Why Creationism and Intelligent Design Do Not Belong in Public Schools

This quote was drawn from the recent case in Dover, PA, in which the scientific status, and therefore the presence in the public school science curriculum, of intelligent design was determined. While both intelligent design and its predecessor, creationism, have been rejected as science by the courts, there is still a push being made by the religious right to have Creationism or ID taught alongside - or even in place of - evolution. Such action would lead American education down a path in the direction of the Dark Ages.

There are many legitimate debates within the scientific community. Even evolutionary biology has its own major controversy, that being the debate between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium. Naturally, if there are multiple scientific answers to a particular question, our children should be taught the details of both hypotheses. Given that I support teaching scientific controversy, you may wonder why I am so opposed to teaching the controversy between evolution, creationism and ID. The answer is, only legitimate science, and not the pseudoscience of creationism and ID, should be taught in science classes. Would you have the stork theory taught in sex ed? Holocaust denial in history classes? Astrology alongside astronomy? These are all so-called "controversies," but none of them belong in their respective subjects. In fields relevant to evolution, such as biology and paleontology, over 99.9% of scientists consider evolution to be the most accurate explanation of life's diversity. Polls have confirmed this. It is not a coincidence.

Creationism and ID are not science, as they violate the scientific method. Creationism, for example, begins with its conclusion. A second grade student knows that scientists begin with evidence, examine it, and attempt to draw conclusions from it. Creationists begin with the Bible and attempt to find evidence to legitimize it. Some will say that many creationists became creationists as a result of the evidence. William A. Dembski, one of the leading proponents of these pseudosciences, has told us that his religious conversion came first, and further has confirmed that this is true for most creationists and ID proponents.

As a proponent of ID, Dembski will tell us that evolution and intelligent design are not mutually exclusive. In the past, he has used the example of Mount Rushmore. Driving past it, one would assume that its complexity implies a designer, and the same is true of life. Perhaps, perhaps not. As most ID proponents would tell us, this belief would not contradict evolution. This is true, but it is not scientific. What ID has created is a perfectly legitimate philosophical position, but not a scientific one. They have made the philosophical, but unscientific, assumption that complexity implies design. This belief is not testable or confirmable in any scientific sense. (It is also untrue, given that convection currents, snowflakes, planetary orbits, molecular structures, and many other scientific phenomena are complex and ordered, not by design, but by the laws of nature and mathematics.)

Creationists will come to me on this point and ask how evolution is testable. Evolution is tested against the fossil record. It is potentially falsifiable by a static fossil record or a mechanism that would prevent accumulations of mutation. We find none of these, and thus the evolutionary theory remains unfalsified. No creationist or ID can provide a potential line evidence that would falsify their concepts.

The use of the word "theory" to apply to evolution has also given creationists an opportunity to attack it. People who refer to evolution as "only a theory" profoundly misunderstand the scientific usage of the term. In the colloquial, a theory is mere speculation. But in science, a theory is used to refer to something as a certainty - different from a fact, but no less certain. A scientific theory is an explanation of facts, a description of a series of phenomena. Legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould: "Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered." Gravity is a theory. So is germ theory. Should we reject those on the grounds that they are "only a theory"?

Moreover, creationism and ID are useless. What are we to tell our children in class? "God did it; class dismissed"? Unlike ID and creationism, evolution is an extremely useful theory. It forms the basis of modern biology. Without evolution, biological science is a series of meaningless and dissociated facts. Evolution provides the framework. It gives us the "why" in addition to the simple "what." Would you teach advanced mathematics without starting with arithmetic? Furthermore, evolutionary theory has been at the heart of many scientific advancements, from medicine to bioinformatics to agriculture.

Lastly, creationism and ID are violations of Ockham's Razor. Many of these pseudoscientists have tried to use Ockham's Razor to support their ideas. They say that the precept favors the simplest explanation. Regardless of what the film Contact has said, this is not Ockham's Razor. Ockham's Razor says that you should not multiply entities unnecessarily. Evolution requires only two entities (life and nature), both of which have confirmed existences. Creationism and ID require three (nature, life and God), one of which is unconfirmed. Once again, not science.

The point of this article was not to prove evolution (though any honest researcher of science will realize the factuality of evolution), nor was it to disprove the existence of God. Evolution and God are compatible. The latter, however, is not scientific. Many people believe that natural processes have brought about life's diversity, while they invoke the divine in the creation of the universe or the origin of life. The latter two issues aren't even covered by evolutionary theory. In the end, it does not concern me what you believe. It is when you attempt to undermine legitimate science in our schools that you endanger the progress of science in America.