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Posted on 11/10/2005 4:43:24 AM PST by Nicholas Conradin
In an election in Pennsylvania this week, voters tossed out eight members of the Pittsburgh school board who wanted Intelligent Design theory to be taught alongside evolution in school. But should Intelligent Design -- the theory that living organisms were created at least in part by an intelligent designer, not by a blind process of evolution by natural selection -- be taught in public schools? In one way, the answer to this question is simple: if it's a scientific theory, it should; if it's not, it shouldn't (on pain of flaunting the Establishment Clause). The question, however, is whether Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory.
Opponents dismiss ID's scientific credentials, claiming that the theory is too implausible to qualify as scientific. But this reasoning is fallacious: a bad scientific theory is still a scientific theory, just as a bad car is still a car. There may be pedagogical reasons to avoid teaching bad scientific theories in our public schools, but there are no legal ones. The Constitution contains no interdiction on teaching bad theories, or for that matter demonstrably false ones. As long as theory is science and not religion, there is no legal barrier to teaching it.
To make their case, opponents of teaching ID must show not just that the theory is bad, but that it's not science. This raises a much more complicated question: What is science? What distinguishes genuinely scientific theories from non-scientific ones?
In one form or another, the question has bothered scientists and philosophers for centuries. But it was given an explicit formulation only in the 1920s, by Karl Popper, the most important 20th century philosopher of science. Popper called it "the problem of demarcation," because it asked how to demarcate scientific research and distinguish it from other modes of thought (respectable though they may be in their own right).
One thing Popper emphasized was that a theory's status as scientific doesn't depend on its plausibility. The great majority of scientific theories turn out to be false, including such works of genius as Newton's mechanics. Conversely, the story of Adam and Eve may well be pure truth, but if it is, it's not scientific truth, but some other kind of truth.
So what is the mark of genuine science? To attack this question, Popper examined several theories he thought were inherently unscientific but had a vague allure of science about them. His favorites were Marx's theory of history and Freud's theory of human behavior. Both attempted to describe the world without appeal to super-natural phenomena, but yet seem fundamentally different from, say, the theory of relativity or the gene theory.
What Popper noticed was that, in both cases, there was no way to prove to proponents of the theory that they were wrong. Suppose Jim's parents moved around a lot when Jim was a child. If Jim also moves around a lot as an adult, the Freudian explains that this was predictable given the patterns of behavior Jim grew up with. If Jim never moves, the Freudian explains -- with equal confidence -- that this was predictable as a reaction to Jim's unpleasant experiences of a rootless childhood. Either way the Freudian has a ready-made answer and cannot be refuted. Likewise, however much history seemed to diverge from Marx's model, Marxists would always introduce new modifications and roundabout excuses for their theory, never allowing it to be proven false.
Popper concluded that the mark of true science was falsifiability: a theory is genuinely scientific only if it's possible in principle to refute it. This may sound paradoxical, since science is about seeking truth, not falsehood. But Popper showed that it was precisely the willingness to be proven false, the critical mindset of being open to the possibility that you're wrong, that makes for progress toward truth.
What scientists do in designing experiments that test their theories is create conditions under which their theory might be proven false. When a theory passes a sufficient number of such tests, the scientific community starts taking it seriously, and ultimately as plausible.
When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, the first thing he did was to make a concrete prediction: he predicted that a certain planet must exist in such-and-such a place even though it had never been observed before. If it turned out that the planet did not exist, his theory would be refuted. In 1919, 14 years after the advent of Special Relativity, the planet was discovered exactly where he said. The theory survived the test. But the possibility of failing a test -- the willingness to put the theory up for refutation -- was what made it a scientific theory in the first place.
To win in the game of science, a theory must be submitted to many tests and survive all of them without being falsified. But to be even allowed into the game, the theory must be falsifiable in principle: there must be a conceivable experiment that would prove it false.
If we examine ID in this light, it becomes pretty clear that the theory isn't scientific. It is impossible to refute ID, because if an animal shows one characteristic, IDers can explain that the intelligent designer made it this way, and if the animal shows the opposite characteristic, IDers can explain with equal confidence that the designer made it that way. For that matter, it is fully consistent with ID that the supreme intelligence designed the world to evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. Given this, there is no conceivable experiment that can prove ID false.
It is sometimes complained that IDers resemble the Marxist historians who always found a way to modify and reframe their theory so it evades any possible falsification, never offering an experimental procedure by which ID could in principle be falsified. To my mind, this complaint is warranted indeed. But the primary problem is not with the intellectual honesty of IDers, but with the nature of their theory. The theory simply cannot be fashioned to make any potentially falsified predictions, and therefore cannot earn entry into the game of science.
None of this suggests that ID is in fact false. For all I've said, it may well be pure truth. But if it is, it wouldn't be scientific truth, because it isn't scientific at all. As such, we shouldn't allow it into our science classrooms. At least that's what the Constitution says.
The writer teaches philosophy at the University of Arizona.
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Depends on which side of Sprintville you live....
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I would guess it's a combination of the two.
Thanks for the ping!
One or the other, yeah.
A mixup that demonstrates massive, mind boggling ignorance. This is from a guy who pontificates on the failures of science.
You seem to think that the laws and theories of physics and chemistry are more provable than those in biology. Please explain how physics or chemistry proves something. Give a specific example of such a real world proof with full analytical rigour applying to any physical or chemical law or theory of your choice......
I'll wait. I've seen your contention made many times by those who wish to deny the theory of evolution (or to by some mysterious process promote ID to being on equal status with ToE), and when I ask this question the response has been chirping crickets, every time.
This sounds like a confusion of separate incidents in science. Einstein did not use relativity to predict Pluto. He used relativity to predict the bending of starlight near the Sun. What happened in 1919 were observations of a solar eclipse by Sir Arthur Eddington which confirmed the shifting of apparent position of stars near the sun (which could only be observed during such an eclipse).
Pluto's existence was indeed foretold by certain perturbations in the orbit of Neptune. (Not by Einstein, IIRC, however.) It and its moon Charon were eventually found about where the predicted object should have been. There's a hitch, though. The Pluto-Charon system isn't massive enough to have caused the perturbations used to predict it in the first place. Either those observations were spurious or there was something else out there.
It was Lowell who predicted Pluto in 1915, but finding it fairly close to his predicted position was actually pure luck, because it isn't what causes Neptune's orbital perturbation (I think it isn't large enough); there is something else out there, as yet undiscovered.
Einstein's successful prediction was of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit, due to the distortion of space by the sun's gravitional field.
Kind of odd, when you think about it, to take one's handle from a Kansas postal district...
So, by your name you are legal representative to gazelle hounds, or an alumni of SIU. Are you also a transplant from the sucker state?
It think the author is confusing the prediction of the precession of Mercury's perihelion with some sort of test of SR. He's got it all mixed up. You're right about the bending of starlight being the falsification test of GR.
It's too bad; the author's analysis of Popper and his conclusions re: ID are spot on. Oh, well, that's what one gets when one lets a philosophy nerd write an article.
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Sounds like I'm confused too in what I thought. I think relativity is one of those things that should probably be left to professionals. I just remembered another successful prediction; don't the clocks on the shuttle run slow enough for the difference to be detectable by the time it lands after a long flight? I'm sure I read it somewhere (so it must be true). I think it was in Relativities Chapter 3 Verses 4-6.
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