Creationism in schools (a continuing thread)

People who read the regular blog posts but not the comments may not be aware of activity on old posts, which is why I’m starting a new thread. This is a continuation of a discussion with Lena, who first dropped in on a post from last November, in which we were talking about the new trailer for “Expelled.” I’m resetting the thread mainly so that the conversation doesn’t get lost to history.

Lena writes:

Kazim; I understand that there are people who believe in both evolution and God. However, current biology textbooks do not include references to the possibility of intelligent design; I am not aware of any biology or science textbook in mainstream public schools or universities that references the concepts of intelligent design.

That’s right, they don’t. And do you know why? Because “intelligent design” isn’t a scientific concept. It hasn’t been accepted into the scientific lexicon; it hasn’t achieved mainstream penetration into scientific journals. It isn’t testable, and with rare exceptions, it is almost universally regarded as nonscience by biologists everywhere.

Could this change someday? Sure it could, but schools don’t have the authority to make that change. Textbooks on science are written BY scientists FOR schools, not the other way around. If this were going to change, it would be by a major shift in the way that biology is understood. And while I understood that there are a lot of popular books, speakers, and 80′s movie stars who are gung-ho about Intelligent Design, it’s only fair to point out that this has barely registered at all in the scientific community. That’s why ID isn’t taught in schools.

You can argue that belief in God is the realm of religion, but really, we’re not talking about God. We’re talking about Intelligent Design – people don’t have to believe that is was a God that was the designer, do they? Teachers would never have to say who created the universe, just that there was evidence of design. It is atheists who make the assumption that intelligent design would be identifying God as the designer; why is that?

That’s an easy one to answer. It’s because ID comes at the tail end of a long history of deceptively trying to slip creationism into schools under false pretenses. In the case of Kitzmiller v Dover of 2005, one of the findings was that the major book being used to promote ID, titled Of Pandas and People, was really just a modified version of an earlier creationism textbook. The editors went through the text and did a search-and-replace operation to eliminate all references to “creationism” and replace them with “intelligent design” and so forth. But they didn’t do a very thorough job — in one place, the word “creationists” was sloppily replaced by the words “cdesign proponentsists.”

A number of years before that, something called the Wedge Document was unearthed, explicitly stating that rationale behind the existence of the whole “intelligent design” movement was to, and I quote, “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

I don’t see why any of this should come as a surprise to you. You’re a theist, and so far as I can tell, the main reason you’re complaining about lack of ID in schools is because you think that failure to teach ID is tantamount to atheism. Have I missed something?

Certainly there are people out there who might have a different idea of “who” that creator or designer was? There are seriously people who believe space aliens created the earth, but in our society you don’t hear public outcry against them.

Yes, you do. Those people are crackpots. They don’t come out as regularly as do cdesign proponentsists, but when they do, they tend to receive about the same level of ridicule. Their views are not taken into account as part of mainstream science either.

Do you really think, Kazim, that if the vast majority of people who advocated ID’ism were believers in space aliens, that schools would have a hard time with it? I doubt it.

I do. It would have to have serious research and peer-reviewed publications backing it up before it could even be considered as part of a curriculum. Any teacher who made a unilateral decision to ignore the standards and start teaching about our alien designers would meet with the exact same kind of resistance that creationists experience now.

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