The Evolution of the Discussion
The following was going to be comment in response to Fraser in the thread below, but since I don’t have a big post ready for today, might as well promote it to the blog proper and move the discussion up into another comment thread.
Fraser writes:
…I wonder if the problem isn't a mix of bad science education and years of PR by conservatives touting "evolution's only a theory." The idea that schools should "teach the controversy" sounds emininently fair if you don't realize that, scientifically speaking, there is no controversy. Or if you buy into the idea that "random, meaningless" evolution is incompatible with a Supreme Being ( "Finding Darwin's God"--by Kenneth Miller, I think--is an excellent discussion of why that's wrong), something both fundies and some scientists believe. Some good points to bring up in such discussions (courtesy of various pandasthumb.org posts): By what mechanism did the intelligent designer cause all these evolutionary changes? How do we know that there's one designer, rather than an alien race (the Raelian theory) or multiple designer-entities? By what standard do we conclude that the designer is intelligent, rather than really clumsy (human backbones are severely flawed because they've evolved from quadrupeds--what excuse would a designer have?)?
In my view, it's a matter of probabilities. Certainly anything is possible. The question is, which hypotheses do we take time to seriously consider? The Theory of Evolution shouldn't be taught because it's true to the exclusion of all other possibilities, but because 150 years of disciplined thought and research have given it very strong explanatory power. Whole fields of natural science, medicine and genetics would be incoherent without it. Practical advances in human technology have been made possible by using Evolution as a working model.
That's the frustrating thing about this discussion. Science isn't about Truth in the way that religion is. Science is about method, about finding out what works and what doesn't. Even the most widely-accepted scientific theories are only considered provisionally-true, pending conflicting evidence. Religious fundamentalists are after certainty. They make a fetish of it. The muddiness of science probably confuses and frustrates them. ID and creationism, along with various alien theories or whatever else, have a completeness and a certitude that makes them appealing to people with a low tolerance for ambiguity. Theories (e.g., hypotheses substantiated by experimentation and research) will always seem unsatisfactory to people who need the comfort of a seamless world view.
The problem with seamless worldviews is that the world isn’t seamless – not in scientific terms (as far as we know) and certainly not in human terms. Teaching evolution in schools encourages people to look at the world as a process, a series of questions and problems that we, as humans, can solve through the application of intellect and observation. That, in my opinion, is a good way to prepare young people for the complexities of life, and arms them with the skills to engage the kinds of questions and problems they will face when they join the workforce. Naturally, most people won’t become biologists, and the specific question of how life developed on earth won’t be in the least bit important to them. But the principle of problem-solving and coming to nontraditional conclusions by observation and deduction will serve them well.
In my view, this whole issue has little to do with the scientific basis of evolution. Demanding that pseudoscientific speculation be taught in a science classroom should be viewed as an attack on science’s greater claim to truth in the physical world. The fundamentalists desperately want their complete and certain worldview (embodied in creationism and other Biblical literalism) to be taken as seriously and treated with the same respect as the disturbing, complex and perpetually-unresolved questioning methods of science.
But they’ve lost that battle. History shows that religious absolutism is a threat to freedom. Ideological orthodoxy of any sort leads inexorably to senseless oppression and conflict. Faith as personal spirituality and the common beliefs of voluntary associations of people is a wonderful thing, but it becomes toxic when it becomes coercive. Fundamentalists aren’t content to teach their worldview to their own believers, or discuss it as religious theory rather than scientific theory. There’s this need to insist on the unquestioned rightness and truthfulness of their beliefs, to the exclusion of others. You don’t have to spend long in the presence of a fundamentalist before this tendency becomes painfully apparent.
Fundamentalists aren’t interested in science. They resent science because it actually delivers what religion only promises: the ability to transform the world. It demonstrates that man can know and do things that used to be the monopoly of God and his priests. It’s the “forbidden knowledge” that religion has warned against since Eve gave Adam the apple.
So excuse me if I don’t take the “scientific” claims of ID at face value. It seems clear to me that the intentions of the movement and its proponents are profoundly unscientific and that their “research” and “findings” are meant to come to one preordained conclusion. That’s not a good way to think in a free society, and it’s not a good way to approach problem-solving in a free market that rewards effective thinking and results, not intentions. Teaching this mode of thought to kids as a methodology that’s as acceptable as scientific reasoning does them a disservice and does democracy a disservice.
It has been said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. That’s entirely true of the First Amendment. Respect for individual beliefs and the free exercise of religion should not bend us into a position where we countenance the corruption of the humanist philosophy that underlies our free form of government in the name of “tolerance.” To paraphrase Toast in an earlier comment, the respect due to individual believers as a matter of human dignity does not mean we need to respect their crackpot theories, or teach them with a straight face to our children.
9:38:04 AM 
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