Note: This was originally posted on my website, as part of my regular Brains on Vacation segment on the “Are We Alone” radio show. My blog gets a lot more traffic, so I decided to go the easy way out tonight and post it here. You can get the audio part of the interview (later, James Randi comes on!) here.
You can dress creationism up, but you can’t take it anywhere.
At least, not to Utah. In a surprising but extremely wise move, the Utah Board of Education has decided that the so-called "Intelligent Design" idea — that life is too complex to have occurred naturally, and is the product of a designer, aka God– is not scientific, and should not be taught in Utah public schools. This, despite heavy pressure from one of their state senators, Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan), who has been railing against evolution for quite some time now.
The Utah BoE is exactly right for not allowing this to be taught in school, and for the right reason. It ain’t science. It’s not even a theory, it’s just an idea, and it’s based on bad thinking. IDers claim that evolution cannot possibly produce such complex biological mechanisms such as the eye, or the flagellum of a bacterium. But, oops! These claims are demonstrably wrong! In fact, it’s not hard at all to show that evolution could have — indeed, did — produce very complex structures, like the eye or (in some cases, but evidently not all) the brain.
A scientific theory makes predictions and can be supported by evidence. This right away means ID isn’t science– the evidence isn’t there. All they really do is attack science, saying that, since science doesn’t know everything, God must have made whatever we don’t understand. Well, of course science doesn’t know everything… yet. But that’s a pretty thin premise to base your ideas on! As we learn more, we understand more, and as we understand more the claims of creationists and IDers get more and more narrow, wedging themselves into increasingly narrow gaps of knowledge. Eventually, the gaps are closed. Then what do they have?
Well, nothing, which is what they started out with. And the Utah BoE saw that, and called them on it. If that could happen in Utah, an incredibly religious and conservative state, it can certainly happen in other states too. Maybe this is a sign that a lot of peoples’ brains are finally coming home from vacation.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
Way to go for all the states.
September 7th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Woohoo!
September 8th, 2005 at 8:37 am
Congratulations, UT! I fear my state will be the next target for pseudo-science: NE.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:30 am
[chuckles]
This is excellent news. The struggle between creationists and scientists isn’t resolved by what happened in Utah. Indeed, it wasn’t resolved in Scopes, so we aren’t likely to ever see this go away until the demonstatable evolution of a large, new species. People want to believe in the supernatural, and the theory of evolution is seen as an important ideological high ground; whoever takes and holds that dirty hill has command of the battle between science and religion. So the creationists will keep coming at it until they are irrefutably rebuffed (even in their minds), or the religious as a group decide that God can indeed work through evolution and it isn’t important anymore.
So what’s important about the Utah decision? It’s a weather reading for our country. While there are a huge number of people who want to place ideology before reason, there are still enough rational thinkers in important places to resist the impulse. So while the creationists keep talking about a big storm, so far it hasn’t rained. And that’s good. Not perfect, but good.
September 8th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
Having written an article on Chris Buttars myself, and can only cackle with glee at hearing this news.
September 8th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Keep in mind that although this state is conservative and religious, Mormon theology isn’t grounded in a literal interpretation of the Bible. In fact, Mormonism has radically different fundamental beliefs than other “Christians” including the progression of individuals to Godhood with worthy individuals becoming gods in charge of their own planets. Creationism comes from biblical literalism. Don’t lose sight of that. Beneath the surface of shared politics, Mormons and evangelical Christians are enemies.
September 8th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
BJN,
Yes you are right. The crux of the problem is viewing the Bible as “Literal Truth” and note again here we are really talking about the old testament and fundamentalist Christians.
Problem is like any other fundamentalist they are really on the “fringe” and we have a duty to explain this.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
Good news! Nice to see some positive results.
September 9th, 2005 at 8:38 am
phew
September 9th, 2005 at 8:57 am
A recent issue of the American Prospect magazine has an article about the Discovery Institute and their I.D. Wedge strategy.
Accordingly, I.D. is “the renewal of religiously based culture by (through) the overthrow of the key tenets of modern science than with the disinterested pursuit of (scientific) knowledge.”
“William Dembski now heads the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Center for Science and Theology to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ.”
“IDers are not doing any credible science but advancing a political and (religious) moral agenda–the epitome of anti-intellectualism.”
September 9th, 2005 at 9:39 am
> Beneath the surface of shared politics, Mormons and evangelical Christians are enemies.
I wouldn’t say that. We do our best to follow the Second Commandment, and I would hope people don’t think we hold anything against other religions.
To clarify our doctrine, our 8th article of faith says “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly…”. As we all know, the Bible has gone through many hands and translations over the years, with some things lost and others distorted, and it’s hard to know what’s what.
The literal interpretation of the creative periods being exactly 24 hours is exactly that, a literal reading of “it was called the first/second/etc day”, and it’s not expressed anywhere that those periods were indeed so. The idea of ‘ex nihilo’ is also a theory introduced by Catholocism, to which the Bible never speaks.
In the LDS Church we believe that the Earth was organized from existing matter, and that the creative periods were called days as a matter of differentiation. As to the methods used for creation (natural selection, etc.), the Church does not speculate on things that haven’t been revealed yet.
Now speaking as to my personal opinion, if you were God, how would you describe the creation to Moses? You have to put things in terms he’ll understand, he not knowing too much about natural selection, physics, etc. I and many other LDS people view God as a master scientist, using scientific principles to achieve his goals, via natural selection or whatever; I don’t know for sure, don’t care to speculate, and it doesn’t really affect what I need to be doing in my life.
That may help a little in describing why ID would fail in Utah…
September 9th, 2005 at 9:45 am
It might also be interesting that the Church’s doctrine on this has been taught since the 1830’s, about the same time Darwin was making his observations on the Beagle, their paths having never crossed.
September 9th, 2005 at 10:10 am
I guess that ascension to Godhood will require some advanced science studies in the Celestial Kingdom, eh? When a Mormon posits “…if you were God” there’s at least a glimmer of hope behind that hypothetical since the multilevel Divine Marketing Plan allows for such things. That is, if you’re male.
I’m not suggesting Mormons have real hostility toward other religions. Condescention, yes. But many evangelicals are openly hostile toward Mormonism.
September 9th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
I’m very pleased to hear this news!
I’m VERY conservative (I make Hannity look like Colmes), and I know that ID/Creationism does not belong in a science class.
Why?
The reason the Greek/Roman myths are not taught in a science class, are the same reasons why Creationism/ID shouldn’t be taught in a science class.
The Greek myths are taught in english/literature class. If the story of Genesis was taught in english/lit, that would be ok, but to try to pass it off as hard science, is just too incompatable. You don’t teach algebra in gym class.
However, if you are faithful to your religion you can still teach your children what you believe in Sunday school (or the equivalent in your faith). That’s your right. Just please refrain from demanding that I accept an unproven idea as hard, proven, concrete fact without any evidence or forensic data.
September 10th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Literal interpretation of the bible or not, the creation story (whichever one you choose) has been shown by science to be wrong. Must be really bad translation or retranslation, eh?
This small victory in Utah is wonderful news, but its just one battle in a much bigger and more devious war that these IDers are waging against knowledge and reason.
Jim.
September 11th, 2005 at 6:22 am
Trouble is, no one is listening to the other… Every one think they are right and the other person is wrong.. THere is so much frad on this issue..
LUCY comes to mind, i was watching a show about the discovery, I am not a overly educated person in this field… But when you find bones with in a 100 yards… There is no proof that the bones went to the same body… Also in order for the theory to work, the bone grew after the body was dead… Am I the only one who noticed this in the film? Too often both sides try to make the science fit their point and
too often are wrong…
September 11th, 2005 at 10:16 am
“Also in order for the theory to work, the bone grew after the body was dead”
Do you have a source for this?
September 11th, 2005 at 11:08 am
hello;
It was on the show about the finding of LUCY, about the hip bone… I do not remember the name of the show… IT had the one who made the claim about Lucy.. THe difference between Lucy and a ape was the hip… THey said that the hip bone grew after death.. I did not understand how it happen the way they said… I will see if I can remember the show, but it was a number rof years ago.. There was a number of thing which I questioned at the time.. THe big thing was finding the bones in a 100 yards area…
September 11th, 2005 at 11:26 am
it was a film that Dr Johanson made.. He spent half of the time bashing non beleivers dawing theory.. I do not remember the name of the show, I went to his web sight but did not find the information about the hip.. He if you look at the 40% of the whole he make a lot of guesses about what this thing could have done.. Talking about the size of the brain.. Only bone found of the head was a little jaw bone.. I am not sure all the bones are from the same animal..
as the bones was found with in a 100 yard sight…
September 11th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
I was quite puzzled when I read this quote of senator Buttars in the Salt Lake Tribune article:
“Whenever anyone challenges the evolution people, they go berserk,” he said. “[Evolution] is not a fact . . . We’re dealing with censorship here. If we only taught Shakespeare in English class, that wouldn’t be fair.”
Where on earth would one teach Shakespeare but in English class? Then it struck me! If I remember some of the plays and especially some of the sonnets, those works couldn’t have possibly have been written by a person living hundreds of years ago!
I suspect supernatural intervention and a bit of ID here as well…
September 11th, 2005 at 7:47 pm
Btw, the Daily Show on Comedy Central is having an “Evolution-Schmevolution” (sp) special this week. I’m curious what people will they internview.
September 11th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
I’d ask that senator if he’d rather go back in the middle ages or live in a world of beserk evolutionists.
September 11th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Tomislav Bleiziffer Says: “I was quite puzzled when I read this quote of senator Buttars in the Salt Lake Tribune article: ‘…If we only taught Shakespeare in English class, that wouldn’t be fair.’ Where on earth would one teach Shakespeare but in English class?”
I think you’ve got it slightly wrong here. The Senator was speculating if Shakespeare was all that was taught in English, *not* if Shakespeare was taught only in English classes (as opposed to other classes).
The Senator is right, but irrelevant. More appropriate question would be this: “Should school kids be taught all the controversies in all subjects? Who should determine which controversies should be taught? Where should they be taught?” For example, what would you say to teaching that the Holocaust didn’t happen? After all, there are people who hold this up as a controversy in Modern History…
ID is the negation of science. It’s okay to question a theory in science, but you’d better have an alternate theory to put in its place. ID isn’t that.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:48 am
Good to hear sense being used in government, at least on a local level.
As WW says, can you imagine Moses coming down the mountain and greeting his brother with the words, “Arran, we came from the slime, the miracle of evolution caused us to develop.” I think the responce from his family would have been a bit harsh. I was always taught that you can take the Bible seriously or literally. Besides, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “The greatest form of leadership is when they say ‘we did this ourselves’”
September 15th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
I find it rather amusing that the IDers want to teach creationism as being scientific… while trying to discredit science at the same time!
September 17th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
Grey Says:
“I’m VERY conservative (I make Hannity look like Colmes), and I know that ID/Creationism does not belong in a science class.”
I wouldn’t go quite that far. It certainly doesn’t belong in any elementary school or high-school science class. But I wouldn’t categorically rule ID out of a college Philosophy of Science or Cosmology class.
Why? Well the origin of Intelligent Design was as an answer to the problems created by the strong anthropic principle. Obviously doesn’t make it right…or wrong until we figure out how to observe other universes, or that this is the only universe that exists.
Is speculation about the existance or non-existance of other universes science? I would say that it certainly can be part of science. For example this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0506053 by Karch and Randall is clearly physics, although it may not lead to testable hypotheses. In this sence, ID is potentially science. What is needed to (possibly) make it into real science is to find a way to test its predictions.
In the area of biology, of course, we know that evolution does occur, and Occam’s Razor implies that since evolution exists and is sufficient for the creation of intelligent life in this universe. So ID is at best irrelevant to biology. However, there is a lot of ferment in cosmology right now, and until there are testable theories about why the universe is the way it is, ID cannot be ruled out.
