I was reading about the Kansas school system intelligent design debates (after a co-worker introduced me to the Flying Spaghetti Monster), and talking to Laura about it, and came to a realization. I know how to deal with the question of intelligent design in schools, and I better understand why I don't think intelligent design belongs in biology class.
It belongs in math class.
That's right, you heard me. Math. See, creationism is an alternative to evolution (and when I say evolution, I refer only to the physical mechanics; that will be important later). Intelligent design is not—it's an alternative to probability as it is currently presented, or, to be more accurate, intelligent design is an alternative to random chance in all of its forms. Nothing about intelligent design is actually unique to evolution; at its core it's just a restatement of the idea that “God does not play [fair] dice”. Fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with teaching that in schools, in the context of probability. All of probability is based on the precondition of “all other things being equal”, and intelligent design just says things can never be known to be equal, because there could be a higher power waiting to meddle at its whim. You could argue that it's weak science, because it's not provable or disprovable (the whims of an intelligence we don't understand being by more or less by definition indistinguishable from random chance), but it's not science—it's a basic assumption. And the same is equally true of the idea that all things are governed by random chance, and there's nothing wrong with pointing out that we should question basic, unfounded assumptions. Probability (or at least the application thereof to anything in the real world) is then recognized not as a mathematical truth, but a generally useful theory for prediction, which is exactly as it should be given that all of its applications are based on an assumption we can't prove.
Then, all that remains is to remove the word “random” from most scientific teaching materials, since random is in opposition to intelligent design, and thus an endorsement of atheism in most cases. If we simply talk about “chance”, and understand that to be either random on not, according to our beliefs, then we all gain a better understanding of the difference between fact and theory, our teaching is more belief-agnostic—and the issue of evolution becomes simply one special case of that.
So that's my plan, which I think is very workable. Except of course for the fact that that most of the scientific community would rebel against it, since it weakens the public facade of infallibility so many people of science wish so wrongly to cultivate. It wouldn't really weaken science in any real way; probability would remain exactly as useful as a prediction tool provided that any intelligent forces continue in the same fashion they have through all the experiments that led to the creation of the theory of random chance... and that caveat is nothing new, since all of science predicts based on the assumption that things will generally stay the same. It's just a case of all of us learning to be a little more aware of how deep that caveat runs.
I bet you didn't think this was going to be an endorsement of teaching intelligent design when you saw the title, did you? I didn't either, when I started thinking and talking things out with Laura. It just goes to show that you can learn some startling things when you question what you haven't really thought to question about your education.
Category: Society
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