Credible?
Science classes are one thing, religious education or comparative religion is another thing, or perhaps two other things.
The government has cleared the way for a form of creationism to be taught in Britain’s schools as part of the religious syllabus. Lord Adonis, an education minister, is to issue guidelines within two months for the teaching of “intelligent design” (ID), a theory being promoted by the religious right in America…Adonis said in a parliamentary answer: “Intelligent design can be explored in religious education as part of developing an understanding of different beliefs.”…The theory has gained a foothold in the American state school system, sparking legal challenges from secular groups seeking to oust it from science teaching.
From science teaching. Not from comparative religion teaching, from science teaching. It makes a difference which class we’re talking about. At least it ought to.
Although Adonis stopped short of permitting the teaching of intelligent design in science lessons, one of the key lobby groups behind the theory, Truth in Science, hailed his statement as a significant breakthrough…Andrew McIntosh, a professor of engineering at Leeds university who heads Truth in Science, said: “We believe that evolutionary theory should be taught in a critical manner, and some space must be given to credible alternative theories, such as intelligent design.”
Credible alternative theories such as intelligent design? It’s not all that credible, really. It’s more credible than young earth creationism, but that’s not saying much.
The lobby group says its ultimate aim is to pressure schools to teach ID in science lessons as a challenge to Darwinism. It says it has the support of about 70 heads of science across Britain, who want ID to be introduced in the national curriculum as part of science.
Does it say how many ‘heads of science’ across Britain it has the opposition of? I bet it’s more than 70.
It has emerged that 12 prominent academics wrote to Tony Blair and Alan Johnson, the education secretary, last month arguing that ID should be taught as part of science on the national curriculum. They included Antony Flew, formerly professor of philosophy at Reading University…
That’s sad. See Raymond Bradley’s article on ‘Intelligent Design or Natural Design’ for more.
From that Times piece, I loved the quote by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor of Salisbury cathedral:
I don’t see why religious education should be a dumping ground for fantasies
Isn’t that just beautiful?
Oh yeah. That was a good one.
I’m reading Jon Krakauer’s book on Mormon fundamentalists. Hilariously, evangelical Xians like to show up at Mormon rituals in upstate New York to squawk ‘heresy’ at the Mormons, and Mormons excommunicate and excoriate and disavow Mormon Fundamentalists, saying there is no connection whatever between the two groups, even though both believe in Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni and the gold plates and
falls to ground breathless with laughing
A proper encounter with the Study of Religions (AKA Religious Studies) can be very effective at educating students to take a more sophisticated and historically sensitive approach to religion. Religion is a potent force in the world today and it should be considered of the highest order of importance to educate students so they understand the nature and varieties of it. Even if students choose to study their own “family’s religion” (a troubling concept but one that captures something real), that is better than nothing. Just like sex education, it is better left to the schools than to the parents and clerics to teach their children about religion. The study of intelligent design and creationism can then be placed in its proper context next to other religious myths of origin.
It’s sad, but it seems that Antony Flew might be going a bit ga-ga. Fair enough if he’s changed his mind about God, but signing a letter for a bunch of ID crackpots? Mental deterioration is the only excuse that will rub with me.
I don’t think ID is any more credible than young earth creationism. A more complex conceptual construction, which may more easily muddle the brains of those with no understanding of real science, but I wouldn’t say more credible.
Religion has never been anything but a dumping ground for fantasies.
< Irony mode OFF >
Perhaps the old preference of the RC church that they would rather children recieve NO religious instruction than shock/horror comparative religion should be a dead give-away on that subject.
As for the public proponents of ID, I don’t think I’m allowed to say what I think of them – I don’t mean their gullible and deluded followers, of course, who are either too ignorant (which is curable) to know better, or too stupid to know better ( not curable, unfortunately)….
Oh, thanks for the link to the Bradley article – good stuff.
In theory, there should be no objection to discussing creationsim and ID in school sessions devoted to the comparative study of religious practices and histories.
In practice, of course, many of these classes will be handed to the part-time maths teacher who happens to have a slot in their schedule and who will have to rely on the materials to hand – especially I have no doubt the DVD thoughtfully provided by Truth in Science…
Do pupils in the UK actually take a blind bit of notice of what happens in Religious Studies classes?
If so, things have changed since my day when such classes were just considered a joke. In fact, if anything the classes were likely to encourage atheism – not that it needed any encouragement since (effectively, at least) it was the default position of most people anyway.
