Wired Magazine (Start, Atlas, issue 15.05) recently published an article, "May the best theory survive," about the "theory that life was created by a higher intelligence," also known as Intelligent Design theory. The letters to the editor in the following issue contained this reader response; "A scientific theory must be able to make predictions that can be tested by experiment. Intelligent design cannot do this, so it is not a scientific theory."
Several problems arise from such a stance. First, the theory of intelligent design can be tested. Second, testability has never stopped scientists from deriving theories, nor should it. Finally, science is itself built on fundamentally untestable assumptions.
The theory of intelligent design can certainly be tested. We could stand on a hilltop and cry out for such a designer to show himself. Many have done just such an experiment, but, sadly, the results have been mixed. We could hypothesize that if an item--say a Galapagos finch or a book about the origin of species--were created by an intelligent designer it would carry the hallmarks of such design, such as a structure of sufficient informational complexity as to make random processes extremely unlikely explanations for it's existence. If you cannot test the finch in such a manner, you cannot test the book. Not seeing the informational complexity inherent in a finch as evidence of intelligent design requires an a priori belief that there must be some other explanation. If we assumed that authors were a myth, we would similarly have to preclude authorship as a plausible method of accounting for the contents of The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin (or is it).
The mention of Darwin, that fairy tale character for the masses, leads nicely into the second point; namely, a lack of testability has never stymied theorizing by scientists. Darwin had no way of testing a theory of new species arising by evolutionary modification (although testing natural selection was easy enough). Modern scientists, for that matter, cannot test such a theory. They can only offer compelling evidence that new species do arise from other species, but how is that different from the intelligent design crowd? If you start with the assumption that there is no intelligent designer, the evolutionary explanation seems to be the only game in town. If you don't start with such an assumption, other explanations may seem more likely. But both start with an initial assumption. Which leads us to point number three.
Science itself is built on fundamentally untestable assumptions. Science hypothesizes and tests. It asks and answers. It experiments and discards. All of this is good. But one can only say it's good by drawing on untestable belief. How does one decide the value of a question or the value of its answer? For example, "Are we really better off as a species for having discovered CFCs, Mustard Gas, and the atomic bomb?" Yes or no, the answer must depend on values, and science cannot speak to values. The very fact that we consider science to be a valuable pursuit relies on a faith-based belief beyond the ken of the scientific method.
So the letter writer, it seems, was mistaken. Although he may not like the theory of intelligent design, it is, nevertheless, still a scientific theory. It is every bit as testable as more accepted scientific theories. In contrast, many scientific theories held with religious fervor by the faithful are not testable, at least not currently. Finally, science itself requires untestable assumptions to be considered as a worthwhile explanatory framework. It seems we all have our idols.
1 comment:
1) I don't think you understand what "testing" ID would involve and why it cannot be done. The issue is that a hypothetical designer could do anything: make anything look like anything. Thus there is no way to _disconfirm_ the idea since anything at all can confirm or disconfirm it. Theories are only testible when they are limited in scope, and ID by definition has no limits and those no distinguishing characteristics.
2) Speciation and evolutionary modification are very much testable. I think you are laboring under the misunderstanding that tests on historical claims can only be done by repeating history, but this is not the case. We test the past by testing the evidence the past leaves behind: the direct implications various events have for leaving behind this or that piece of evidence. All science, in fact, works like this: all we EVER have is more or less evidence supporting some claim via induction and inference.
3) Science is indeed built on untestable assumptions. But these assumptions are rather special: they are axiomatic, the very assumptions we ALL require to act and function within the physical world. Merely by reading and responding to my words, you concede those assumptions, as you do every time you move and act in the physical world. So they are givens, not the sorts of special additional claims that people make for their pet theories.
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