Designing a lesson in science - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Young
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS RECEIVING PUBLIC SUPPORT, ranging from qualified approval to enthusiastic promotion, in Australia for reasons that have less to do with science and more to do with culture and politics. Our main heritage was once British and European culture, where the mainstream churches long ago accommodated evolution within their thinking. More recently we have experienced the growing impact of American culture on Australian society, especially in matters of religion. In the US, the controversy over evolution and creation has remained a sore point since the famous Scopes trial in 1925 when a high-school biology teacher was tried for unlawfully teaching the theory of evolution in Tennessee, where such teaching was banned. Although Scopes' conviction was set aside on a technicality, religious opposition to evolution continued right through the twentieth century and even increased. As Australian schools offer religious instruction, this has helped keep science and religion separate here, but Christian bookshops in Australia are well stocked with American publications, so popular religion in this country is fed an antievolutionary diet.
More importantly, the intelligent-design movement is partly a response to the way evolution is commonly represented in public discourse. Popular science books on evolution are quite often written by authors who are openly hostile to religion. Some even take the opportunity to build a world view that denies the existence of God and casts doubt on the meaning and value of human life. The most famous proponent of this is Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, who insists that we are mere lumbering robots, programmed during evolution by our DNA, and have no ultimate purpose. Similarly, British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot recently reacted to the intelligent design debate by saying that Darwinian evolution shows we are merely incipient compost and our life has no purpose.
Insofar as intelligent design advocates are responding to such interpretations of evolution, they are giving voice to legitimate concerns. And it is important that we hear these concerns as part of the current debate in Australia because such sweeping philosophical claims, made in the name of evolutionary biology, should be troubling to all members of a civilised society, not just religious enthusiasts.
But rather than doubting the science, it needs to be emphasised that science cannot be used to decide answers to such profound questions as whether God exists or how we should view our fellow human beings. These matters are not part of science but come within the purview of philosophy and theology. Scientific theories do not have built-in "implications" for these fields of inquiry.
What is needed, then, is an inquiry to recognise science and religion as independent areas of human understanding. Of course, it is worth looking at the interaction between them, and this is a lively field of scholarly inquiry. But it needs to be done without one side simply trying to impose its point of view on the other.
UNFORTUNATELY, INTELLIGENT DESIGN DOES NOT HAVE much relevance to this inquiry precisely because of the way it mixes up these areas by using the concept of "design". This concept actually goes back a long way, and by taking a brief look at its roots we can better understand its limitations in the present context.
The classic argument from design used the orderliness of the natural world, and especially of living organisms, as evidence for the existence of a divine creator. It did this by drawing a close analogy between the natural world and human artefacts such as statues or clocks. These artefacts are clearly the result of creative design and so, by analogy, are complex natural objects. This argument gained force as modern science began to reveal the close fit between an organism's structure and its way of life. Surely these intricate adaptations of living organisms must be due to divine design imposed on them when they were created rather than being produced by chance. This line of argument reached a peak during the eighteenth century and culminated in William Paley's Natural Theology, published in 1802.
All this made good sense in an eighteenth-century context when clockwork was leading-edge technology. It was then generally agreed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that not much had changed since the beginning of the world. Hence, the well-adapted species of animals and plants that we see around us must have been created at the beginning. These species could be thought of as being rather like clocks or watches that had been designed and manufactured by God when the world was created.
However, no sooner had Paley published his book than this argument began to fall apart. The new science of geology showed that the Earth had a vast history with a succession of distinct periods. During this history, a whole range of species, from mammoths to dinosaurs, had become extinct and been replaced by other species. This seemed to imply that a manufacturing God had to intervene in his own creation at frequent intervals to replace species that had gone out of date. And the very fact of extinction, which had been explicitly denied by Paley, implied a failure of design and benevolence. Then Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory of evolution, which showed how well-adapted species could arise through natural processes over time without any need for external design.
Thus the concept of design was so tied to the imagery of 18thcentury science and technology that it could not cope with the scientific discoveries of the next century. The key factor was that nineteenth-century science revealed a world that is not static but unfolds over vast periods of time through natural causes. This pattern applied to both the Earth and life and was extended to the cosmos as a whole in the twentieth century. In such an evolving world, the static concept of design and manufacturing fails as a way of picturing the relationship between a supernatural creator and a changing natural world. It is therefore unfortunate that the intelligent-design movement is still trying to apply this outmoded concept to those bits of the world that science has not explained yet.
The need for a fresh approach actually became clear as soon as Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, and some clergy promptly began work on this issue. Among them was Charles Kingsley, a clergyman with enough of a reputation in natural history for Darwin to have sent him a prepublication copy of The Origin. Kingsley and others were able to resolve the apparent conflict between creation and evolution because Christian theology had long insisted that divine creation is not confined to the beginning of things but also involves sustaining the world in existence. From this perspective, the natural causes and laws discovered by science can be seen as an expression of divine activity and not an alternative to it.
So it was possible for Kingsley and others to accept that each species had not been created separately by divine intervention but rather created by God working through the process of evolution. Writing to a colleague in 1863, Kingsley said that now scientists "have got rid of an interfering God ... they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident and a living, immanent, ever-working God". By working along these lines, theologians in the mainstream churches were soon able to incorporate evolution in an enlarged and refined understanding of creation. It is therefore possible, in the twenty-first century, to reconcile science and theology on the topic of evolution using well-established concepts.
From all this, we may reasonably conclude that the idea of intelligent design tends to undermine science and is no help to religion. While the DVD being circulated here might include up-to-date information, the case it makes is built on concepts that have long been rendered obsolete in both science and theology. It should also be borne in mind that the intelligent design movement is a piece of wedge politics in another country's deep cultural divide between religion and science.
Do we really want to import this sort of material to present to our students? Or are we capable of thinking for ourselves and developing a more nuanced approach that allows for mutual respect between science and religion in the public arena? ♦