Why States Must Maintain Faith In A Cautious Balance

At heart, I'm a rationalist, and I always have been. That doesn't mean I don't respect people of faith, merely that I value well considered, rational reasoning above that which is based primarily on "articles of faith".

This morning, while I was perusing the news sites I visit on the Web, I found something on CNN that is deeply disturbing. It appears that constant hectoring from extreme religious groups is causing the state government to once again re-open the can of worms that is the discussion about evolution.

Eighty years after a famed courtroom battle in Tennessee pitted religious beliefs about the origins of life against the theories of British scientist Charles Darwin, Kansas is holding its own hearings on what school children should be taught about how life on Earth began.

The Kansas Board of Education has scheduled six days of courtroom-style hearings to begin Thursday in Topeka. More than two dozen witnesses will give testimony and be subject to cross-examination, with the majority expected to argue against teaching evolution.

The first thing that goes through my mind is 'What the heck are they thinking?'. Then it turns out that a group called "The Intelligent Design Network" is one of the advocates for this debate:

Irigonegaray's opponent will be attorney John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, a Kansas organization that argues the Earth was created through intentional design rather than random organism evolution.

The group is one of many that have been formed over the last several years to challenge the validity of evolutionary concepts and seek to open the schoolroom door to ideas that humans and other living creatures are too intricately designed to have come about randomly.

Fundamentally, Intelligent Design (ID) is a desperate attempt on the part of creation advocates to hide their theology behind a veneer of apparent rationalism. I've read (among others), Michael J. Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" - one of the better known ID texts out there. My analysis of it is an essay unto itself, and perhaps one day I'll post here (over several days). Suffice it to say that although Dr. Behe is a very smart man, his arguments left me feeling not only were they incomplete, they were deeply flawed from a rational standpoint.

The basic argument that ID advocates make is that the world is far too complex, and far too elegant to have occurred by "mere random chance". Therefore, some "higher power" had to have "designed it". Okay, fine, you've replaced the word "God" with the more abstract "Higher Power", and for a change you are actually arguing without referencing the Scriptural Genesis story. I suppose that's a small improvement. Unfortunately, there is an underlying theism in the argument. That higher power is a deity of some sort - whether it is God, Allah, Odin, Ra or Zeus.

The odd thing is that I actually agree with the Creationists and ID people on one point - Evolution is not "proven" yet. There is compelling evidence in its favour, and of all the explanatory models I have seen, it seems reasonably complete to my eyes. (Granted, I'm not a biologist or anthropologist by training, so there may be more problems I haven't heard about) However, if I apply Occam's Razor to the arguments over evolution versus other theories, evolution has the relative grace of being simple. Simple models (as opposed to simplistic) have this nasty tendency to be correct - even if you don't like the conclusions.

What worries me about the form of this debate in Kansas is the obvious undertones of conservative religious views being brought to bear. Frankly, if the ID argument has enough evidence behind it to stand up to peer review for journal publication, I'd be quite happy to see it in the classrooms alongside evolution. So far, the ID people have claimed that they can't get published in peer reviewed journals because of "discrimination". I'd say it's far more probable that the issue isn't discrimination so much as a lack of compelling evidence presented in their papers on the subject.

If the religious conservatives want to talk about Creation, ID (or our descent from pink chocolate bunnies), let's put that in a class talking about theology in general. Science is science - it is an attempt to study the world objectively. Clouding the issue with a bunch of religious issues doesn't help a 12 year old understand basic chemistry, physics and biology. Science is riddled with theories - models that appear to explain the evidence, but are not provably complete. Evolution is one of those, and is a legitimate part of study. Like democracy, science isn't perfect - but it's the best we've got right now.

Professionally, I write software for a living. The systems I work on are large and complex - and every so often we run into problems where we sit there and scratch our heads and say "that shouldn't happen". Eventually, after staring at it long enough, we find out that yes it can (obviously - it did), and the piece of code that allowed it to occur simply had an ever so tiny probability of allowing the observed behaviour. In a very microcosmic sense, this underscores to me the likelihood of random chance events actually occuring, no matter how tiny the odds are.

"Millions to one odds happen nine times out of ten"
- paraphrased from Terry Pratchett.