Question about EVOLUTION, intelligent design, etc...?!??

Question

im not saying i believe in either evolution or intelligent design.

but... honestly, why is the teaching of the possibility of intelligent design prohibited from public schools?! i mean... they are both THEORIES. evolution, as much as you argue, is not a proven fact... its a THEORY. as is intelligent design. why not at least be allowed to suggest the possibility for both? ... whats so wrong with the possibility that our earth may have had a designer? im not even saying this in support of christianity... you don't even have to say that such a designer might have been God. why does that designer have to be God? i mean... you can't rule out the possibility of intelligent design just cause you don't want to believe in God, you don't have to put the two together. but why not at least allow both theories to be taught and let the learner decide for himself?

it seems unscientific to present only one side of a view. i would be just as upset if intelligent design was the only theory presented.

Answer 1

Well, the thing is, evolution IS a fact and intelligent design is NOT a theory.

Evolution is a fact, it happens, we can see it, there is no denying this.  The theory of evolution is a different thing, it explains why things evolve.  It's a theory.  We KNOW things evolve, we're just not 100% sure why.

(We are about 97% sure though...)

Intelligent design is not a theory, not in the scientific meaning of the word theory.  See, the problem is the intelligent design supporters try to confuse people over what is a scientific theory and what 'theory' means in common, everyday language.  In everyday use, 'theory' basically means a guess.  And that's what intelligent design is, a guess and nothing more.  In science though, a guess is called a 'hypothesis.'  A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested many, many times and has been proven true in every single scenario that it's possible to test it in.  A theory is much, much stronger than a guess.  What scientists call 'theory' is something that has been verified so much that the common person would say it has been proven.  The only reason scientists call it theory instead of saying it's proven is there's always the possibility, no matter how small, that we could learn something new that changes everything.  For example, we still have the theory of gravity.  Things don't get promoted above theory, theory is as high as it goes.  If we call a thing theory it doesn't mean we think it might be true, it means we're pretty d**n sure it's true.

Intelligent design is an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and that's why it doesn't belong in school.  If a scientist wants to study intelligent design to try to find enough evidence that we can make a real Theory of Intelligent Design, then that's his business and that's fine.  But science classrooms are not for teaching every random guess about the world that's ever been proposed.

Evolution on the other hand, we know evolution happens and we're pretty d**n sure we know why and how.  We're actually more sure about evolution than we are about gravity, honestly.  And that's the kind of thing we teach in science class.

"or those of you who are saying religion doesnt belong in public schools or whatever... why are you making it about religion?? "

Look at the people who fund intelligent design and do intelligent design 'research.'  Answers in Genesis.  The Discovery Institute.  They're ALL religious organizations.  Intelligent design is a religious movement that is trying to hide it.

Answer 2

religion does not belong in schools. schools should teach evolution, as one possibility, because no one can prove we evolved from something else, and churches should teach thier  beliefs.

my theory is, we are all dead. this is h**l.

Answer 3

Its psycho babble and insanity that will end with the fruition of the anti-Christ. A creature mutated useless front arms, for years and years and one day they flew with them(Wings) yea right

Answer 4

Questioner gave an excellent answer.  First, learn the real fields and concepts, not the caricatures presented by their opponents or even by the schools, which often present an oversimplified distortion.  Schools should first teach the fundamentals of science and how to think.  Evolutionary theory should be presented in a factual, honest, unbiased way, Thinkers with an adequate background should be qualified to decide for themselves which evolutionary claims are solid science and which are still hypothesis or even speculation.  It's intellectual dishonesty to forbid people or schools from presenting the weight of evidence behind an idea, or from simply asking whether this looks more like a design than an accident.

Answer 5

Carlita,

It all comes down to what the *SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY* believes!   That's it!

Science is NOT a democracy!   I know that sounds terrible to Americans ... but really ... science is NOT about taking votes.  People who think that what the general public believes about science should influence science education, either don't know, or don't care that 18% of people believe in Bigfoot, 20% believe it is possible to communicate with the dead, and  25% believe in UFOs, and 37% believe in hauntings and ghosts.  Do you really want this to be how we decide what is taught in science classrooms?

