Intelligent Design? [...in California schools]

A new debate has begun over the question of the origin of the species, and our superintendent of public instruction, Jack O’Connell, has weighed in on the subject. Last week he announced that California schools would never teach the theory of “intelligent design.” No matter what the science says, he proclaimed, California would always teach evolution.

I can understand how anyone who has spent most of his life in government, like O’Connell, would come to the conclusion that creation is an act of pure random chance, since most government action is purely random, and largely unsuccessful. Most government programs spend eternity crashing into people's lives, occasionally ruining them, mostly annoying them, and generally costing them money unnecessarily. There is certainly no intelligent design in government.

Science, however, is beginning to question the origin of the species. The problem with evolution is that, although it purports to be a complete theory about how we came about, it cannot explain some of the things that science is discovering about how we work. Evolution says more complex biological systems “evolved” from less complex systems, so, as we study the more complex systems, we should be able to figure out from which less complex systems the more complex systems evolved.

But we can’t. In fact, some scientists have discovered the problem of “irreducible complexity,” which essentially means that no less complex system can be found from the complex system being studied.

In his book, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,'' Thomas Kuhn talks about how scientific theory is explained. Most of us are taught from high school that science develops tests to study the facts, comes up with a theory about how those facts relate to each other, and that is how knowledge is developed. Kuhn disputed this explanation. He claimed that science comes up with a theory, which he calls a paradigm, develops tests based on those paradigms to discover the facts to prove the paradigms. When the tests, however, come up with facts that dispute the paradigms, anomalies as he calls them, the paradigm begins to break down, and a “paradigm shift” occurs. Some in academics cling desperately to the old paradigm, but soon, all science begins to reject the old paradigm, and a new “theory” of science replaces the old.

Evolution is reaching the point of a paradigm shift. As scientific and technical knowledge advances, new tests based on evolution are being developed, except these new tests are developing facts that cannot be explained by the theory of evolution. The response of the defenders of evolution in some cases is to attack those who question the theory, rather than seek to develop facts to prove their critics wrong. Evolution, in some quarters, is accepted as an article of faith, and those who don’t accept the faith are figuratively burned at the stake as “scientific” heretics.

I thought we had moved beyond hemlock, prisons, and witch hunts in academia with the passing of Socrates, or the jailing of Galileo. Unfortunately, evolution has become a sacred belief, with Darwin’s writings as the scripture, and those who question the church of evolution are treated as heathens. Shouldn’t science be about discussing and testing alternative theories of nature and natural occurrences? Do we simply reject a fact of nature because it doesn’t fit into our “world view” of how nature is, or should be, organized? Certainly Jack O’Connell thinks so. No longer the Superintendent of Public Instruction, he has chosen to become the High Priest of Darwinian Evolution.

I thought our left wing friends were the chief proponent of an open-minded approach to education. This latest attack on the critics proves them to be exactly what they are, doctrinaire censors of open scientific discourse, true heirs of the collectivist ideology they promote and protect.

For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison

Dec 28, 2005

Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.

Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.

Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.

Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.

This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)

Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."

Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.

With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.

However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?

The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?

Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?

Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.

Find this story at: http://townhall.com/opinion/columns/billmurchison/2005/12/28/180478.html

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