The UK isn’t going to become a remotely religious country until our demographics alter. Religion just doesn’t fit with our (predominant) culture.
>Do pupils in the UK actually take a blind bit of notice of what happens in Religious Studies classes?
>If so, things have changed since my day when such classes were just considered a joke.< I wrote more or less the same thing in another thread a week or so ago.(Admittedly about long ago times when I was at school — it was called RI [Religious Instruction] in those far off days) And parents who didn’t want their children to attend RI on conscientious grounds were able to enable their children to opt out.
Chris Whiley
>In theory, there should be no objection to discussing creationsim and ID in school sessions devoted to the comparative study of religious practices and histories.< *Ideally*, it would be good if it were discussed in non-science classes (religious studies would be as good a place as any). And it would probably be good if the maths teacher was the person doing it. Should the teacher be a fully-fledged Anglicn, my sense about C. of E. types anyway (judging by comments by senior Anglian ministers I’ve read in the press) is that they recognise the agenda of those pushing the ID argument. Of course this presupposes that the teacher has the background knowledge and open-mindedness to present the arguments in the round – which implies the recognition that Darwinian theory is for the biology class, and ID and its like is for discussion in religious ideas class.
Actually, a form of ID could be taught in a philosophy class as well as or instead of religious studies class; at least I think so. As far as I know it’s a reasonable philosophical question to ponder whether an Intelligence or a Mind or a Purpose is a more convincing brute fact to start from than a Big Bang is. In a way it’s too bad the ID crowd have contaminated the whole discussion with all this covert and/or theistic stuff, because it’s not an inherently uninteresting question. It has interesting questions attached to it, too – such as whether it matters how ‘convincing’ it is; whether there’s any point to distinguishing between convincing explanations and true ones about questions that are at least currently insoluble.
Philosophy class would be the ideal place. Do schools have philosophy classes nowadays? (I include the US as well as the UK of course, and any European country, if there be anyone from those parts able to enlighten us.)
US ones certainly don’t. I think I’ve been told that French ones do; that a couple of philosophy classes are mandatory for everyone; but maybe that’s a myth.
>In a way it’s too bad the ID crowd have contaminated the whole discussion with all this covert and/or theistic stuff, because it’s not an inherently uninteresting question. It has interesting questions attached to it, too – such as whether it matters how ‘convincing’ it is; whether there’s any point to distinguishing between convincing explanations and true ones about questions that are at least currently insoluble.< I think Ophelia raises an important issue. I don’t see why we should assume, in the year 2007, that we (or rather, evolutionary scientists) have the answers all wrapped up, with only the details to sort out. Maybe in 50, 100, 200 years time it will be discovered that there are other scientific principles involved of which we don’t have an inkling. Which is not to say we don’t work on the assumption that Darwinian evolution is the central theory in biology until someone gives us reason to suppose that there may be something else to add to the mix.
My memory of my own(British) religious instructions classes was that only the atheists bothered to pay attention. If you already knew that you were an atheist at that age then you had actually thought about religion and had an interest in it. Most of the pupils didn’t care. Would apatheist be the appropriate term?
Apatheist – that’s an excellent coinage. Ding ding – we have a winna!
There IS an exception to the apatheist ( – that’s brilliant btw, not to say “bright” ? ) culture in Britain.
The muslims.
In schools and Universities, though H-u-T have gone quiet recently.
I expect there will be a lot more screaming and posturing, and demanding of “respect” this year.
But I don’t think ID really stands a chance here, nonetheless.
As far as I know it’s a reasonable philosophical question to ponder whether an Intelligence or a Mind or a Purpose is a more convincing brute fact to start from than a Big Bang is ..
Perhaps for the top centile of the school population — for the rest its ‘eyes glaze over’.
I’m pretty sanguine about ID at school if only because it’s so much more convoluted than evolutionary theory, the basics of which ‘click’ straight away for any child of average academic ability (ss Thomas Huxley is supposed to have said: ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’).
ID seems to be something like rocket science without the science. All very well if you’re a professional philosopher but an intellectual waste of time for most of us.
To avoid misunderstanding — I mean I’m ‘sanguine’ about ID being a damp squib, not ‘sanguine’ about it’s being a success.
