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November 12, 2005

Intelligent Design vs Evolution

On the intelligent design debate, I can't say I've followed whatever larger discussion there is on either side. I imagine someone has similar ideas to mine, but without doing exhaustive bibliographic work, I lazily offer my own views.

Intelligent Design, as I understand it, is the idea that “the Creator” designed the universe, not evolution. This isn't science; it's religion, faith, one's belief in “the Creator.” The intelligent part of the two-word rallying cry means divine intervention; the design part of intelligent design is what divine intervention created.

Evolution is about science, not about religion, faith, etc. It is the observation of facts about life in the world from a human standpoint. No one had to deliver tablets to tell us germs have gotten better at survival since the first days of penicillin. Germs susceptible to early strains of penicillin died and those resistant to it survived and had germ offspring. These germs have evolved to beat subsequent penicillin variations because they evolved. There’s less evidence for the move from apes to humans, or complex molecules to single celled organisms, but that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and say we don’t know anything or that we need to offer up theistic explanations.

If I understand the battle raging on now, it is about intelligent design being taught in school. As far as I know, intelligent design is already taught at many private religiously affiliated schools, so I imagine the question is to whether we should be teaching intelligent design at public schools. I think some of the debate is that intelligent design should be a viable alternative to teaching evolution in schools.

Should intelligent design be taught in schools? Yes and no. But, let me define what I am talking about.

Intelligent design is not based in science, so no, it should not be taught as a scientific theory with the likes of evolution. With regard to its being an appropriate study for social theories or religious studies, probably not a bad thing to do to introduce students to the likes of the world’s various religious and their thinking about creation. Teach Campbell’s work on the underpinnings of myth; a fine complement to social studies.

Anything more than this becomes problematic. This country shouldn’t support teaching one religion’s views over another in public schools. Given the variety of possible intelligent design courses and views from the various religions, it’s a hard question for how to think through what would be a good representative intelligent design curriculum.

Intelligent design curriculum, for what it was supposed to teach, however, would be a great topic to have in schools – how to teach one to be a better citizen. The Bible has been shown to match most people's view on what is good human behavior, principled action, etc. That the Bible, Dhammapada, Go, Koran, indigenous religions, etc. are largely NOT at odds, shows the universality of the message - no matter the religious/philosophical point of origination. If the intelligent design advocacy was for teaching ethics, principles, morals (getting shakier), and how best to behave, then I’d be for it.

My local grade school does this. They have the Five Bees. Each bee does its part in reminding students about the school’s various credos: Be(e) responsible, be(e) courteous, and so on. While it’s not part of the curriculum, it’s a code of behavior and the five are the prescribed mandates for student interaction. Now, imagine if no child left behind included requiring each grade level passing escalating degrees of difficulty with regard to the Five Bees!

Certainly corporations have been doing ethical rewrites with more frequency either by choice or force lately and probably would be better off with more attention to the Five Bees. If you look at many multinational corporations’ missions and leadership principles and you’ll find a near one-to-one correspondence with most of what’s included in religious teachings and the Five Bees. The point is that more principled companies tend to prosper versus those others that often get stung.

Religion might not be taught in the classroom, or be a valid scientific theory, but its principles and pervasiveness cannot be ignored. Which brings me to why I’d say yes, teach this brand of intelligent design in public school.

God’s word. The Bible. The Koran. The Dhammapada. The oral history and millennia of teachings of indigenous peoples throughout the world. All are not wrong. They all point at the same vital essences, core principles, that permeate throughout each religious point of view and for good measure the game of Go (c.f., The Way of Go), ethics, principled atheism, the Five Bees, and so on. Whether influenced by intelligent design or not, the religions do arrive at truths about proper behavior that most atheists would agree with once you stripped out their we’re-the-only-true-holders-of-truth dogmas.

A brief tangent on dogma and why it’s not needed from the side of Christianity. I think a lot of the folks in favor of intelligent design are arguing something they need not argue – that intelligent design is as scientifically valid as evolutionary theory. Why argue that? There’s no need. Take the typical view and let’s dissect it.

