Why Ask Why?

Intelligent design should not be taught as a science. Now, I am not trying to destroy religion, as some creationists believe, which led to the formulation of intelligent design. I believe matters of faith are personal things. That is something for you to decide. Conversely, it is also something that you should not force on other people.

However, I am not here to argue faith, or the existence or non-existence of deities. I am here to argue my statement that intelligent design is not a science.

The latest battleground for this argument is in Pennsylvania where the Dover Area School District has called for statements of evolution’s doubt to scoff at it. One of the main arguments to evolution is that there is not enough proof in the evolutionary evidence (the so-called missing links) to prove evolution therefore you should doubt evolution. If there is doubt then that theory should be looked at as being invalid, because there should be no doubt in truth. Luckily here comes intelligent design: 100-percent doubt free!

This is putting the scientific method ass backwards. Scientific method requires us to doubt a theory, in fact scientists do not go out to prove a theory, they try to test it to see if they can disprove it. If something disproves the theory they found out why, and either adjust the theory or throw it out. It is called scientific skepticism. Now, I will agree that there are numerous holes in the evolutionary evidence, mainly because fossil evidence hundreds of millions of years old is hard to come by, but nothing we do have as evidence disproves the theory. Without testing a theory there is no validity.

Intelligent design takes it the other way. Their “theory” (actually it is a hypothesis) is that life is so complex it could never of happened by chance, therefore something intelligent had to design it. There is no way to test this, which is why it is not a theory. In fact, nothing can disprove it because of the logic. Ancient fossils? The intelligent designer made them for a purpose!

What I find dangerous about intelligent design being taught as a valid science is that it takes the most important ingredient of science and disposes of it: asking why. With the standards of intelligent design the answer is always “because that is the way it is.” That is a mentality that keeps us stagnant. The need to know, to question and to explore the unknown is what makes us unique creatures on this planet. When these questions are denied we come to a standstill. All of the advances we have today are because someone asked, “Why is it…”

If everyone accepted lightning as something caused by a god we would not have electricity because the steps to get us there would never have been taken. If we never wondered why are the stars in the sky, and accepted them as angels or ice crystals or whatever faith at the time decreed them, we would never have explored the moon, or Mars or the outer planets.

Again, science and faith are not mutually exclusive, but to deny us the ability to ask “why” is the road to nowhere.