The Way of Science

Chip Gibbons at The Binary Circumstance makes an excellent point regarding the religionists’ tendency to pooh-pooh science because it does not explain absolutely everything:

Discounting science because it has not yet explained everything in nature is a rather odd position to for believers in Intelligent Design to take. Intelligent Design explains nothing, so shouldn’t it be completely discarded?

It’s true: Science cannot explain everything we observe in the universe around us. Some proponents of “intelligent design” would have us believe that this is proof that there is some deep flaw in the scientific method, that the materialistic methods of science should be abandoned. The scientific method can’t give us all the answers. Why should we continue to place our trust in it?

But this claim — that there are gaps in science, and that therefore science cannot be relied upon to explain the universe adequately — is a subtle cariacature of science. Science is not our body of knowledge about the universe. It is not the state of our understanding of the natural world. Science is the means we use to reach that state of understanding.

In his essay Scientific Thinking and the Scientific Method, Steven Schafersman makes this point clearly:

Science is a method that allows a person to possess, with the highest degree of certainty possible, reliable knowledge (justified true belief) about nature. The method used to justify scientific knowledge, and thus make it reliable, is called the scientific method.

Schafersman also points out that the scientific method depends upon three principles:

1. Empiricism: The use of empirical evidence to gather information about the universe
2. Rationalism: Practicing logical reasoning when seeking to formulate an explanation for what we observe
3. Skepticism: The willingness to hold tentative conclusions and to change one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence

Ignore any one of these fundamental principles, and what you are doing is no longer the scientific method. Intelligent design fails to meet any of the three criteria of the scientific method:

• Empiricism: Intelligent design adherents would have us believe that their belief in a supernatural designer is based on observations of nature. This is false. IDers base their presumption of a supernatural designer on their own inability to explain what they observe. Certain biological constructs—the eye and bacterial flagellae being two favorite examples [REFERENCE EXAMPLES]—are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligence. The problem is that this is not an observation about nature. Rather, intelligent design proponents mistake an observation of their own inability to formulate a hypothesis for an observation about the universe around them.

• Rationalism: Put simply, intelligent design proponents abdicate any attempt to reason rationally about speciation or the origins of biological systems. Instead, they have concluded that because they cannot explain these phenomena, there must be no rational explanation—it’s all the work of a supernatural Gepetto.

• Skepticism: The scientific method requires that any hypothesis that explains the observed phenomena be falsifiable — that it be possible to formulate an experiment that, if it results in negative findings, shows the hypothesis to be false. Ask an ID proponent to describe such an experiment, and you’ll likely get a blank stare for your trouble. There is no skepticism at work here — only dogmatic certainty.

ID is religion with a paper bag over its head. It is Christianity hiding behind a mask. Bear in mind that the purpose of ID is not to further scientific debate. The infamous "wedge strategy" document from the deceptively named Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture makes this clear:

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

ID is in no way a scientific investigation of nature. There’s ample evidence that it is, in all significant aspects, an attempt to use public schools as a forum in which to proselytize for Christianity. ID cannot be honestly taught as science, for it shares no attributes with the scientific method.