It is difficult to conclude that intelligent design should not be taught in schools alongside evolution if, like the president, you have a sense of fair play and believe that both sides of an issue should be taught. Let there be no doubt that the way science is taught in schools has become an issue on the country’s political agenda, given added prominence by the President's remarks to a group of reporters from Texas on August 2.
Intelligent design is an upscale, sophisticated version of creationism that posits that the universe is too complex to have been created by chance. As such, it has some appeal and cannot be as easily dismissed as the crude arguments of those who insist that the words of Genesis are literally true. But should it be given equal status with evolution in the classroom?
There are several matters to consider here. First, the two theories, evolution and intelligent design, do not have equal weight among scientists. Even President Bush's science advisor, John Marburger III, was quoted as saying that "evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology" and "intelligent design is not a scientific concept" (see the report from the New York Times that appears in the Fort Worth Star Telegram). The truth is that much of the appeal of intelligent design comes not from the scientific qualities of the theory, but from its consonance with fundamentalist strains of Christian thought.
Second, there is a possibility that should intelligent design be taught alongside evolution, other theories favored by the scientifically minded may come under attack as well. The Big Bang is first among those. This theory is not as antithetical to fundamentalist thought as evolution--it does, after all, posit a definite beginning to the universe and leaves open the question of what, if anything, came before. Nonetheless, the Big Bang theory does assert that the universe was created in something more than six days. Moreover, once past the beginning, it is consistent with the idea that the universe more or less developed on its own, sans divine intervention. So bringing evolution in the front door may well leave that door open to the further dilution of science as it is pursued in our schools.
A third, related issue raises a specter whose strength can be too easily exaggerated. This is whether we should let matters of faith determine how we teach science. The specter here is Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's favored biologist. He favored Lamarckianism, which Stalin believed had more in common with Soviet ideology than Mendelian genetics. That is, Lysenko, and Stalin, believed that traits acquired by one generation would simply be passed from one generation to the next. That is, the son of a blacksmith who developed strong arms would also have strong arms (if the mother's traits did not dictate otherwise). Genes had nothing to do with it. It was simple inheritance, rather like the family fortune.
Favoring ideological purity in biology, Stalin pushed Lysenko to the top of the Soviet scientific pyramid. The results were disastrous for Soviet biology, which lost its scientific credibility, in contrast to other parts of Soviet science, physics in particular.
Now, no one in this country is talking about supplanting evolution with intelligent design in our colleges, universities, and research labs. The current discussion is about teaching children of high school age and younger, not how research is conducted. So any parallel with Soviet science in the last century must be inexact and should be drawn carefully. The point of bringing this up, however, is to suggest that by bringing ideological or religious criteria into our approach to science at any level risks doing damage to the scientific enterprise in the United States,
The current policy debates over stem cell research and global warming add to the possibility that some damage may occur. In both debates, one side (at least) has placed the needs or conclusions of science behind religious or political imperatives. The opponents of adding to the supply of stem cells available for research oppose the needs of science with essentially religious arguments. Believing as they do, they would be wrong to do otherwise, but the effect on scientific research is a cost to be considered. With global warming, the conclusions reached by a preponderance of scientists have been devalued in essence because they suggest that politically difficult choices may have to be made.
A fourth consideration is that science is worth learning less because of the facts and theories that are taught and more because it opens the mind of the student. A student can find that common things—the motion of waves in physics, the interaction of compounds in chemistry, for example—can be examined and understood, and not simply looked at as things that happen. Of course, the student also picks up the scientific method, or a rough approximation of it. The essence of that method includes the imperative to follow the evidence to its conclusion, no matter how inconvenient or counterintuitive. One of the great memories I drew out of my science education came from an experiment that proved the hypothesis I started with to be 180 degrees wrong. Much of my research in the social sciences has had similar results, precisely because, like a natural scientist, I declared my assumptions and hypotheses and tested them. Intelligent design, like its cruder companion, begins with the conclusion that God's activity in the universe must be clearly visible to man. That may be good theology; it is not science.
One might question whether it is in fact good theology. Are we so certain that we know what God intends and how God works that we can foreswear the conclusions that scientists have reached? Surely that is an arrogance that anyone contemplating the wonders of the universe should avoid.
As you might imagine after reading this, I have approached the conclusion I declared to be difficult. I do not wish to see kids, particularly my own, taught intelligent design as a theory equal to evolution. I remain uncomfortable with this.
I would be more comfortable with it if the advocates of creationism and intelligent design were more clearly open to an intellectual conversation that went beyond assertions of the tenets of their faith, if they would be open to Bible courses that taught that several interpretations of the good book had equal standing among Christians, or if they insisted that history courses dealt with the development of Christianity over the millennia, treating Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and the many strains of Protestantism, including, yes, Fundamentalism as different parts of a single whole. Barring that, the openness seems too one-sided and the cry for fairness in pedagogy seems a disguised call for a new orthodoxy.
