Peter Slevin, in today's Washington Post,
reports on a new national movement to install intelligent design into
evolutionary teaching in public schools. We should all welcome this
discussion.
Intelligent design is the belief that
evolution has a plan and a desired outcome built into it. This should
be an easy thesis to reject if one has a definition of science that
is based on the theoretical work of Karl Popper. Popper in 1959
advanced the thesis that the definitive quality of scientific theory
is falsifiability. If a theory does not offer a mechanism for its
own falsifiability, then it is not scientific.
The reason I welcome this debate is
because scientists do not understand or accept Popper's definition.
If scientists accepted Popper's definition then no one who calls
themselves a scientist could teach or advocate intelligent design as
a scientific theory because it isn't falsifiable.
You can't falsify evolution by intelligent design. Especially since any evidence you present in your argument against intelligent design will be met with 'we just don't fully understand the design plan.' That would be the response to the proposition that no intelligent designer would create mosquitoes that carry malaria and kill millions of children every year. Response: 'we just don't understand the purpose of the design plan.' That is not a falsifiable theory. That is not science.
Unfortunately, more than 90% of
scientists accept, as good science, a completely unfalsifiable theory: Global Warming. Global Warming is so unfalsifiable that every piece
of evidence that is presented to falsify it has forced the theory to
migrate to a new, unfalsifiable home called Global Climate Change.
So long as scientists don't accept and live by Popper, they deserve to get into an argument with religious folk, which the scientists keep losing. The only way scientists can get out of this box is to become honest Popper people.
No wonder the public can't distinguish science from religion, 90% of scientists can't do it either.