God vs. Darwin ... Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

In the days following the Dover decision, I continue to see more and more articles regarding the debate over Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, and as a scientist, I find it harder and harder to remain mute on the issue.  The thing that I most want to scream to the talking heads on the TV and the innumerable faceless bylines of the print and digital media is:  "Since when does Evolution imply the non-existence of God?!"  As with many other grandiose debates that have come before the public forum in the past five years, the debate about ID vs. Evolution has been unnecessarily framed in binary terms.  If you're for Evolution, then you must be against God, and vice versa.  Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, even went so far as to lump Evolution into what he called a "half-century secularist reign of terror," implying that anything that does not explicitly include God must be implicitly against God.

Whoa ...  Let's back up a second there, Rich.  It's not as if scientists have "disprove God" on their things-to-do list for today.  Science itself is quite mute on the subject of God, and rightfully so, because to a scientist, there's a big difference between "knowing" something to be true and "believing" it to be true.  In science, something can only be "known" if it passes a rigorous series of tests called the "Scientific Method."  If I observe an unexplained phenomenon, then I can formulate a "hypothesis" to attempt to explain the phenomenon, but before my hypothesis can become a "theory", it must pass three additional steps in the Scientific Method.  I must first be able to imagine other observable phenomena whose existence could either confirm or deny my hypothesis.  Next, I must develop an experiment or a series of experiments that show how the initial phenomenon and its secondary phenomena can be produced under controlled conditions-- in addition to showing how those phenomena would not be produced if the conditions were removed.  But that's not all ...  Other peers in my field must be able to reproduce my results.

If my poor little hypothesis survives all of this rigor, then it will eventually graduate to a "theory."  Even then, a theory often has a long and hard road ahead of it before it can become an accepted theory.  An accepted theory is as close as you can get to a "fact" in this world.  In order to become an accepted theory, a theory must have amassed a large amount of experimental evidence to support its truthfulness, all with no major wrinkles being discovered.  That doesn't means that people won't still try to refute it.  After all, some still claim that the Earth is flat.  However, as the evidence mounts in support of a theory, the skeptic's job becomes more and more difficult, and eventually, it reaches a point at which refuting the theory requires rejecting a very large number of scientific observations, and by extension, rejecting the scientific principles that led to those observations. No theory can explain everything.  Einstein's Theory of Relativity is an accepted theory that NASA uses on a daily basis to do their work, but it does not explain all observable phenomena in the Universe, so new hypotheses have to be formulated to deal with said phenomena.  Quantum Mechanics, similarly, cannot explain everything, but if it were untrue, then semiconductors wouldn't work, and you wouldn't be reading this right now.  Eventually, both of those theories will likely be shown to be only part of a larger theory that explains even more phenomena, but discovery of this larger theory does not invalidate Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.  It simply fills in the gaps left by those earlier theories.  String Theory is a candidate for the larger theory, but it is not an "accepted theory" by any means.  Some would argue that String Theory isn't even a "theory" at all.

Evolution is, however, a very well accepted theory.  It has amassed a huge body of evidence in support of it, with few wrinkles, and it is even being leveraged by technology.  Does Evolution explain everything?  No, but it has passed the rigors of the Scientific Method over and over again.  Ultimately, Evolution may be proven to be part of a larger theory, but in order for it to be disproven, there must be a competing theory that not only explains everything that Evolution explains but explains more.  And of course, the competing theory must also pass the rigors of the Scientific Method before we can reasonably discuss it in a scientific context.

I go to all of this trouble to describe why Evolution is a "theory" so I can point out that Intelligent Design is not a theory.  ID is a hypothesis.  ID is a possible explanation for the complexity observed in nature.  In order for it to become a theory, ID advocates would first need to come up with other secondary phenomena that could be observed if ID were true ... phenomena that would not be observed if ID were false.  A good example might be a tiny watermark on the human genome that reads "I Made This-- G."  In other words, before ID can be taken seriously as a scientific concept, a phenomenon must be discovered that only ID can explain and other existing theories cannot explain.  Even then, however, such an observation would not necessarily disprove Evolution.  It would probably only show that Evolution is a subcomponent of a grander truth.  A large reason why scientists have such a problem with the current formulation of the Intelligent Design hypothesis is that it requires rejecting parts of a well-accepted scientific theory.

The arguments for Intelligent Design remind me a bit of the controversy a few years ago regarding modern events that were supposedly foretold in the Old Testament.  Supposedly, one could take the original Hebrew text and look at regular patterns of letters in the text, letters that seemed to spell out descriptions of 20th Century events.  The problem is that the author of this study did not provide a "control group" in his experiment.  Had he observed 100 other books, all of them secular, and failed to find similar patterns, then the hypothesis that these patterns in the Bible were due to intelligent design would have had more credence.  As it stands, however, an independent observer noted that it is just as easy to "foretell" modern events from the text of Moby Dick.

