Defining ScienceBarbara ForrestProfessor of Philosophy "Only a Theory" A theory in science is an explanation. It's a large system which has withstood some very, very rigorous testing, literally attempts to debunk it, and has survived all of those attempts. So when creationists try to dismiss evolution as "only a theory," they are misusing the word theory. They are using it in the ordinary sense, the non-scientific sense, of a hunch or a guess, and that's not what it means at all. If you have a scientific theory, you have already done years, decades, of scientific work, hard scientific research that you have offered to the scientific community for their evaluation. But never a single time has any intelligent-design creationist ever done that. Yet they've created a public relations concoction that they present to the public and to the media that they have some cutting-edge science that really needs to be taught to children—that there is another side to this issue and it's only fair to tell it to the kids. Well, there aren't two scientific sides to this issue, because there aren't two scientific theories. There's only one. And if you believe that children should be told the truth, you have to tell them that the only scientific theory which explains the shape of life on Earth is evolutionary theory. And if you tell them anything other than that, you're not telling them the truth, and that's hardly fair. Nick MatzkePublic Information Project Director Avoiding the Supernatural If you really look at the history of science, many scientific fields really didn't get started until supernatural explanations were discarded and natural explanations were adopted. Before evolution, this happened in geology, it happened in physics. A famous example is Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1700s proposed that lightning and electricity were the same thing, and proposed that lightning rods could stop lightning bolts from hitting church steeples and burning down churches. Some people accused Franklin of thwarting the will of God by doing this, but most people said Franklin had proposed a useful, natural explanation for a natural phenomenon and come up with a solution to a natural problem. This is really fundamental to the history of science, the reliance on natural explanations. And it's not a trivial thing to just toss that out, particularly when the proponents of supernaturalism in science have nothing to propose except a miracle, except God did it or an intelligent designer did it, end of story, stop the investigation. Scientists are never gonna buy that. And when a judge hears that, naturally a conservative judge isn't going to just redefine science and conduct a major scientific revolution on the say-so of a few intelligent-design experts. So the whole idea of redefining science really came back to bite the intelligent-design guys in the trial, and it really backfired. Ken MillerBiologist Science and Religion Now, religion can also be defined in a whole variety of ways. What religion, I think, is, in a certain sense, is the attempt to account for the world which we see in terms that transcend the natural. In other words, in terms that include the natural world, but enclose it in a kind of spiritual worldview. This makes religion, I think, fundamentally a different kind of intellectual exercise from science. There is absolutely no problem to a person of faith—and I'll include myself in this—for positing God as a cause of certain things. For all I know, my own ability to overcome a crisis in my life when I was 24 years old was due to the support that I prayed for from God. God could be responsible, no question about it, for the first living cell, or for certain animals that appeared in the Cambrian Explosion, or for the '69 Mets, which I've never been able to explain any other way. And I say that not to trivialize the idea, but to point out that supernatural causes for natural phenomena are always possible. What's different, however, in the scientific view of this, is the acknowledgment, by scientists such as myself, even scientists who are people of faith, that if supernatural causes are there and are active, they are above our capacity to analyze and interpret. Saying that something has a supernatural cause is always possible. But saying that the supernatural can be investigated by science, which always has to work by natural tools and mechanisms, that's simply incorrect. So, by placing the supernatural as a cause in science, you effectively have what you might call a science-stopper. If you attribute an event to the supernatural, you can by definition investigate it no further.
On Isaac Newton The point here is that what Newton and other scientists did was to assume that the universe made sense because it had a designer, and then to use what we would call ordinary material scientific methods to investigate that universe. That's just what science does today. What intelligent design pretends to do is to be in the tradition of Newton. What intelligent design actually is, to be perfectly honest, is they're in the tradition of the Middle Ages, where they stop investigation by saying, "We cannot answer this mystery; it is the work of God, the designer." This is a science-stopper. Kevin PadianPaleontologist A Solid Theory The difference between what a theory means to the average person and what it means to a scientist is really completely opposite, because theories are very strong concepts in science. A theory is something that has been tested and tested over and over again, built on, revised. It continues to be reworked and revised. The theory of evolution today is not like it was a hundred years ago. We have molecular genetics. We have developmental evolutionary biology. We have far more fossils than we had before. We have better kinds of phylogenetic techniques. Everything is improving through science. All of these things are becoming much better and better known. And, so there's no crisis in evolution. It's healthier than ever. Do we have controversies? Sure, we do. Sure, we do. But, they're not about whether evolution occurred, or whether you can possibly see a unity to the ancestry of life. Those issues were settled. They were settled a century and a half ago. Robert T. PennockPhilosopher and Evolutionary
Scientist Natural Explanations There's a big fancy term for this, it's methodological naturalism … scientific naturalism. And it says we can't appeal to the transcendent; we can't appeal to the divine. Probably the simplest way to explain this is in terms of a nice cartoon that Sidney Harris did in American Scientist a long time ago. It's got a scientist standing in front of a blackboard, and he's obviously been working at his series of equations and it covers the blackboard, but there's a gap in the middle. It's been too hard; he can't figure it out. And he's written in there, "Then a miracle occurs." And his colleague is looking at this and says, "I think you need to be a little more explicit there in step two." And that, in sort of a cartoon version, is what
methodological naturalism is. It Science Is Not Dogmatic Evolution is portrayed by creationists as being equivalent to atheism. But that's not part of the definition of evolution. Evolution is just what we have discovered empirically using the normal scientific approach. One can set aside the question theologically about what that means; that's to depart from science itself. That's to bring in religion, to bring in philosophy—I'm certainly not opposed to any of that as a philosopher of science. But it's important for us to keep those things distinct conceptually. Science itself, when done properly, isn't dogmatic, isn't religious. It's just a way of investigating the natural world, in the best way that we natural beings are able to do it. Eugenie ScottExecutive Director Science Tests Its Claims If you teach intelligent design as a science, you are confusing students about the nature of science, about science as a way of knowing, the scientific method. You're also confusing students and miseducating students about the position of evolution within science. Evolution is no more controversial in modern-day science than heliocentrism—that the planets go around the sun. There are individuals out there advocating geocentrism—that the sun goes around the Earth. But we don't give them equal time in the high school science class just because it's fair. Neil ShubinPaleontologist The Power of Science It's really important to me that the public understand evolution, because there's great power in scientific knowledge. Evolution is the centrally unifying concept for all of biology. It unifies observations as different as genetics and ecology and so forth. Evolution is not a theory in crisis by any stretch of the imagination. But, that being said, do we disagree about how evolution acts, even some of the mechanisms? Absolutely. That's the sign of a vital and successful theory. But does it mean we throw away scientific understanding altogether? No way, that would be a tragic mistake. Scientific knowledge has a special place in our world because it's testable. It's something we always have to compare against the real world. And many of the great breakthroughs in our world are coming from science. Not only technology, but new understandings about ourselves, our bodies, our climate, our world, are coming from scientific information. If children are somehow shielded from all that, we're doing them a great disservice. |
|
Intelligent Design on Trial Home | Send Feedback | Image Credits | Support NOVA |
© | Created October 2007 |
|