Intelligent Design
The Board of Education in Kansas is the first to mandate the including of intelligent design in the science curriculum. I suppose many people have read Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. This is a book that easily sweeps one up in a frenzy of Vatican intrigue and scientific speculation about the big bang and creation ex nihilo. Mary Baker Eddy would be ecstatic! Her dogmatic assertion that there is no such thing as matter would fit in with this idea.
My understanding of the big bang theory is that astronomers and physicists have observed that the universe is expanding. Extrapolating back from that, they propose a point from which this expansion began and they postulate a big bang. Well, a big bang from what? one might ask. From nothing—creation ex nihilo. Now Star Trek comes to the rescue: antimatter! The idea is that the material universe must also have a mirror image — an antimatter universe. But where is it? What is it like? Scientists have managed to create antiprotons by colliding subatomic particles, and the next step they are aiming at is the creation of antihydrogen atoms. If the big bang was what we think it was, it involved the creation of matter as we know it and an equal amount of antimatter which somehow became isolated from the matter because if matter and antimatter were to come together they would cancel each other out and return to nothing. In Dan Brown’s book a scientist working secretly at CERN actually produces some antimatter and it is contained in an electromagnetic field so that it doesn’t come into contact with matter. The scientist is murdered and the canister containing the antimatter is hidden somewhere in the Vatican. When the battery for the electromagnetic field shuts down, there will be a tremendous release of energy. There also happens to be a conclave going on to elect a new Pope, so you can see the gripping quality of the story.
The viewpoint of intelligent design is that the big bang could not have just happened and therefore it must have had an intelligent cause. This is an attractive hypothesis, one that I like very much, but it is not scientifically proven, so it has no place in a science curriculum. It belongs in the philosophy class or in the religion class. Intelligent design goes on to suggest that what we understand as evolution was all guided by God rather than simply a random process based on the survival of the fittest. This too is an attractive hypothesis, but it is not scientifically proven.
As a science teacher and as a Christian, I have no philosophical trouble balancing the seeming contradiction between pure science and pure religion. The gap between what scientists know and what God presumably knows is still enormously wide. I am convinced that science is here to help religious understanding, not to hinder it. Most religions seem to be based on a primitive understanding of nature. But Christianity postulates a divine intervention in history, and one might simply say that since the birth of Christ human knowledge of God has been ratcheted up quite a bit. At the same time, and perhaps indirectly because of this new theological awareness, human scientific inquiry has undergone a tremendous expansion. We have had to refine and modify our religious understanding in order to fit in with what we now know about the physical universe. Far from weakening one’s religion, this tends to make it stronger, because the enormity of the universe and its complexity simply inspires awe.
I don’t know what the push for intelligent design in schools is driven by. I wouldn’t say ignorance, but it obviously has something to do with evangelical fundamentalism. These are people who have somehow backed themselves up against a wall when it comes to the Bible. For them the Bible is the Word of God, and if it says God created the World in six days, that’s what happened. I had a student in my biology class who sat in the back of the room and read his Bible. His pastor had told him that biology teachers were teaching Darwinism and that was against the Bible. No manner of protests on my part that Darwin was a clergyman who believed in God could alter his opinion, the evidence of humanoid bones dating back millions of years to the contrary not withstanding.
What is the good of including in a science curriculum something that will encourage students to discount the evidence for highly substantiated scientific theories? What are you going to put on a quiz: first give the evolutionist answer to the question then give the creationist answer? Let the scientists do their work and let the theologians do theirs too. They should listen to each other, but not intrude into each other’s fields of study.
David Burt
The Board of Education in Kansas is the first to mandate the including of intelligent design in the science curriculum. I suppose many people have read Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. This is a book that easily sweeps one up in a frenzy of Vatican intrigue and scientific speculation about the big bang and creation ex nihilo. Mary Baker Eddy would be ecstatic! Her dogmatic assertion that there is no such thing as matter would fit in with this idea.
My understanding of the big bang theory is that astronomers and physicists have observed that the universe is expanding. Extrapolating back from that, they propose a point from which this expansion began and they postulate a big bang. Well, a big bang from what? one might ask. From nothing—creation ex nihilo. Now Star Trek comes to the rescue: antimatter! The idea is that the material universe must also have a mirror image — an antimatter universe. But where is it? What is it like? Scientists have managed to create antiprotons by colliding subatomic particles, and the next step they are aiming at is the creation of antihydrogen atoms. If the big bang was what we think it was, it involved the creation of matter as we know it and an equal amount of antimatter which somehow became isolated from the matter because if matter and antimatter were to come together they would cancel each other out and return to nothing. In Dan Brown’s book a scientist working secretly at CERN actually produces some antimatter and it is contained in an electromagnetic field so that it doesn’t come into contact with matter. The scientist is murdered and the canister containing the antimatter is hidden somewhere in the Vatican. When the battery for the electromagnetic field shuts down, there will be a tremendous release of energy. There also happens to be a conclave going on to elect a new Pope, so you can see the gripping quality of the story.
The viewpoint of intelligent design is that the big bang could not have just happened and therefore it must have had an intelligent cause. This is an attractive hypothesis, one that I like very much, but it is not scientifically proven, so it has no place in a science curriculum. It belongs in the philosophy class or in the religion class. Intelligent design goes on to suggest that what we understand as evolution was all guided by God rather than simply a random process based on the survival of the fittest. This too is an attractive hypothesis, but it is not scientifically proven.
As a science teacher and as a Christian, I have no philosophical trouble balancing the seeming contradiction between pure science and pure religion. The gap between what scientists know and what God presumably knows is still enormously wide. I am convinced that science is here to help religious understanding, not to hinder it. Most religions seem to be based on a primitive understanding of nature. But Christianity postulates a divine intervention in history, and one might simply say that since the birth of Christ human knowledge of God has been ratcheted up quite a bit. At the same time, and perhaps indirectly because of this new theological awareness, human scientific inquiry has undergone a tremendous expansion. We have had to refine and modify our religious understanding in order to fit in with what we now know about the physical universe. Far from weakening one’s religion, this tends to make it stronger, because the enormity of the universe and its complexity simply inspires awe.
I don’t know what the push for intelligent design in schools is driven by. I wouldn’t say ignorance, but it obviously has something to do with evangelical fundamentalism. These are people who have somehow backed themselves up against a wall when it comes to the Bible. For them the Bible is the Word of God, and if it says God created the World in six days, that’s what happened. I had a student in my biology class who sat in the back of the room and read his Bible. His pastor had told him that biology teachers were teaching Darwinism and that was against the Bible. No manner of protests on my part that Darwin was a clergyman who believed in God could alter his opinion, the evidence of humanoid bones dating back millions of years to the contrary not withstanding.
What is the good of including in a science curriculum something that will encourage students to discount the evidence for highly substantiated scientific theories? What are you going to put on a quiz: first give the evolutionist answer to the question then give the creationist answer? Let the scientists do their work and let the theologians do theirs too. They should listen to each other, but not intrude into each other’s fields of study.
David Burt
posted by C. David Burt | 3:24 AM
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