(Un)Intelligent Design

I have two family members in public office. This is the first time that I ever considered that I could cause them some trouble. I woke up this morning to an editorial in the Rock Island Argus entitled "What are the scientists all afraid of?" In the editorial, which you can hopefully read here he basically calls the scientific community cowards for not adjusting the scientific credo so that it can include intelligent design. Among his more absurd pronouncements is that science "will collapse, sooner or later, like the Soviet Union." Now, people who know me know that that kind of ludicrous shit cannot stand without rebuttal. So, after spending a couple hours at a hopeless job fair *sniff* this afternoon, I got to writing. Since I have serious doubts whether this will actually make it to print, I wanted to share it with you here. This is what the Argus' People's Pulpit will be getting in their inbox this afternoon :

William Rusher’s column of January 12 asked what the scientific community is so afraid of when it comes to intelligent design, and in doing so, he exemplified what terrifies scientists so much. Quite simply, the fear of those in the scientific community is that a philosophical and theological concept will rewrite the definition of what science is. Rusher argues for just that in his column. He chastises science for its adherence to “materialistic interpretations of reality.” He criticizes science for being an empirically based enterprise and not allowing supernatural explanations into the formula. He wants to change the rules of science, plain and simple, and he calls the scientific community cowardly for not doing so. It’s like Peyton Manning deciding to plant landmines in the backfield to keep a defense off his back, and then calling his opponents wimps for not allowing for more lenient interpretation of the rule book. You don't hear any scientists calling for ammendments to the Ten Commandments in order to make them more scientifically inclusive, so why should we twist the fudamentals of science to make room for faith-based explanations?

The rejection of intelligent design in the scientific community comes from an absence of compelling evidence, not some underlying political dogma. Rusher makes a number of baseless suggestions about the scientific community that completely misrepresents their worldview. First among them is that science has a worldview. It does not. The theories and laws that guide science are the result of years of testing and experimentation; science didn’t bend these conclusions to fit with what it believed to be true. If that were the case we’d all still be worried about falling off the edge of the Earth. Rusher also labels the scientific community as intrinsicly godless. Again, incorrect. At worst, the scientific community is, in practice, agnostic. There is no empirical data to support the existence of God, so scientists study independently of that faith-based variable. Still, there is no universal claim from scientists that there is no God. Certainly there are a number of atheists in the scientific community, just as there are in the world at large. But some of the best scientific minds also had deeply held religious beliefs. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds in history, often spoke eloquently and faithfully about God, and he is not the only scientist to do so. And despite Rusher’s claims, science does not show, without a doubt, that the universe had no beginning. It suspects. It has ideas. But it is constantly testing those ideas against empirical data. If science played by intelligent design’s rules, the scientific community’s work would be done. They could just give it all up to the "designer".

One of Rusher’s more naive suggestions is that intelligent design leaves the identity of said designer open. Of course, he admits, “one obvious possibility is God.” I’m curious what he believes the other identities to be. Zeus, perhaps? Or possibly some extra-terrestrial? Alf, maybe? Or those little chain-smoking aliens from Men in Black? Let’s ask Tom Cruise who he’d slip in as his cosmic architect. I’m sure Rusher would appreciate an open conversation on the topic. After all, we don’t want to be like those narrow-minded scientists. In truth, God is not one possibility for the intelligent designer in an open-ended spectrum; which God is where I.D. remains mute. Yet, this is where intelligent design becomes more dangerous than Rusher’s aww-shucks presentation. If we institute I.D. into schools, how long before the conversation turns to who, specifically, this designer is? Suddenly, science is no longer science. It is theology. And despite what Rusher seems to believe, that is a bad thing.

Intelligent Design does have its place in public schools, in philosophy or theology classes, but its inclusion in science classes further corrodes an American student body that is falling further and further behind the rest of the world in those “materialistic” areas like math and science. If we want to broaden that divide, we need only adopt a concept like intelligent design into our classrooms under the pretense of inclusiveness and well-roundedness. Despite Rusher’s prediction that science and its godless worldview “will collapse, sooner or later, like the Soviet Union,” I assure him that science and faith will have equal influence on the future of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we should change the nature of either so that we can bring the two together. That is what intelligent design is asking us to do, and that is what scientists and the faithful alike should be afraid of.