Philosophy courses might be an appropriate place to teach about ID, which, when Hume decisively refuted it, was known in the version called “the argument from design.” As far as I know, French and Italian secondary schools (at least the “classical lycée/liceo”) teach history of philosophy from textbooks. At the secondary level, though, I do think a social scientific approach is more accessible to students who should study ID merely as an example of pre-modern origin myths. Without going into the complexities of a philosophical refutation of ID, secondary students will at least get the sense that lots of different groups have different pre-scientific origin myths. Then, they can learn the non-mythical facts about life’s origin in their biology classes.
Re school philosophy classes, Ophelia wrote:
>I think I’ve been told that French ones do; that a couple of philosophy classes are mandatory for everyone; but maybe that’s a myth.< Well, there are exceptions to every good idea! I can just see the kids being faced with Deleuze and Guattari. I recall checking out their promising-sounding “Anti-Oedipus”, and finding it was like trying to grasp porridge. Wikipedia has this description of it: “In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric, offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968.” Yeah, yeah, right on. I didn’t understand it, man, but it’s a terrific indictment of modern bourgeois society.
>Philosophy courses might be an appropriate place to teach about ID, which, when Hume decisively refuted it, was known in the version called “the argument from design.”< Not quite, otherwise it wouldn’t be the new best thing in creationist circles. As I understand it, the genuine IDers accept that Darwinian evolution occurs, but argue that certain “irreducibly complex” biological systems are too complex to be explicable in terms of Darwinian processes of selection. They argue that an intelligent agent must have intervened at this point which shall be nameless (let’s call it G-d). Oh, mighty G-d, nameless shall be thy name – but You know who You are.
I am intrigued that Flew thinks ID should be part of the science curriculum. Does anyone have more information on the letter in question?
In general, surely philosophers will think that it is up to domain experts to set curriculums? So physicists determine what physics students study, biologists what biology and so on.
Alan,
Jon Stewart commented that the ‘designer’ in ID was not necessarily god, but had the same job description and skill sets.
I was commenting on Stewart’s saying that ID was just the same old “argument from design.” As I said, my sense is that it is better designated “the argument from irreducibly complexity”.
I’d better clarify what I just wrote having re-read Stewart’s precise words!
I don’t think the advocates of ID in detailed terms (rather than the many hangers-on) put their arguments in terms of the “argument from design” which Hume refuted. (Not in the book I perused when this whole thing came to the forefront a few years ago.) The emphasis was on “irreducible complexity” that couldn’t be explained (in their view) by Darwinian selection. Certainly in that book Darwinian selection as a biological mechanism was accepted, but regarded as not able to explain certain *specific* features of biological systems.
Actually, a form of ID could be taught in a philosophy class as well as or instead of religious studies class; at least I think so. As far as I know it’s a reasonable philosophical question to ponder whether an Intelligence or a Mind or a Purpose is a more convincing brute fact to start from than a Big Bang is.
I agree – but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with grouping this kind of pondering under intelligent design. “Design” would include, I would guess, “someone” selecting an actual state from a number of possible ones with some kind of purpose in mind: fidgeting to get gravity right for possible intelligent life to emerge would fit the bill, as well as fixing the bacterial flagellum. But when dealing with ultimate brute facts per se, i.e. God as some kind of necessary entity underlying all contingent existents as in some versions of the cosmological argument, the whole design thing is not relevant to the argument.
Barring some kind of causal overdetermination – with both a designer and Darwinian evolution working in parallel – I think Intelligent Design as pushed by the anti-evolutionists is pretty hopeless as philosophy as well. I simply don’t see how we can substantiate the design of local, contingent states of affairs by an entity which we have no scientific confirmation of. The Paleyan watchmaker argument works because we have a theory of what humans can and cannot design, and we know humans exist. I’m not sure where this leaves fine-tuning arguments.
So if the irreducible complexity argument would have wings, we’d have something falsifying Darwinian evolution (in some specific cases) but nothing to take its place. Basically then Darwinian evolution and other possible natural mechanisms would be the default on the basis of philosophical rather than scientific grounds.
Yeah, I had doubts later about having said ‘a form of ID.’ I should have said a related question or something. The second sentence quoted there doesn’t really follow from the first – and I think Mind as brute fact is a reasonable philosophical question, but I don’t think ID is. All that fiddling with parts – no.
Well, I got the IHT on a plane today and the back page contains the headline “Washington: Court rejects challenge to preflight ID checks.”
Let your imagination run wild… I can actually see Dembski standing between passport control and the place where they confiscate your toothpaste. The rest of you guys are welcome to supply the exchanges with the passengers…