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Should We TEach Intelligent Design?
Jim Rurak, FOrmer Haverhill Mayor

One of my favorite movies of all time is “Inherit the Wind.”

Two great actors, Spencer Tracy and Frederick March, square off in a courtroom battle over whether Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught in public schools.

The movie dramatizes the actual Scopes case from the thirties. The court ruled against Darwin, but science won the ultimate battle and Darwin’s theory replaced the Bible story of creation as the only acceptable approach to explain the biological order of nature. Nowadays, there is a movement both scientific and religious to re-introduce the concept of “intelligent design” into both scientific investigation and classroom teaching.

Thus far, the courts support the Darwin-only approach on the grounds of the separation of church and state. The assum-ption is that any theory of intelligent design must be religiously motivated and therefore not rigorously scientific. I do not support re-introducing religious teaching into the public schools, but I’ve been reading about intelligent design theory and now believe that it will and should ultimately find its way into the public schools. Here’s why.

Intelligent design theory is not out to replace Darwin, but to complement him. It begins with the same questions Darwin sets out to answer, namely, how can we account for the marvelous and specified complexities we see all around us? The flexibility and agility of the human hand and how it is so well adapted to fulfilling the needs of our species, and the utter complexity of the eye and its coordination to our brain, are two classic examples of the “wonders” Darwin explained scientifically.

The Biblical explanation led people to conclude that these wonders came from God’s handiwork, that they were planned or designed. Darwin turned this approach upside down and presented an explanatory framework that changed our whole sense of nature. Nature, rather than being planned by God, is a vast struggle of creatures to survive; they struggle for food and reproduction.

But even within species there are vari-ations, adaptations to surroundings that give those that have them an advantage in the struggle. Over vast amounts of time those with the advantageous characteristics will become more numerous, not by God’s hand, but simply because they eat better, become stronger and reproduce more relative to their “peers.” All of the species around us and their marvelous charac-teristics, according to Darwin, emerged from this vast and long struggle.

To talk about design, then, to explain complexity is to abandon the scientific enterprise and go “backwards” into religious thinking. Public schools, dedicated to reason and science, cannot therefore allow any discussion of design back into biology. That would substitute religion for science, thus destroying the separation of church and state.

Religious conservatives see intelligent design theory as an opportunity to crack open the monumental intellectual and political fortress of Darwin and science. They see the works of mathematician William Dembski and biologist Michael Behe as sufficient proof to re-insert creation-ism into the public schools. But they’re wrong, even though some of their instincts are right.

First the right instincts. The religious right knows in its bones that the Darwinian hegemony is not just scientifically motivated. It supports and is supported by a view of the world that severs human beings from obligations to their creator and sets them free to their own projects and plans in the struggle for survival. As Gordon Gecko said, “greed is good!”

That’s because it may provide an advan-tage against those constrained by morality. Our culture isn’t just interested in pure science; it wants unrestrained competition; it doesn’t want to discuss whether there’s a design of God to which we should conform. Yes, the religious right knows that the public school curriculum debate is about something much broader than science.

Where they’re wrong is in thinking that current design theory entitles them to re-impose their science and their morality on the larger culture.
 But here’s the rub. The work of Dembski, Behe and others, though highly sophisticated, does not yet provide a clear-cut alternative to Darwin, and, even its most convincing arguments for design do not support the conclusion that the designer is the God of the Bible. Thus far, the most successful arguments have to do with showing how certain phenomena in nature are so complex and specific as to function that they cannot be reduced mathematically to what occurs either regularly or by chance in nature. Hence, we must “infer” design.

These arguments are building slowly and gradually just as they did for Darwin in the late 19th century. Darwin published in 1859 and it took decades before his theory was taught in public schools. Likewise for intelligent design. The theory is less than ten years old. Political opportunists shoved it into the limelight too quickly, but behind the scenes it is amassing arguments and evidence that are mathematical and scientific.

If the religious right supports it, it should find ways to fund that research rather than try to foist it into the public school curriculum before its time. I think this will happen and that in about ten years there will be an open and reasoned debate about the theory. Then, we will have a fascinating debate that raises perhaps the deepest question of earthly life: Are we here simply to struggle for food and reproduction, do our political and cultural institutions simply work to support those instincts, or, is there a design to which we can and must adhere if we are to enjoy a full human life and a sustainable future?

Darwinism renders such a discussion meaningless because it dismisses that alter-native.

If design theory can successfully challenge Darwin, then we’re not only in for a revision of our public school curriculum, but our whole way of life.

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The June, 2006 Edition of the Valley Patriot
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