Science instead operates by *consensus* within the scientific community!   Scientists are people who devote their lives to undertanding the issues and evaluating the evidence .  They spend years in universities getting PhD.s ... a process that *MAKES* them understand everything available in their field, and to contribute something new to it (their thesis).  They publish, they argue, they go to conferences, they spend years in the lab or in the field.  They each, individually write dozens or even hundreds of papers and even books ... and they read *thousands* of papers and books.  They critique each other's work *mercilessly* (a process called 'peer review').  They teach, and work in the major universities in the world, and tenure, positions, awards, and livelihood are dependent on their continued publication in their fields. Many scientists have careers spanning decades ... 40, 50, 60 years of this kind of relentless examination of the issues, and the evidence.

There are hundreds of thousands of these scientists in universities in many different fields, including the biological fields like genetics, biochemistry, paleontology, organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, zoology, botany, anatomy, physiology, medicine, anthropology, primatology, etc. etc.

*THESE* are the people who debate the issues like evolution vs. Intelligent Design.

And these scientists *OVERWHELMINGLY*, by the hundreds of thousands, for over 150 years, accept evolution as one of the two cornerstone ideas that are the foundation of all of modern biology (the other being cell theory).

And these scientists *OVERWHEMINGLY*, by the hundreds of thousands, find nothing of value whatsoever in Intelligent Design ... other than as a set of questions (some of them good ones) that evolution (so far) has had no trouble answering.  And a set of questions (even good ones) IS NOT A THEORY.

But the advocates of Intelligent Design don't care what the scientists think!   They want to take the debate instead into 10th-grade Biology classroom.  Why?  Because while arguments with sciencie-sounding names like "irreducible complexity", "generation of new information from point mutations", or "violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics" are *EASILY* answered by any scientist with a little grounding in biochemistry, complexity theory, thermodynamics, or even basic genetics ... these arguments sound awfully convincing to a 10th grader struggling to memorize the difference between mitosis and meiosis!

In other words, if these arguments can't persuade scientists, then perhaps they will persuade 10th-graders!  Or at the very least, it will present the impression that this "evolution stuff" is complicated and controversial ... when in fact EVOLUTION IS REALLY *SIMPLE* AND *NOT* CONTROVERSIAL IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

>"you don't even have to say that such a designer might have been God. why does that designer have to be God?"

That's precisely the problem with Intelligent Design, and why it is not a *theory* at all.   By trying to remain vague about what the Designer is ... IT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL!   It replaces the thing to be explained (say the eye, or the flagellum), with something far more mysterious.   What is this Designer?  What is *its* origin?  What is its energy source?  What is its mechanism?  What is its *MOTIVE*?   Intelligent Design answers none of these.  It asks far more questions than it answers.

>"... whats so wrong with the possibility that our earth may have had a designer?"

Nothing at all wrong with it at all.   But it's just *NOT SCIENCE*.  

>"but why not at least allow both theories to be taught and let the learner decide for himself?"

Because a kid in 10th grade does not have the background in biochemistry, genetics, information theory, complexity theory, thermodynamics, etc. to "decide for himself."  Not if it is presented as a "debate" between two competing "theories" as if they are equal.  These kids will only end up utterly confused (which is precisely the *goal* of these ID advocates).

>"it seems unscientific to present only one side of a view."

Not when there is only one side of view to be presented.  A 10th-grade biology classroom is not the place to be having "debates" between the bedrock theory of modern biology, and half-baked non-theories like Intelligent Design.  Kids who are just learning what a chromosome is should not be delving into the biochemistry of the bacterial flagellum!  Not unless the goal is specifically not to educate, but to *confuse*!

Summary:  Advocates of Intelligent Design, unable to convince even a *tiny fraction* of the world's scientific community ... have turned instead to trying to have this confusing, non-scientific, and emotionally charged "debate" into 10th Grade classrooms.  Unable to convince scientists, they will gladly settle for confusing schoolchildren.

It is cowardly and pathetic.  It is NOT science!

Answer 6

I hadn't noticed anyone engaged in debate over the arrangement of the solar system, though the Bible tells us that the sun revolves around the earth.  It also tells us that the circumference of a circle is three times its diameter.  And of course there are the commandments that everyone ignores, like Deut 22:11.

Answer 7

<<but... honestly, why is the teaching of the possibility of intelligent design prohibited from public schools?>>

It's due to the lack of supporting evidence.

<<i mean... they are both THEORIES.>>

In science, a theory needs to be potentially falsifiable by testing it against the available evidence.  So called intelligent design isn't falsifiable and, therefore, isn't a theory.

<<whats so wrong with the possibility that our earth may have had a designer?>>

Nothing's wrong with it, but science happens to require evidence.

