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
