Scopes II

Kenneth Woodward touches on some interesting points in today's NY Times about the Harrisburg, Pa. court case that the press is calling Scopes II. Some parents have sued the Dover School Board for among other things, requiring teachers to read a brief statement about intelligent design to students before classes on evolution. The statement says Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and has explicable "gaps." It also refers students to an intelligent-design textbook for additional information.

Woodward rightly points out that science and religion need not be in conflict, and that the late Pope John Paul II publicly recognized the primacy of Darwin's scientific theory. Then he says:
The danger in intelligent design is not just that it is bad science, but that it seeks to enlist evidence from science in the service of religious truth while denying evolutionary processes like mutation and natural selection. But the designer God of intelligent design is no more necessary to Christianity (or other monotheisms) than was the deistic God of Newtonian physics. In both cases, God ends up being made in the image of an intellectual system, much like Aristotle's unmoved mover. That is not the God of revelation.
In this view, the problem with intelligent design is the temptation to "model bash", or trying to fit two seemingly unrelated paradigms in the same box. Model bashing has a chance of success when both paradigms are backed up by quantitative evidence - say, the Two-Step Theory of Communication with the Diffusion of Innovations. Creationists commit the double folly of first selling their paradigm as science, then cramming their pseudoscience into a box with fundamentalist Christian dogma.

But using the science of life's origins to reveal larger truths about the human condition is what creationists accuse evolution proponents of. Without God as part of the lesson plan, say creationists, evolution holds that humans are nothing more than an assemblage of material parts, or "gene survival machines" as Oxford's Richard Dawkin's puts it.

Woodward's solution to this conundrum seems a little farfetched to me, when you consider that we are talking about high school students:
One way out of the classroom conflict over teaching evolution would be to devise courses that examine the cultural uses to which evolution is put. But such courses would inevitably involve dialogue with religious concepts and perspectives - and thus raise further objections from those who see no place at all for religious ideas in public education.
Seems a little high level for a bunch of 17-year olds to discuss the God of Newtonian physics, or Aristotle's unmoved mover.
1.10.05 18:29
 


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