declare
that they are neutral on many questions related to their religious
motivations, the Wedge document reveals in clear terms that their assertions
are at best deceptive. The document specifically outlines plans to reverse
prevailing scientific practices and methods, and makes clear that the
motivations of ID's main supporters are religious, not scientific.
Q: Why not “teach both sides”?
A: This would be like teaching astrology in
an astronomy course or alchemy in a chemistry class. There are not “two sides”
to the science. Evolution is a scientific theory that seeks to explain how
life on earth has changed over time, while ID is simply an ideology that
attacks science and asks that its ideas be accepted as if they are true.
Evolution and ID address different topics, employ different methods and
certainly should be judged by entirely different standards.
Q: How does ID undermine science
education?
A: Teaching ID as a so-called “alternative”
to evolution would misinform students as to the scientific standing of the
theory of evolution and the workings of the scientific method. In addition, it
would improperly prepare them for postsecondary science education, placing
them at a significant disadvantage to their peers. All scientists and
physicians who study such diseases as SARS and AIDS, as well as those who
trace how bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics, completely rely on
evolutionary theory to understand the phenomena they are examining.
Q: How does ID undermine religious
freedom?
A: ID is attempting to insert its particular
religious beliefs into science education – as if it were science. By trying to
use governments to give the prestigious label of “science” to their
controversial theories, they are misleading children and parents. By
attempting to elevate a single religious viewpoint over others and situating
religion in conflict with science, they are endangering the religious freedom
of all Americans. In the words of Theologian John F. Haught, “If a child of
mine were attending a biology class where the teacher proposed that students
consider ID as an alternative to…evolution I would be offended religiously as
well as intellectually.” (Haught, J, rep. App. 3,
tab F, at 7.)
Q: What's wrong with the claim that
evolution is “just a theory”?
A: Calling evolution “just a theory” is
deeply misleading because it confuses the everyday meaning of the word
“theory” (a “hunch” or an “opinion.”) with the scientific meaning (requiring
an explanation that is testable, grounded in evidence and able to predict
natural phenomena better than competing theories). The scientific theory of
evolution is one of the most robust theories in modern science. It has been
corroborated by hundreds of thousands of independent observations and has
succeeded in predicting natural phenomena in every field of the biological
sciences, from paleontology to molecular genetics. No persuasive evidence has
been put forward in the last 150 years to contradict the theory of evolution.
In the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the most prominent geneticists
of the 20 th century, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of
evolution.”
Q: Does the scientific theory of
evolution deny the existence of an intelligent designer or God?
A: No. Since the question of God's existence
is outside the realm of science, the theory of evolution is silent on it.
Darwin himself openly wondered about the existence of a supreme designer
throughout his life, but kept these questions separate from his scientific
work. Accepting evolution and belief in God are not mutually exclusive.
Q: Aren't there controversies among
scientists about evolution?
A: There are many debates within science
about aspects of any theory, and scientific theories are constantly being
revised as new and compelling information is learned. In evolution, as in all
areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. There are many important
debates within evolutionary theory. For example, did human evolution occur in
a steady succession of mutations or was there a sudden explosion in human
biodiversity at some point in history? Does evolutionary change occur mostly
as a result of individual mutations or group adaptation? How much of
evolutionary change occurs because of the need to adapt to changing
environments versus spontaneous genetic mutations? The list goes on. None of
these debates, however, undermines the scientific standing of evolution
itself.
Q: Why not teach ID as just one
controversy about evolution along with others?
A: Unlike real scientific theories, ID cannot
provide any evidence in favor of its conclusions – meaning that it is an
ideology and not science.
Q: But what about gaps in the theory
of evolution that cannot be explained by scientists?
A: Most important scientific theories have
gaps that need to be filled, and unanswered questions do not render a theory
invalid. Doubters of Galileo's theory of the earth's rotation around the sun
asked, why, if the earth is spinning, don't we all fly off it? It took roughly
a half-century for Isaac Newton to develop the theory of gravitational pull,
which answers this question. A scientific theory is not disqualified simply
because it raises new questions; in fact, the ability of a theory to inspire
new questions and experiments is a measure of its quality.
Q: Have the ID critiques of
evolutionary theory been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals?
A: Peer review is the standard process by
which scientists judge each other's work and deem it acceptable for
publication in scientific journals. Only one article supporting ID has ever
been published in a peer-reviewed journal – the Proceedings of the
Biological Society of Washington – and it was later disavowed by the
Society's governing council. The writer was a philosopher of science, not a
practicing scientist, and the article reported no original data.
Q: What do ID proponents mean by
“irreducible complexity” and how do they argue that this concept implies
design?
A: Michael Behe, a Discovery Institute
fellow, coined the term “irreducible complexity” as a description of organisms
that are so complex that they could not come into existence gradually. He uses
a mousetrap as an example: a mousetrap has many different parts, and if one of
them did not work, you wouldn't have an inferior mousetrap, rather your
mousetrap would not work at all. Therefore, you should assume that the
mousetrap must have had a designer. The principal flaw in his argument, which
has been repeatedly shown by scientists familiar with evolution, is that
no theory of evolution imagines that the complex entity spontaneously
appeared. The organism became complex over a long period of time, having
undergone gradual transformations. Indeed, Behe's “irreducible complexity” is
a perfect example of the flaw in ID. It sees a complex object, and without
understanding how it came into existence, imagines it must have been created
spontaneously.
Source:
http://www.aclu.org/ReligiousLiberty/ReligiousLiberty.cfm?ID=17204&c=139