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Whatever Intelligent Design Is, It's Not a Theory and It's Not Science

“Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade,” wrote the brilliant paleontologist and Harvard professor, Stephen Jay Gould, “a secular religion masquerading as science.” Signaling that those charges are still part of a contentious discussion about the origins of life, Kansas’s Board of Education just recently adopted new standards to question the validity of Darwinian theory and open the door to teaching alternate explanations of biological development—most specifically, the concept of “intelligent design.”

Intelligent design is acknowledged by many observers to be the latest spin on the “creationism” concept that Gould repeatedly questioned as a true science; to him, and to other mainstream scientists, the movement was solely an attempt to legitimize a religious and Biblical explanation for life’s origins by giving it a scientific veneer. Frustrated by their defeats in court and inability to introduce creationism into schools as a viable, alternative theory to evolution, creationists have begun to publicly disavow religious sources for their philosophy and now suggest that life began through the work of an intelligent ‘designer,’ a supernatural force responsible for the entire creation of the universe and all life within it.

Unfortunately for I.D.’s supporters, the courts have repeatedly seen attempts to introduce this pseudo-science into public school curricula as an attempt to advance a religious philosophy where the state and the law cannot condone such an intrusion, and which is specifically prohibited by the First Amendment’s ‘establishment clause.’ 

The intelligent design adherents, as well as their creationist predecessors, have aggressively attacked evolutionary theory as being no more valid a set of answers than their own explanation of the origin of life; in fact, they contend that evolution is merely a theory, not scientific fact, and therefore open to vigorous debate and scholarly inquiry.

If it is true that evolution is no more certain that intelligent design, they ask, why not expose students to both theories? Why keep students for investigating each scientific approach and choosing between them?  "It's an academic freedom proposal,” said Stephen C. Meyer of Seattle’s nonprofit Discovery Institute, the principal generator of I.D. research. “What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism." 

There is one serious problem with the specious idea of teaching intelligent design in science classes as a concomitant scientific theory to evolution: no credible member of the scientific or academic communities has ever proven that intelligent design is anything more than a faith-based philosophy masquerading as science, grounded on the Genesis account of the creation of life. Despite the fact that they have tried, in pressing the intelligent design theory, to distance themselves from their faith, supporters have still not been able to convince the courts that I.D. can stand on its own as a body of knowledge appropriate for science classes. 

“The methodology employed by creationists is another factor which is indicative that their work is not science,” the court found in its extensive and insightful decision in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education.  “The creationists' methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing scientific data, and thereafter reach the conclusions [of the intelligent design theory].” 

Science involves methodical investigation of unknown facts, with findings that are sometimes anticipated but frequently unknown, surprising, or serendipitous. Intelligent design fails as science because it was created as a specific contradiction to evolution, and was promulgated to support a pre-existing ideology. “While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion they choose,” the court in the Arkansas case added, “they cannot properly describe the methodology as scientific, if they start with the conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation.”  

The fact that intelligent design is not science is exactly the reason that it should not be part of any science curriculum—either as an alternative theory to evolution or as intellectual exercise by which students, exercising their ‘academic freedom,’ can investigate other approaches to the origin of life.

The fact is that not every intellectual viewpoint is worthy of being discussed in the classroom, merely because one group feels passionately that their issue has intrinsic value, is true, or should be heard as part of the marketplace of ideas. Some truths are absolute and do not require a fair and balanced measurement against some contradictory body of thought. An entire intellectual ‘industry’ of Holocaust denial research has many fervent followers, for instance, but few sentient school boards would find it palatable or reasonable to have students exposed to the ‘theory’ that the Holocaust never occurred along with history lessons expressing the verifiable and incontrovertible fact that it did.

Ironically, deniers conduct their research and have come to their findings about the Holocaust in a manner similar to the way intelligent design theorists come to theirs. In his essay “Why Revisionism Isn't,” Gordon McFee seems to echo, in the context of revisionist history, the court’s appraisal of how intelligent design was researched and promoted. Just as creationists start with the premise that the theory of evolution is flawed and subject to doubt, wrote McFee, “‘Revisionists’ depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion.” “Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology . . , thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head . . .  To put it tritely, ‘revisionists’ revise the facts based on their conclusion.”

Deniers may have concluded and may passionately want to believe that there was no “Final Solution,” that gas chambers were used merely to delouse prisoners, that only hundreds of thousands of Jews, not millions, were exterminated, and that the Holocaust is overall a hoax perpetrated by Jewish victims to extract sympathy and reparations from the world; but all of their invidious scholarship cannot prove the unprovable, and nor obviously would their theories deserve to be taught as an alternative ‘history’ in public schools merely because they question history and employ perverse scholarship to deny and distort the magnitude of one of the most documented and pernicious events of contemporary times.  

“‘Creation science,’” Gould wrote in an essay he called "Verdict on Creationism," “has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage — good teaching — than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?”