Thursday, August 03, 2006
Intelligent Design Rant
It was prompted by someone posting a link to this news article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060731/ap_on_re_us/creation_museum_1
Museum uses bible to tell earth's history
By DYLAN T. LOVAN, Associated Press Writer
PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one
has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant
reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that's the
point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky.Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that
contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few
thousand years ago."If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is
true, that's our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there," museum
founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which
is due to open next year.Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing
company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately
funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view."We're going to show you that we can make sense of the different
people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see
in the world," he said.Visitors to the museum, a few miles from Cincinnati, will be
able to watch the story of creation unfold in a 180-seat special-effects
theater, see a 40-foot-tall recreation of a section of Noah's Ark and stare into
the jaws of robotic dinosaurs."It's education, but it's also doing it in an entertaining way,"
Ham said.Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating
technology show that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first
dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before
the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago."Genesis is not science," said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of
vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
"Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really
knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and
certainly knew nothing about what fossils were."Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great
Flood described in Genesis.Mark Looy, a vice president at Answers in Genesis, said the
museum has received at least $21 million in private donations. He said two
anonymous donors have given $1 million, and he expects the museum to be
debt-free when it opens next May.John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in
San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will
affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man
evolved from lower forms of life."Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came
from a fish," he said.
Most of the responses were appropriately (IMO) against the establishment of such a "museum". Here's one I agreed with:
I replied to that opinion, to begin my own rant.That's where I have trouble with it...when they start claiming
that it's science. It hurts our scientific community in more ways than
one.And lets not get into what our math and science situation is in
this country.
__________________
[begin rant]
Bingo.It's time for me to inject some more of my own opinions into this thread. Prepare for me to step on the soapbox.
I'll tell you, the quote from a previous poster that probably has bothered me the most in this whole thread was:
More importantly, where do you get off calling someone that has a different belief system than you ignorant?
Maybe he didn't mean it in precisely this way, but this is where political correctness has led us to: person A's theory is just as valid as person B's theory, because "it's OK for people to have different belief systems".
That is the antithesis of the scientific method.
The scientific method says we test out theories, and if they hold water, we keep them. If they don't, we don't. Pardon the religious metaphor here, but it's what allows us to make decisions (like governmental policy) on a foundation made out of rock, rather than a foundation made out of sand.
I was recently at a teaching conference where one of the topic of conversations was "What should students learn from their general education experience?" A list of 10 or so items were tossed out from an opinion piece we were discussing--an opinion piece which had "inspired" many of my fellow professors. Many of the items mentioned in the piece were good and important, in my opinion. But far too many of them focused on things like "appreciating diversity", "learning to think outside one's own world-view", and "recognizing validity of alternate viewpoints" (I'm paraphrasing).
Not a single one addressed "critical thinking" in any form.
I would have put that at #1 on my list of what college students should be learning. How to tell fact from fiction. How to weigh evidence and understand what's significant. What is likely to be true. How to use their heads. How to separate hoax from reality. How to research a topic and decide whether someone else's opinion is meaningful/correct/etc. How to make meaningful estimations based on known evidence. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
We were asked "what items would you add to this list", and I mentioned "critical thinking". Not a single one of my colleagues (we were about 15-20 people, from all different disciplines) spoke up to agree with me, to say, "Yes, that's really important for students to learn." Boggled my mind.
___
Let me move on to Creationism--and by Creationism I don't mean the folks that believe in a Creator, since I'm one of those myself. In fact, anyone who's read much here knows I am one of the most religious guys on this site. By Creationism, I'm talking about the folks that tend to believe in a literal reading of Genesis, as discussed in this wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation-evolution_controversy
Intelligent Design is the subset of Creationism that is typically involved in these discussions. ID as is used in today's political climate is not just the belief that the universe was intelligently designed--after all, as a religious believer, that's something I think is true--it tends to be a belief in a particular type of design, basically that viewed as correct by a particular religious crowd. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design_movement
What really bugs me about this particular crowd is that they are trying to win scientific equivalence for theories which are not science. And they are trying to win this equivalence through political--not scientific!--channels. "Let's pass a bill requiring science teachers to teach both evolution and creationism. What's the harm? They're both just theories. We should give equal time to opposing arguments."
The harm is that one is a scientific theory, having gone through the scientific process, peer review of articles, etc., etc., and the other is not. One is part of the scientific consensus, and is believed by 99.9% of scientists to be the truth, or fairly close to the truth. The other is not.
There is no equivalency between the two, and to teach our kids that there is does them a tremendous disservice. It destroys any chance we have of teaching them critical thinking and the scientific process.
You might be interested in reading these two editorials from the past year, written for the American Physics Society News. I don't agree 100% with the writers, but I agree with a lot of what they have to say.
October 2005
http://www.aps.org/apsnews/1005/100518.cfm
April 2006
http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0406/040617.cfm
The second one in particular, by Lawrence M. Krauss, seems to have some good quotes which summarize my views fairly well:
The dishonesty of ID lies in its proponents pointing to a controversy when there really is no controversy. A friend of mine did an informal survey of more than 10 million articles in major science journals during the past twelve years. Searching for the key word evolution pulled up 115,000 articles, most pertaining to biological evolution. Searching for Intelligent Design yielded 88 articles. All but 11 of those were in engineering journals, where, of course, we hope there is discussion of intelligent design. Of the 11, eight were critical of the scientific basis for ID theory and the remaining three turned out to be articles in conference proceedings, not peer-reviewed research journals.
The ID strategy is also unfair in a very particular way. Consider how real-world science gets done. Suppose you have a novel scientific claim. You do some research on it. You then submit an article to journals. The journals send it out to idiots called peer reviewers, and those idiots tell you why you're wrong, and then you have to fight with them and tell them why they're idiots, and it goes on and on. If you're lucky, you get published. What happens next? If your work is interesting, other people will begin to look at it and do follow-up research. If it's really interesting, you'll build a scientific consensus, which may take ten, 20, 30, or 40 years. Only then does your work get mentioned in high-school textbooks.
ID advocates want to skip all the intermediate steps. They want to take their theory straight into high school textbooks. And that's not fair. ID advocates are unwilling to play by the same rules as scientists. If they believe ID is a scientific theory, they should welcome the requirement that they go through all the steps that other scientists have to go through before their work makes it way into textbooks.
We face a vast problem in the public understanding of science.... [A good fraction of people surveyed] thought creationism, evolution, and ID should be taught-on grounds of fairness, of course.
So what's the harm of this particular museum? Probably not too much, but it is symptomatic of something much larger which is doing serious harm to our country.
[end rant]
Leah in Roseville
: 8/17/2006 7:51 PM 
<< Home
