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Education

Journal frankie's Journal: Unintelligent Design 21

Journal by frankie

Yeah, I know everyone has already written about this. It still bugs me enough to do it again myself.

The largest damage done by ID is not that some kids in Kansas will be taught some extra bits of nonsense, it's that in order to accomplish this goal they explicitly redefined the word "science". ID is not science: it makes no predictions, it offers no verification. So the Kansas board of ed simply removed such requirements from their science curriculum. ANY explanation of how the world works, testable or not, may now be claimed as science. Arrr!

FWIW, ID is undeniably tautologous to Creationism. ID tries to dodge the God question by saying no one knows who created humans (et al). They say it could have been aliens or robots or some such. That argument is annihilated with one simple reply: Who designed THEM? How did they come to be? Were they created by God? Or did they ... evolve? The universe is finitely old; eventually you end up at the beginning.

But then we have the redefinition. You can't trap ID in an argument like that. Logical reasoning is irrelevant, just like the reality-based community that believes in it.

Someday, the (re-)United States will look back on this era of willful ignorance with sadness and ridicule. Personally, I doubt it will come in my lifetime, but I dearly hope (yes, to God) that my children will live to see it.

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Unintelligent Design

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  • Pharyngula covers the Kansas story [pharyngula.org].

    Part of the problem is that the media does such a poor job of covering school board elections that people with creationist agendas can sneak in by cozying up to local party officials. When the voters find out what a bunch of wingnuts they've elected, they often turn them out, as they just did in Dover, PA last night. All the IDers lost their seats.

  • As long as you believe ID is undeniably tautologous to Creationism then you will not see the incredible opportunity this offers. ID is not creationism; taught properly (with all of the evidence, including myths, scientific evidence, recent Papal Encyclicals on the subject, etc), ID opens the door to teach evolution *without offending hard core believers*. But if you believe the hype that the other side is trying to feed you, that ID means Young Earth Creationism and no evolution will be taught, then you'v
    • ID defines itself as an alternative to evolution. It is incompatible by design.

      Evolution, just like Gravity, Atoms, etc, is a verifiable scientific hypothesis with mountains of evidence backing it. ID is a philosophical proposition with no testable substance. Even if it were taught exactly as you suggest, it still has no business being in a science classroom.
      • ID defines itself as an alternative to evolution.

        No it doesn't- creationists define it as such, but not everybody who believes in ID defines it as such.

        It is incompatible by design.

        What design? All ID is is the theory that there is more to evolution than mere random chance. What ID is an alternative to is Spontaneous Genesis, not Evolution.

        Evolution, just like Gravity, Atoms, etc, is a verifiable scientific hypothesis with mountains of evidence backing it.

        Agreed. But Spontaneous Genesis is NOT.
        • For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the definition of ID as put forward by the Kansas Board of Education, and by the political campaigners who got them elected. Their curriculum lists ID as a specific alternative to evolution.

          The burden is on you to convince the politicians, lobbyists, and "experts" that your definition of ID is better than the one they currently have.

          Although it's true that Spontaneous Genesis is also affected by the Kansas decision, Evolution is what this was really all about.
          • For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the definition of ID as put forward by the Kansas Board of Education, and by the political campaigners who got them elected. Their curriculum lists ID as a specific alternative to evolution.

            And like I said in the great grandparent- by accepting THEIR definition of ID, science gets painted into a corner of being opposed to religion instead of a partner with religion.

            The burden is on you to convince the politicians, lobbyists, and "experts" that your definit
            • by accepting THEIR definition of ID

              Names are a system of mutual consensus. If government, business, AND media play by one definition while you doggedly retain another, you get nowhere. Until such time that you change enough other minds, I would instead say you believe in a strong but metaphoric interpretation of Genesis. It wasn't 7 literal days, and evolution was used to do it, but in the final analysis God is the one who created life.

              I believe roughly the same thing, except that you see direct interve

              • Names are a system of mutual consensus. If government, business, AND media play by one definition while you doggedly retain another, you get nowhere.

                Well, no- government and the media are playing by one definition, and businesses plus the majority of Christian individuals in this world are playing by another. What this is really about is government and the media being taken over by small minorities on the extremes of the question. I take great comfort in the fact that Tuesday Night, the voters in Dover,
                • encyclical supporting the form of ID I'm talking about

                  RCC does not lay claim to the specific phrase "Intelligent Design"(tm). Without substantial support for different ownership of those exact words, ID belongs to the stealth fundamentalists and conveys their definition. IMO, you need to pick a different catch phrase.

