undyingking (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
undyingking) wrote2005-09-13 01:25 pm
undyingking) wrote2005-09-13 01:25 pm
Entry tags:
Intelligent Design theory
I've been musing about this interesting 'theory' just lately. Essentially it claims that there are some things about life (in the biological sense) that are just too complicated to have evolved by natural selection, and so instead they must have been designed by some more powerful agent.
It's been claimed that this is just creationism in pseudo-respectable guise, and certainly it's seems to have been treated that way in the Kansas State Board of Education. But I guess we can do the proponents the politeness of taking at face value their claim that the Christian God is not a necessary component.
My interest is in the actual structure of the argument. It's actually very old (Thomas Aquinas I believe put it forward) and so presumably has a lasting appeal, but it seems to me to be impossibly weak. The weakness is that it seems to take the arguer's own paowers of imagination / reasoning as axiomatic of the system. It's saying "I can't imagine how this could have arisen by non-designed means, therefore it can't have." You would think it could automatically be refuted by someone else saying "Well, I can quite easily imagine it, so boo sucks to you." Although a philosopher would probably put that more elegantly.
In the 19th century opponents of Darwinism cited the eye as an example -- saying that part of an eye provided no benefit, therefore natural selection could not have evolved it gradually towards its current form as Darwinists suggested. This was quite easily shot down by showing that just by looking around the animal kingdom of today we can identify a whole spectrum of optical structures which are less complex than our own eyes but which provide benefit to their users.
Today's intelligent design advocates use things like the bombardier beetle, the blood clotting sequence, and the bacterial flagellum as examples of things which only work at all when fully realized. I don't know enough biology to be able to counter these examples, but presumably it can be done?
The more practical question though is about whether ID should be taught in schools. Richard Dawkins has said that this would be equivalent to teaching flat earth theory, and of course Flying Spaghetti Monsterism also has its advocates. However it seems to me that it would be useful if schools gave a bit of perspective on how science arose and the intellectual battles it had to fight, rather than just handing it down on stone tablets. The Victorians were presented with Darwinism as an alternative to the prevailing creationist theory, and they were intelligent enough to (mostly) see that Darwinism was more likely to be right. Won't our children understand natural selection better if they work out for themselves why it's superior to what came before, rather than just being told that it's right because the syllabus says so?
It's been claimed that this is just creationism in pseudo-respectable guise, and certainly it's seems to have been treated that way in the Kansas State Board of Education. But I guess we can do the proponents the politeness of taking at face value their claim that the Christian God is not a necessary component.
My interest is in the actual structure of the argument. It's actually very old (Thomas Aquinas I believe put it forward) and so presumably has a lasting appeal, but it seems to me to be impossibly weak. The weakness is that it seems to take the arguer's own paowers of imagination / reasoning as axiomatic of the system. It's saying "I can't imagine how this could have arisen by non-designed means, therefore it can't have." You would think it could automatically be refuted by someone else saying "Well, I can quite easily imagine it, so boo sucks to you." Although a philosopher would probably put that more elegantly.
In the 19th century opponents of Darwinism cited the eye as an example -- saying that part of an eye provided no benefit, therefore natural selection could not have evolved it gradually towards its current form as Darwinists suggested. This was quite easily shot down by showing that just by looking around the animal kingdom of today we can identify a whole spectrum of optical structures which are less complex than our own eyes but which provide benefit to their users.
Today's intelligent design advocates use things like the bombardier beetle, the blood clotting sequence, and the bacterial flagellum as examples of things which only work at all when fully realized. I don't know enough biology to be able to counter these examples, but presumably it can be done?
The more practical question though is about whether ID should be taught in schools. Richard Dawkins has said that this would be equivalent to teaching flat earth theory, and of course Flying Spaghetti Monsterism also has its advocates. However it seems to me that it would be useful if schools gave a bit of perspective on how science arose and the intellectual battles it had to fight, rather than just handing it down on stone tablets. The Victorians were presented with Darwinism as an alternative to the prevailing creationist theory, and they were intelligent enough to (mostly) see that Darwinism was more likely to be right. Won't our children understand natural selection better if they work out for themselves why it's superior to what came before, rather than just being told that it's right because the syllabus says so?
no subject
Intelligent Design doesn't really fit this bill.
For a start, it isn't really a predecessor of evolutionary theory except in the loosest possible sense. The real predecessor is creationism, which was dogmatic, and not necessarily accompanied by any argument whatsoever. Some philosophers (e.g. Aquinas) did attempt it, but not just by argument from design; they also attempted the ontological argument and other such mumbo-jumbo. So we can't really legitimately teach Intelligent Design per se as history.
Secondly, some people still believe it. This might be seen as a good reason to teach it as current theory, except that AFAIK it is an unbelievably small minority of professional biologists who believe it, plus an unknown number of non-scientists. So teaching it would be rather like teaching the theory that life came from Mars - some people do believe it, but it isn't really a credible or interesting theory, and certainly isn't central to the corpus of modern biology.
Thirdly, it is a theory that cannot be disproved. Think about it; what evidence could possibly convince us that Intelligent Design was untrue? Even if evolutionary theory were to be categorically proven (not possible), the very fact of evolution could be a testament to the Designer's ingenuity. So it isn't really scientific at all, unlike phlogiston (and flat earth theory for that matter) which at least can succumb to evidence.
So I don't really see the rationale for teaching ID in science classes - perhaps it could be argued as a component of philosophy or religious studies classes (to go alongside Aquinas' arguments).
no subject
You're right that it's not possible to disprove (unless you count the reduction ad absurdum), but that of itself makes it interesting I think. To set it aside, students will have to learn a new thought weapon -- Occam's Razor.
no subject