Will it ever be? Very probably. As recently as twenty years ago, most physicists would have agreed that it would not be possible to ever observe some quantum phenomena directly. Today, experiments that directly observe particles in multiple states or locations (or technically looking while not observing
are commonplace, and great progress has been made toward building practical quantum computers. So if other universes do exist and can be observed (or possibly other 3-branes in this universe) then we will need to have theories to test.
Theories that can never be tested are not science. We need to allow/encourage scientists to work in areas that are currently believed to be non-testable because theoretiicians developing those areas into testable theories (and experimentalists devloping the experiments) is how science progresses.
September 21st, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Interestingly, Christianity is “testible.” If you would read
http://pathlights.com/onlinebooks/David%20Dare/David%20Dare%20TOC.htm
you may notice a section on how to disprove the Bible. It’s rather simple. Some of the old testament prophecies say that certain cities would never be inhabited, or that certain things would remain in a certain state till the end of time. Currently, I am unaware of a prophecy that can be disproven. But, if one were to simply fundraise some money, gather a group together and inhabit a an ancient city such as Babylon, hey, you have some argument with you. But, as the prophecies have so far shown true, this would be proof of the Bibles accuracy if the settlement of such a city failed, especially if it made no sense as to why it failed.
Also, in biology, I don’t believe how the first cells formed is well proved. The Miller experiment showed only that some of the monomers could have formed. We have failed to form the complex polymers. And I do suppose we have tried.
September 29th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Forgive my poor english grammary. :>
“Some of the old testament prophecies say that certain cities would never be inhabited, or that certain things would remain in a certain state till the end of time.”
Well, if prophecy says “this city will fall”, and given city was NOT felt for now, then you always can say that this city do not fall YET. And eventually all cities will fall, no doubt. Same with emerging cities.
Nice, long list of falied prophecies in Bible is here:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/proph/long.html
October 11th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
Robert raises an issue, and I’ve been wondering when this would come up– when ID gives up on biology, they have an obvious retreat to cosmology. Sort of like pulling back from the foxholes into the bunker. Biology is all around us, with a wealth of data just waiting to be mined. Cosmology is very hard to observe directly, beyond the creation of the cosmic microwave background at about 300,000 years after the Beginning. The ultimate fortress is the Planck time, an unimaginably tiny fraction of a second after the postulated singularity. ID, or any other speculation for that matter, can never be dislodged from that citadel, for it is hard to conceive of any physical theory that will be testable from that era. And it is important to remember that all credible cosmological models at present require an initial condition that is completely ad hoc, something that originally bothered scientists as Robert points out. But the key issue that Robert may be missing is that ID will never be good cosmology, because it just isn’t good science. And not because it’s wrong, who knows, it might be right in some deeper and nonscientific sense, after all there is that pesky initial condition. The reason it is not good science is so obvious that it is often overlooked– it invokes a miracle. It has to– if the intelligent design occurred via normal natural processes, then you have a theory of how extraterrestrials created our universe, not God. You have a theory straight out of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, not a holy revelation. It *has* to be a miracle, or no IDer worth his/her salt will want anything to do with it. But miracles are to science what the bubbles are to Swiss cheese– if science were to encounter one, it would have to sidestep it, since a miracle *by definition* cannot be explained by the science of natural processes. As soon as it is explained in terms of natural processes, it is not a miracle any more! Could this be any more ironic when applied to calling ID science? Don’t the IDers realize they are not exalting their God, they are lowering Him/Her to the level of a natural process that is testable and explainable? He becomes the Wizard of Oz!Why on Earth would they want this, to mix their science with their religion? Many don’t, of course, they just use it as a ruse to sidestep the Constitution. Another irony– they call themselves Constitutional conservatives! But despite all this, the rational thinkers must also remember that if scientists would refrain from “believing in” their own theories as if that were an integral part of the scientific method, then the religious faithful would not feel so defensive.