“God created the universe, Earth, humans, and all the beasts; therefore, evolution, being at odds with this, and because we don’t want our children being taught something at odds with the Truth, we advocate for intelligent design.”

First, that’s a rather narrow view of God. Most who argue to know what God is capable of even in the slightest, shouldn’t argue that God is incapable of both creating a universe and having evolution be a valid scientific theory. Human understanding, for those in most religions, is an iota of an entire universe of knowledge that God has. So, the need to come to God’s defense seems somewhat unnecessary with respect to evolution and in keeping with one’s religious beliefs. Why not: “Science is good for going to the moon, chaos theory, and combustible engines, but save the bigger stuff for God.”

Second, science is scary, but it’s how stuff works. Science gives us humans understanding about how things work so that we can do more stuff. If it’s championing a cause on the Internet, if it’s televangelizing, if it’s going to countries with opposing religious views, if it creating weapons of mass destruction; science makes it happen, not anything offered from knowing something about intelligent design. I suppose some people even doubt that science can explain LED or plasma TVs, but I believe that most would agree that science made those things possible. Intelligent design may have made science possible, but science does fine from there on for most things.

But, why then, am I also advocating the teaching of intelligent design (laying aside how to teach a more universalist perspective when it’s mostly Christians advocating their own brand of intelligent design)? I’m not advocating teaching intelligent design instead of evolution, but teaching intelligent design for what it is… well worn, dyed in the wool, time-tested and practically universally agreed upon rules of thumb for being better people; not for giving students a better perspective on how humans can understand today how the universe was formed.

Intelligent design’s prophets – Jesus, Black Elk, Mohammed, Buddha, ______ (insert your religious figure here) – brought you the mysteries of the universe not by their direct scientific explanation, but by their metaphor, parable, analogue, or story. The wonderment of God’s, Allah’s, The Great Spirit’s, ____’s creation was not something that really mattered when people had practically the same problems they have today. These guys (yes, most prophets were men) took great pains to focus their audience on what mattered most. How the universe was formed, what relationship man had to apes, or if there will be a Great Collapse or not, were not atop their lists.

Why not save intelligent design then for churches and other religious activities and keep it out of the classroom? Because, science by itself serves no end. Math, physics, chemistry, history, engineering, economics, and most every other subject is about what and how in a sense, not why. Students with a lot of what and how can go on and live rather “productive” lives, tread the rat race treadmill faster, but no matter how good you get at what and how, you can still go hungry for why. And, there are students in our system who end up worse off than just wondering about why.

Sure, there are all sort of surface level whys like why does déjà vu occur or why is AIDS hard to kill, or why is the sky blue. But the harder whys are beyond science. Why should I care? Why am I here (no, not how did I get to be here)? Why should we produce weapons of mass destruction? Why should we be more concerned about others? There’s all sorts of game theoretic answers to these, but at some point, when the utilities for solving the equations end up being things like love, happiness, and peace, you start to leave the realm of the scientifically solvable and enter the neighborhood of those proposing to study intelligent design. Yeah, that’s not exactly advocating for intelligent design, but it’s where intelligent designs prophets could be helpful to today’s science taught adults.

This does not mean that intelligent design should somehow substitute for teaching of evolution as a science or even an alternative. It means that there SHOULD be such thing as intelligent design within science. Instead of asking if something can be done – clone humans organs for organ transplants in sheep, develop neutron bombs, or split a quark – we need to have the humanity to ask whether something should be done. Intelligent design can be a conscience for science and school in general, as opposed to an alternative to science. Science needs to be complemented, not supplanted.

Imagine a school system where no child left behind meant every student graduated with the best scientific education this country could conjure; with the best principles for how to govern themselves; with knowing how to ask why and learn how to come up with answers to why – why love, why peace, why happiness and so on; with knowing that intelligent design could come from humans, as best as humanly and humanely possible.

Imagine a world where if you hired someone from high school, you’d know that they were principled; where corporations wouldn’t need to champion their principles as if they were introducing them for the first time, where churches, synagogues, temples, shrines, mosques, and support groups were seen as practitioners of the principled arts where students could go to help themselves graduate.

That’s the kind of intelligent design I’d like to see in schools.

Posted by wayofgo at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack