Does Intelligent Design Belong in the Classroom?

Unlike many of my bretheren on the left of the political spectrum, I have no objection to intelligent design being taught in schools, as long as it's being taught intelligently. See, intelligent design is a great opportunity for an enlightened science teacher to teach what science is all about.

Reviewing the basics of science, science is based on observation, testing and prediction. To qualify as a theory, an hypothesis must go through rigorous testing, must be measured and observed and its predictions verified. All science is based on the observable, the measureable and the predictable. Science is not the body of knowledge commonly taught in schools, it is the methodology, the way of thinking, that led to that body of knowledge.

Without a boring dissertation, evolution meets the criteria of observability, testability and prediction. It predicts change, something we've seen in the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pesticide-resistant insects. We can't predict the how life will change from its current state - the change is random - but we can with assurance predict it will change. We can observe it even over the short time we've had antibiotics and chemical pesticides and in the fossil records over millions of years. We can see its fingerprints when comparing DNA between species: Man is ninety-six percent chimpanzee or vice-versa. The same snippets of DNA are found in the genome of man, mouse, bacteria. In an observed world, that would imply that all are related. The fossil record would demonstrate the order of appearance in the biome.

Intelligent design does not fit the criteria of a scientific theory and that is the teaching opportunity it presents. The first postulate of intelligent design disqualifies it as science: There is a Designer we can't observe. No observation, no science, it's as easy as that. Continuing, if we embrace intelligent design, there can be no change without intervention of the Creator, again disqualifying Intelligent Design as a theory because it can make no predictions. Finally, if there is a Designer, it has intentionally muddled the fossil record and genome so that we can only conclude the Designer doesn't exist, thereby perpetrating the largest hoax ever perpetrated on the scientific community. The Designer has designed the system so that it appears exactly as if there were no need for the Designer to exist. In that case, using the logic the Designer gave us, we must assume the simpler of the hypotheses, that the Designer, who we can't observe anyway, doesn't exist.

The word "evolution" is an unfortunate choice and reflects the culture at the time of Darwin. "Evolution" involves somehow an ascension, a progression from lower organisms to what in Darwin's time was considered to be the pinacle of evolution, Man. Hence the misfortune of the word: Man is a step along the evolutionary path, an accident in a random sequence of change through time that saw the ascendancy of the dinosaurs and their replacement by more adaptable, furry little creatures. Evolution itself implies purpose, a goal that species change in an effort to reach. There is no goal. We can use intelligent design to teach biological science but only if we teach it intelligently and understand what science is.