Opinion
Creationism not sound science
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Also by Rob Hunter:
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- Read ID Act goes too far infringing upon civil liberties (April 28, 2005)
- Gay rights needed to protect equality (May 5, 2005)
- Evolution not about free speech (March 17, 2005)
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Last week, the public school district board of Grantsburg, Wis., passed a motion allowing for “various theories / models of origins” to be taught in its science curricula. The door is now open for creationism to be taught in Grantsburg’s public schools.
Predictably, the move was met with academic condemnation. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 43 of the UW System’s letters and science deans, joined by 300 biology and religious studies faculty from state institutions, publicly called for a reversal of the policy. The criticisms were centered largely around education policy. Presenting evolution and creationism as theoretical competitors is bad policy, according to former UW Madison botany professor Don Waller, because teaching creationism “takes time away from real learning, confuses some students and is a misuse of limited class time and public funds.”
Grantsburg officials disagree. According to Grantsburg science teacher Greg Stager, “[e]volution is a theory, just as much as creationism is a theory. There is contradictory evidence for both.”
Unfortunately for Grantsburg’s teachers and school district officials, one of these theories is scientific, and the other is not.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the teaching of creationism — the doctrine that a deity, usually the God of Christianity, is the creator and source of the development of life — in public schools, as it is an expression of religious belief.
Legal rulings, however, do not determine whether theories are scientifically sound. Advocates of creationism have attempted to rebound by repackaging creationism as “intelligent design,” the theory that a higher intelligence is responsible for the complexity and evolution of organic life.
Opponents of the teaching of evolution in public schools call attention to the fact that evolution is a scientific theory, and that as a theory it remains unproven. They go on to argue that it would be scientifically derelict of educators if they did not present opposing viewpoints in the classroom — so why not also teach intelligent design?
This argument is not only a misportrayal of both evolution theory and intelligent design, but of science itself. Science is not the consideration of opposing viewpoints and judging them on their merits (or, as many supporters of intelligent design wish, the intensity of individuals’ belief in them). It is instead a particular way of thinking: obtaining verifiable results by reasoning logically about observable facts.
This is not an exact definition, but it does not need to be one. Genetics, economics and geology do not precisely overlap, but they all share the empirical habit of forming hypotheses, making logical deductions or predictions about them, and then testing them against facts that are observed in the real world. Such an approach is necessarily skeptical: we should not accept or endorse the hypotheses presented in a theory unless they can be confirmed through repeated testing of the same variables.
In this sense, no scientific theory is ever definitively proven. Instead, some theories are successful at providing coherent explanations of the way the world works, and some aren’t. A theory is successful to the extent it generates results that are not at odds with those obtained through repeated experimentation. This leaves open the possibility of refining existing hypotheses or generating new ones to be tested; the skepticism at the core of this process will always drive new attempts to invalidate the existing hypotheses.
As a collection of certain hypotheses, and predictions based on those hypotheses, evolution is a theory that may be verified through experimentation and testing in the fields of zoology, botany, genetics and paleontology, to name just a few. It offers up its theoretical claims for empirical testing in a way that intelligent design theory cannot, as the latter concerns itself with phenomena — spiritual and philosophical — that cannot be observed in the physical world.
Because of this, intelligent design cannot be considered a scientific theory at all. Meanwhile, through testing and verification, evolution has come to be broadly accepted by the scientific community.
While there may be compelling theological or philosophical reasons to consider the intelligent design argument, they have no place in a public school science classroom. The educators and administrators calling on Grantsburg to give up teaching alternatives to evolution are right to do so, not because such teaching is bad education policy but because it is bad science.
Rob Hunter (jrhunter@gmail.com) is a senior majoring in political science and philosophy.
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I wonder if they plan to include other Creation Myths? If so they probably won't have time for any other "science".
"A people's belief about the world's beginnings is usually called a creation myth, mythology, story, or tale..."
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=Creation+Myth
I especially like this little story:
Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths_12.html
Maybe creationism is being taught because the theory of evolution has yet to make a strong case for the existence of the first living cell. The fact that experiments using electrical currents and amonia vapor (to mimic early earth's atmosphere) have produced only simple proteins leaves a big gap that falls short of Life. Filling in this gap takes a greater leap of faith than believing in God and creation.
Which creationism are they teaching? I hear there are several versions originating in each religion but I could be wrong.
doesn't creationism leave room for evolution? Nobody knows how things got started, but everybody should know that it wasn't with humans... so why not explain that the origin of the first cell is debatable, but evolution is a scientific reality. admit that we don't know the absolute beginning. However, don't teach what we know as false.
I believe what Mr. Hunter is not saying that teachers should say how life on this planet started. We can, with a pretty good degree of certainty, say how life evolved over the course of time, but we cannot guess how it started. The problem with teaching creationism in public schools is that it is a typically religious dogma that would, throughout most of America, be taught as the story of Adam and Eve. Essentially, how life started here in the first place is pretty much anybody's guess, but when you teach high schoolers something they oftentimes take it for fact. If someone really wants their kid to know about creationism so much they can very easily take them to church/synagogue/sunday school where all that sort of stuff is covered. A theory with absolutely no scientific backing, though, does not have a place in a science class.
yeah, let alone all the Native American creation stories...
But you can bet money they'll be teaching the one in the bible, after 4 years of Ashcroft, you should be happy you don't have to study bible in 7th grade english class.
Just because evolution can't explain the first living cell, it does not mean the Bible can.
While I don't agree with most of the arguments, I more or less agree with the conclusion.
Creationism is not sound science. The reason is because of its philosophical foundations; it's not because of scientific inconsistencies. In fact, science and "intelligent design" are perfectly coherent.
In the same vein (Darwinian) evolution is not sound science either. The Darwinian model is incoherent with scientific evidence.
Someone with any background in the philosophy of science would realize how problem-plagued is the following statement:
"[Darwinian] evolution is a theory that may be verified through experimentation and testing in the fields of zoology, botany, genetics and paleontology, to name just a few"
Such testing is caught between the horns of a dilemma. Either a test cannot produce evidence of evolution in any Darwinian sense or the experiment is tainted by intelligence.
As for intelligent design not being testable, all I can say is that Hunter does not know much about intelligent design.
Note: I've made the assumption that this article is speaking about Darwinian evolution, or some near cousin, because it makes no sense to pose evolution in general as an opponent to creatism.
Darwinian evolution is not the accepted theory anymore. He believed in phyletic gradualism, where species differentiate slowly over large periods of time. The fossil record does not support this.
What is the accepted or best theory is what is called Punctuated Equilibrium which proposes species evolve through shorter periods (still rather long really) of rapid change followed by longer peiods of stability.
The fossil record supports this theory.
teaching both=good