human bits

Should intelligent design be taught in school science classes?
 
 Personally I am amazed at the fanatical – almost fundamentalist – response that has come from otherwise level headed scientists and science educators on this issue. I really am amazed. I have no time for ‘creation science’ in general, and I applaud the work of people like Ian Plimer in his ‘Telling Lies for God’, but the knee-jerk reaction against ‘intelligent design’ has been anything but intelligent as far as I can tell.
 
 For starters there are lots of things that should be taught as part of science education that are not science. The history of science, the philosophy of science, scientific method, questions of ethics and the cultural ramifications of the outworkings of science – all of these things are absolutely essential parts of any education in science. They are the bed-rock and the building blocks, the infrastructure and context of science, but not one of them is open to validation by scientific method. Test the reliability of scientific method by using scientific method itself?? Bullshit! Science works within a philosophical and cultural framework that is larger than itself and intimately connected with every other part of human life. How intimately? Well ask any scientist how and why they chose science, and listen to his or her answer. From most you will hear a deeply passionate and personal response. The others probably should have become accountants.
 
 A theory of intelligent design as part of the evolutionary process in the development of life on earth is clearly dealing with issues that are part of science even if it cannot be shown to be addressing those issues scientifically. It should be obvious also that it is dealing with ethical, philosophical and cultural issues that are very relevant to those scientific issues. On that basis alone it is probably worthy of discussion in a science classroom.
 
 But is a theory of intelligent design a scientific theory or is it some other kind of theory? Is it more essentially in the realm of philosophy or theology or history, or maybe even mathematics? There are two questions that need to be answered in getting to the bottom of this. The first is ‘can the theory be tested?’ and the second is ‘how can the theory be tested?’
 
 For a theory to be a theory at all, it has to be falsifiable or testable. In other words it has to ‘stick its neck out’ and say something that might be able to be tested and shown to be true or false. If nothing could ever prove a theory wrong, then really nothing could ever prove it right either. For instance if I say "rabbits can jump further than mice" then someone could put that claim to the test; but if I say "imaginary rabbits can jump further than imaginary mice" I’m not saying anything true or false; because there is nothing – even in theory – that anyone could do to test things one way or the other. If nothing can conceivably show it to be false, then equally nothing can really show it to be true. I am not saying anything that could be true or false even though it might sound like I am. In the same way unless a theory is falsifiable, it is not really a theory even if it may at first sound like one.
 
 How a theory could be tested depends on what kind of theory it is. Historical events are – by definition – not repeatable, so scientific method isn’t much help in directly telling us who did what where and why at some specific when in the past. For that you need historical and archeological evidence – ‘left-overs’ that can then be collected and interpreted. Scientific method may well be useful in evaluating and interpreting that evidence. No amount of collecting, analysing and counting apples will ever prove that 1+1=2, or anything more complex in mathematics. Mathematical theories aren’t tested in the lab, but they are certainly used there. And so on.
 
 So: is a theory of intelligent design really a theory? Is it falsifiable? Does it make claims that can be tested? And if so, is it a scientific theory rather than some other kind of theory? Are its claims testable by scientific method? What kind of claims does it make? What kind of evidence could prove or disprove those claims?
 
 I’m going to stop here for the moment. I will continue this later and I think the answers get a bit exciting. Well they are to me anyway. (I’ve always been a bit nerdy. As a 12 year old I was reading everything I could get hold of on high energy particle physics.  ) But tell me if you haven’t already had to do some solid thinking about science in considering the issue thus far.