Science requires that one prove a positive, not a negative.  Thus far, a large number of the arguments for Intelligent Design are really arguments against Evolution-- arguments that point out the as-yet-unexplained loopholes in the theory of Evolution.  Well, one could just as easily find unexplained loopholes in Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, but pointing out things that a theory can't yet explain does not disprove the theory over the scope of things that it can explain.  At the end of the day, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics explain most things we observe ... and so does Evolution.  Saying that an intelligent force created life because we don't fully understand how that complexity could have developed naturally is a cop out.  Science's goal is to explain all observable phenomena thoroughly and without mystery.  If we were to stop trying to achieve that goal, then there would be no more science, and as soon as science grinds to a halt, so does technology.  I'm sure Mr. Land and his cronies wouldn't want that.

So, all of this comes in a roundabout way to my initial question, which is why the Intelligent Design hypothesis is even necessary.  There is nothing in the theory of Evolution that says that God didn't have a hand in creating the processes that drive it, processes that may very well have been ingrained into the very fabric of the Universe.  Am I prepared to say that such is true?  Certainly not.  I am, after all, a scientist, and as such I must clearly delineate my own beliefs from the body of scientific knowledge.  However, nothing in that body of scientific knowledge precludes the existence of a divine power controlling things behind the scenes.  It's not the place of science to make a statement on God one way or another.  Science merely presents what is "known", leaving that which is unknown or unknowable to the realms of religion and philosophy.  Many have described Evolution as a "controversial" theory, but for a theory to be truly "controversial" in the scientific sense, there must be a competing theory.  A competing hypothesis is not sufficient.  String Theory, for instance, is still a controversial theory.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and Evolution are not, so until such time as an experiment can be formulated to confirm or deny the hypothesis of Intelligent Design, it does not belong in a science textbook any more than the Flat Earth Society's talking points belong there.

A very good online debate on this topic can be found here:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html

Smooth Jazz at the Hard Rock

I guess our first clue that this wasn't exactly "our crowd" should've been the fact that we were the only ones in the room not sporting some form of exotic piercing, primary-colored hair, or black Godsmack T-shirt.  Of course, the original plan had been to gig our way out to New Orleans and spend a whole weekend there, and had that plan not fallen through, it wouldn't have been such a great disappointment to discover that the music showcase that was billed as the "New Orleans version of South by Southwest" was actually more along the lines of the "Shreveport version of 'Star Search'"-- but with a decidedly heavy metal focus.  As it stood, we arrived late Saturday night due to a Saturday morning fiasco that I won't even get into, so we barely had enough time to drink a requisite hurricane and watch our rhythm guitar player throw the dice a few times at Harrah's before hitting the sack.

We were supposed to play at around 12:30 PM on Sunday, but the showcase was running way behind.  It was virtually guaranteed that we wouldn't play until 2:00, after which we had to turn right around and drive 9 hours back to Austin.  In a nutshell, our chances of getting anything productive out of this event were about the same as the odds of the Saints winning the Super Bowl (editor's note: remember when this was written.)  I can say one positive thing, though, which is that the college-aged headbangers in the audience responded well to our two songs-- surprisingly well.

But then we got to meet the alleged reps from the alleged label, all of whom looked to be younger than the pair of socks I was wearing at the time.  The first was at least trying to be helpful, but his comment was something to the effect of, "hey, have you guys ever heard of a band called Phish?  You should maybe model yourselves after them."  He had no way of knowing that we had been there, done that, printed the T-shirt, and were now trying desperately to break out of the mold and be taken seriously as a jazz fusion ensemble.  From our point of view, however, it was one of those moments in which you're imagining the worst thing that anyone could possibly say, and then someone actually says it.   He then proceeded to criticize us for having "two rhythm guitars and no lead."  Apparently in the metal world, if a guitar plays separate and distinguishable notes, it's not considered a lead guitar.  The second rep (who looked to be the oldest of the three, a woman of maybe 25) had one useful piece of advice, which was that we all needed to quit our jobs and tour a lot if we ever wanted to make it big.  True, and perhaps if we were playing any other genre, we would have some hope of doing that while avoiding starvation.  The third rep got straight to the point:

Him:  "I guess I'm just wondering why you're here."
Us:  "Because ... you invited us?"
Him:  "All you have to do is turn on MTV to see the type of acts we're looking for."
Us:  "You mean 'The Real World?'"
Him:  "Do you have some idea of who your target audience is?"
Us:  "Your ... parents?"