                  No randomness in the universe

                  Given a God who designed and created the Big Bang, there is no way to determine from inside the box whether or not every single moment was preplanned, from th

                  • RCC does not lay claim to the specific phrase "Intelligent Design"(tm). Without substantial support for different ownership of those exact words, ID belongs to the stealth fundamentalists and conveys their definition. IMO, you need to pick a different catch phrase.

                    Actually, Pope Benedict XVI, in a statement soon after the conclave elected him, laid claim to those exact words, explicitly denying "atheistic evolution". It's only in the last two weeks that two separate minor Vatican comittees have come out
      • Also- you do realize that the scientific method itself is a philosophical concept with no testible substance, correct? As is the concept of objective evidence? If you throw out everything with no testible substance, you will have no science left to teach!
        • Yes, just like every human idea, science is built upon axioms assumed true. These are the axioms of mathematics, causality & logic. They are extremely basic rules of common sense that also match the known universe to the best of our understanding. If we cannot agree to them, then there is no point having a discussion, because without a common frame of reference I may as well go talk to the schizophrenic guy behind the dumpsters.

          Beyond those basic principles, everything in science is testable by definiti
          • Yes, just like every human idea, science is built upon axioms assumed true. These are the axioms of mathematics, causality & logic. They are extremely basic rules of common sense that also match the known universe to the best of our understanding. If we cannot agree to them, then there is no point having a discussion, because without a common frame of reference I may as well go talk to the schizophrenic guy behind the dumpsters.

            Yes, that's exactly right- and that's why we cannot base our decision of w
            • If you consider formal logic to be negotiable, then I guess we are done here.

              I will conclude by saying that science journalism, hype, and (sadly) education unfortunately overstate the case much of the time, which causes a predictable backlash. The fact is that you need to insert the word "probably" to pretty much every sentence of a valid scientific result.

              None of the physical sciences are conclusive, nor are they likely to ever be. Even if we have five-nines [google.com] of a particular problem worked out, some small
              • If you consider formal logic to be negotiable, then I guess we are done here.

                That's a bit sad- since you've proven yourself in the other half of the discussion to be quite adept at being able to conceive of the concept of using evidence and axioms foreign to the problem. Formal logic (aka, Euclidean Logic) locks us into a set of assumptions and definitions that may or may not lead us to truth- certainly not any more than any other set of assumptions and definitions.

                I will conclude by saying that scienc
            • we cannot base our decision of what goes into a school curricula on objective evidence alone (if that even exists, I've yet to see a proof that human beings can be objective in ANY situation, let alone recognize what evidence is objective and what evidence is subjective). To insist on no axioms, or one set of axioms being more "correct" than a different set of axioms

              Upon re-reading the threads, I think you misunderstood my previous post. When I engage in serious policy discussion, I do in fact insist on l

              • Upon re-reading the threads, I think you misunderstood my previous post. When I engage in serious policy discussion, I do in fact insist on logic and evidence as axioms. There are plenty of situations where it can be reasonably demonstrated (through logic) that there are insufficient facts to reach a strong conclusion, in which case other philosophies may be used as a (temporary?) fallback, but rational analysis should remain the baseline.

                When rational analysis becomes unreasonable, that's what I object t
    • Marxist Hacker, the catch in your statement is "taught properly". There is as much chance of ID being "taught properly" as of the death penalty being applied equally across racial lines or of the Topeka case's "Separate But Equal" actually resulting in equal facilities for blacks as whites.

      I offer a bullsh1t test: what happens when one of these young Kansas students asks the teacher if the Intelligent Designer was Satan? Or Allah? Or some set of uberbeings from a polytheistic mythology? Or even the flyi
      • Marxist Hacker, the catch in your statement is "taught properly". There is as much chance of ID being "taught properly" as of the death penalty being applied equally across racial lines or of the Topeka case's "Separate But Equal" actually resulting in equal facilities for blacks as whites.

        Not at all- it's a matter of NOT doing something. That NOT is not insisting that objective evidence *always* trumps subjective evidence until your students think you're an idiot. That NOT is not jumping to stupid conc
        • Really, MH, I feel you. And I can't stress enough that I agree with you in principle about the interplay between faith and science in that one hand washes the other. But I think you're being an idealist. I'll bet you my entire life's wages that the "stupid" instructors in Kansas outnumber by at least 2 to 1 the "smart" ones when it comes to teaching ID.

          We can agree all day that science is based on faith, from physics to Euclid, and shouldn't be taught as incontrovertible truth. Just as we might likewise
          • If you want to have a third class called "Life, the Universe and Everything" that teaches science and faith and philosophy (and possibly some Douglas Adams if you're going to use that name for the class), I think that's a fine idea.

            Now that's the best suggestion I've seen yet for a compromise. Douglas at the end of his life had some very interesting writings on the concept- Scott Adams (of Dilbert Fame) recently had a good blog on the subject as well.

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