Jan 24, 2007
Intelligent Dawkins Debate
The Intelligent Design and Anti-Evolution lobbies often argue that evolution is but a theory and that opposing theories must be taught in order to be properly scientific about the origins of the human race. Well, if its debate they want, then it’s debate they shall have. The Education section of the Guardian reports that the UK government wants religious education classes for 11-14 year olds to encompass the notion of intelligent design (ID) and to highlight texts such as the writings of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Galileo, and Charles Darwin.
It’s about time. While it is all well and good giving our children an education that offers them the opportunity to understand the traditional religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam etc – the only way to get a true perspective on philosophical thinking is to provide them with the perspective of those who have no religion.
“ID,” The Guardian says, “argues that the creation of the world was so complex that an intelligent – religious – force must have directed it.” The debate has been an incredibly contentious issue for scientists and “people of faith” in Britain and the US in recent year, with several education boards (Kansas in the US, Gateshead in the UK) famously scratching evolution from the curriculum because it is purportedly an “unproven theory”.
Scientifically speaking, evolution is a theory, of course and as all good scientists know theories cannot be proved. Science can only look for contradictory evidence that requires said theory to be refined or discarded if too many observations conflict with the predictions of the theory. Scientists are yet to find any such conflicting evidence when it comes to evolution. In contrast, there is much evidence that ID “as a theory” is wholly invalid.
Take the eye, for instance. How on earth could such a device have been designed and if it were, then why were so many variations developed from the simple light sensors of flat worms to the prismatic arrays of fruit flies to the honed sensors of the Golden Eagle?
Debate is a good thing and it is certainly a positive step to at least address the concerns of scientists about the degrading of evolutionary theory by the ID lobby, but there is the worry that 11-14 year olds who are not generally keen on science will become even more confused by the complexities of evolution as a sound explanation for the origin of species. It might even nudge a proportion of them to the far easier to understand fairy tales of benevolent sky gods.
How do you feel about this development? Does evolution have a place alongside Intelligent Design in religious education or should they both be kept for science lab debates?
The word God is meaningless. See the chapter “Does the word God exist?” in the book
Our Almost Impossible Universe:
Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans
extraordinarily unlikely
R. Mirman
iUniverse, inc. 2006
So, Carl, does this mean you are a believer of God or an athiest?
I actually kinda agree with you.
Getting back to schools, it has always seemed baffling to me which people are asking for what to include. At first I thought trying to get prayer in the public shools must be an atheist plot, withe believers pretending to be atheists while oppossing it. After all anyone with a familiarity with schools, at least in the USA, would know that prayer in the public schools would result in would result in a loss of religeous customers. I’ve always guessed that religeous belief is much stronger in the USA then other developed countries is that we have always had seperation of church and state, while most european countries have a history of mandatory religeon. I think that with regard to ID similar considerations apply. The public opponents of ID are the same people who anguish over the many polls showing that about half the US population doesn’t believe in evolution, and half of the rest believe that it was guided by God. In that sense at least the ID people are winning. The sports axiom, “always change a losing game, never change a winning game” suggests that ID in the schools would be bad for the ID crowd and good for the naturalist.
Ok, God created everything, that means time, although time wasn’t even recorded until man became smart, cave men probably did exist, but not as humanoids, but more as another animal that was here, such as the monkey. Time was first recorded by a Westerner the first scientist more or less. But you must agree time was then not even precisely calculkated, because they only recorded big things that took place in history that means technically time was never made, although as proposterous as it may seem the Jewish Calender is almost right. The Bible is also marked as a huge thing in history, because of the great dispute fought after as to the way and who should print it, the Bible also is correct and precise as to time, from the existence of intelligence down to the way it will all end, if you look in the Bible, Elisha a very powerful prophet whop prfessed many things and as recorded all of his profecies came true.
Yes, admittedly, we all fall into an infinite regression once we ask what made the universe, that’s a question neither religion nor science can answer. After all, if there were a god, what made it? If that god has been for eternity then what was happening before creation? At least with cosmological theory we might demonstrate that time itself did not exist prior to the Big Bang so there was no “before”
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