<<it seems unscientific to present only one side of a view.>>

Again, science requires evidence.  It would be unscientific to present non-evidence-based views.  Besides, if you're going to teach one faith-based position, then it would be unfair to leave out all the others.  So called intelligent design is one of ever so many faith-based accounts.

Answer 8

did you watch that movie Exspelled?

Answer 9

Evolution is a scientific theory with a falsifiable hypothesis.  It could be proved wrong with hard evidence if that evidence existed.  On the other hand, there is no way to prove wrong the existence of God.  Intelligent design does not fit in with the scientific method because of its lack of a falsifiable hypothesis.  This is no reason to completely reject either.  Many of those I highly respect believe in a combination of both.

Answer 10

http://www.drdino.com/downloads.php

This is an absolutley wonderful website to go to for stuff like this. Just download the different movies. Dinosaurs and the Bible is my personal favorite.

Proof Evolution is a lie:

1. The slowing spin of the earth limits the earth's age

2. The 1/2 inch layer of cosmic dust on the moon indicates the moon has not been accumulating dust for billions of years

3. Jupiter's moon, Io, is losing matter to Jupiter. It cannot be billions of years old

4. The shrinking sun limits the earth-sun relationship to fewer than billions of years. The sun is losing both mass and diameter. Changing the mass would upset the fine gravitational balance that keeps the earth at just the right distance for life to survive

5. The oldest known historical records are less than 6,000 years old

6. The oldest living coral reef is less than 4,200 years old (Couldn't be 6,000 because The Flood would have destroyed it)

7. Biblical dates add up to about 6,000 years

8. The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now

9. The existance of short-period comets indicates the universe is less than billions of years old

10. At the rate many star clusters are expanding, they could not have been traveling for billions of years

http://www.evanwiggs.com/articles/reason

This also is another good website.

Answer 11

First, go see Expelled (so many people are content to criticize it and swallow the negative reviews without actually seeing it).

Second (as you mention), so many people these days are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design.  "Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet.  Many creationists (like those at Answers In Genesis) don’t like the ID movement because they say it divorces the Creator from the creation.

The thing is, reliable methods for detecting design exist and are employed in forensics, archeology, data fraud analysis, and SETI.  These methods can easily be employed to detect design in biological systems.

As Dr. Stephen Meyer said (when being interviewed by Nightline), “From the evidence of the information that’s embedded in DNA, from the evidence of the nanotechnology in the cell, we think you can infer that an intelligence played a role.  In fact, there are sophisticated statistical methods of design detection that allow scientists to distinguish the effects of an intelligent cause from an undirected natural process. When you apply those statistical measures and criteria to the analysis of the cell, they indicate that the cell was designed by an intelligence.”

The four main areas the ID movement focuses on: Information Theory, Irreducible Complexity, The Anthropic Principle, and The Design Inference.

Design theorists often employ several methods of design detection, including specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and Bayesian probability approaches.

Here is a brief overview of the scientific case for ID: http://www.arn.org/docs/positivecaseford...

And for those who put so much faith in peer-review, check this out: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/...

Here is a growing list of scientists who signed “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism”: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/...

Here is a helpful reference guide with the Neo-Darwinian view next to the Intelligent Design view: http://www.arn.org/docs/Redeeming%20Darw...

What about teaching it in school?  Whatever you may think of George Bush, he was right in this: "Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about.  Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”  

Good science teaching should include controversies.  But, whenever you mention this kind of stuff, evolutionists jump from their trees and start behaving as if someone had stolen their bananas.  Apparently, academic freedom is for other subjects.

As Cal Thomas has said, “Why are believers in one model—evolution—seeking to impose their faith on those who hold that there is scientific evidence which supports the other model?  It’s because they fear they will lose their influence and academic power base after a free and open debate.  They are like political dictators who oppose democracy, fearing it will rob them of power.”

Most Christians I know don't want biblical creationism taught in science classes (they would butcher it). What we want is for molecules-to-man evolution to be taught with all its warts (they are not even allowed to present evidence that would put evolution in a poor light).  And we want intelligent design to at least to be presented.  Unlike leprechauns and a flat earth, etc., a significant percentage of the (tax paying) population believes in ID.

Answer 12

In science Theory has a very different meaning than common English. Theories in science have as much proof as they possibly can. Intelligent design has no proof at all. To teach them as if they are both equal ideas in a science classroom would be inappropriate.