Thoughts Occasioned by a TV Program on the Intelligent Design Controversy

I watched an interesting program last night on NOVA, the PBS television series, on the "Intelligent Design" controversy that played out in Dover, Pennsylvania. As one might expect, the coverage was quite thorough, and a viewer could understand quite well the reason that the scientific community was so united in opposition to the teaching of "intelligent design" as if it were a scientific theory in competition with the theory of evolution.

(In my opinion, for it to become a scientific theory, there would have to be some testable hypothesis defined that would allow evidence to be accumulated in support of "intelligent design". Merely not thinking that something can be explained by evolutionary theory does not suffice as evidence against evolution. Indeed, it took a long time after Darwin and Wallace published the proposal that natural selection was a mechanism of evolution until scientists developed a basic understanding of how DNA provided the mechanisms of random variation and heredity of traits.)

During the program I again wondered why we do not hear more from religious organizations opposing the "intelligent design" factions. On the one hand, the idea that evolution is controlled by some unknown intelligence that is not divine seems profoundly anti-religious. On the other hand, many religions accept the evidence of evolution, holding that it is part of the divine plan. I would assume that many religious leaders would feel that the intelligent design position seems to hold that an omniscient and omnipotent deity could not create the diversity of species by setting into motion an evolutionary process which would inevitably do what it has done; for many, that (imputed) position should be profoundly blasphemous. In either case, I would think that the religious leaders would oppose the teaching of "intelligent design". Indeed, even those who believe that the bible fully, correctly and explicitly explains the creation of the world should object to the "intelligent design" folk who want a "watered down" theory taught as science.

I think scientists see the universe as something we don't understand very well. There are somewhere between 100 and 1000 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of somewhere between 100 and 1000 billion galaxies; the perception of the size of the universe evolved during my lifetime, and have at best a limited knowledge of one solar system. We haven't even fully explored our own planet nor counted its species. Moreover, most of the matter in the universe is "dark" and not really understood. The observed behavior of galaxies billions of light years away defies our understanding, as does the nature of the submicroscopic world. Scientists still search for a missing quark. The complexity of the brain defies our understanding, as does the complexity of the atmosphere, and the complexity of the earths ecosystems. Some scientists are suggesting that the forces we know about -- the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electro-magnetic forces -- do not exhaust the list, while even those forces are not fully understood; scientists still seek a unification of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, and a theory unifying gravitation with the other forces. Scientists are not only willing to acknowledge their ignorance, the entire scientific enterprise is intended to gnaw away at the edges of the borders separating our limited knowledge and our unbounded ignorance, thereby to expand knowledge.

‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all before me.’
Isaac Newton

For some scientists, the scientific enterprise is directed to revealing more of a divine order. For others their aims are more modest; like Newton, they see their scientific selves as examining some pebbles on the edge of the ocean of truth.

I find the proponents of "intelligent design" to be unduly vain. They seem to believe that that which they do not understand must be supernatural. Real scientists seem much more modest in their intellectual pretentious. On the other hand, real scientists may be more ambitious, seeking to understand within the limits of their capacity how things happen.