I recently saw an excellent documentary on PBS’ Nova website titled “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.” It was about the 2005 Pennsylvania State Supreme Court case, Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al., in which the Dover School Board attempted to teach Intelligent Design alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in a public high school science class.
Intelligent Design attempts to reconcile science with the Biblical creation myths by hypothesizing that each species appeared abruptly with its distinct characteristics.
The court ruled that the school board violated students’ rights by introducing a religious doctrine into a public school. The U.S. Constitution forbids the government from promoting or prohibiting any religion.
I was struck by the passion with which the Evangelical Christians argued that kids should also be taught Intelligent Design as an alternative. They emphasized that evolution was only a theory.
Scientific theories are not purely speculative, however. Evolution, like the theory of gravitation or the germ theory of disease, is supported by an enormous body of evidence that has withstood repeated testing. Darwin’s theory is foundational to the biological sciences, which would otherwise be incoherent.
Kenneth Miller of Brown University said, “Not a single observation, not a single experimental result, has ever emerged in 150 years that contradicts the general outlines of the theory of evolution. Any theory that can stand up to 150 years of contentious testing is a pretty darn good theory.”
Many Evangelicals also believe there is an ongoing debate in the scientific community on evolution versus Intelligent Design, but this is not the case. Intelligent Design is overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community, so much so that the defense in this case had a hard time finding scientists to testify.
I was also struck by the apparent belief among Evangelicals that science could and should be re-written to fit their religious beliefs. Like police detectives, scientists go where the evidence takes them, and the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that later species evolved from earlier ones.
Should scientists ignore this massive body of evidence to spare somebody’s Bronze Age religious beliefs? Clearly, science is no respecter of religion and it shouldn’t be. Science is not a creative-writing exercise that we get to re-write at our whim.
The tenacity with which Evangelicals cling to the creation myths in Genesis seems a little arbitrary. For example, the Bible describes a flat Earth with the heavens as a dome enclosing it, within which the planets circle the Earth. Even most Evangelicals now accept the scientific theory of a round Earth that orbits the sun in infinite space, so why the attachment to such archaic creation myths?
In teaching evolution, we are teaching the overwhelmingly dominant scientific model. This is important, as good scientific training is responsible for the technological and medical breakthroughs that give us our quality-of-life.
The federal judge in the case, John E. Jones, III explained this best: “In an era where we're trying to cure cancer, where we're trying to prevent pandemics, where we’re trying to keep science and math education on the cutting edge in the United States, to introduce and teach bad science to ninth-grade students makes very little sense to me ... And it doesn't benefit any of us who benefit daily from scientific discoveries.”
Amen.
Christopher Herrin is a graduate Religious Studies major and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
16 comments
Evolution is falsifiable - there are dozens of tests, if true, that would prove evolution false
Evolution is observable - in nature, in labs (see Lenski E. coli for a good example)
Evolution makes successful predictions - the search for Tiktaalik, feathered dinosaurs, etc.Intelligent Design offers no mechanism: does the flesh dynamically re-form to introduce design, does one creature with a "design feature" give birth to a creature with one?
ID offers no falsifiability: Is the feature evolved, or designed? If we prove one design feature could have evolved, IDers just move to a different feature.
ID offers no observability: if all this "design" is going on, why have we never witnessed it?
ID makes no predictionsScience rejects ID because, for the reasons above, ID is demonstrably not science. And the Dover trial already proved that ID and all other forms of Christian creationism evolved from a single common ancestor. "cdesign proponentsists" is just one of the transitional fossils.There is no controversy, so there is no controversy to teach.
Isaiah 40:22 says
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth.
This is true because from space, the earth is in the shape of a circleJob 26:7 says
He is stretching out the north over the empty place,
Hanging the earth upon nothing;
Before this time, people thought that the world was balanced upon the backs of elephants and had various theories about it being supported by something. They didnt believe that the earth hung upon nothing until technology, which proves the Bible's scientific accuracy