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Politics : A Neutral Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1810)	12/27/2005 3:35:10 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2253

I hope the answer isn't merely something like "the ones which are not science" LOL. That was my precise reaction. Seems to me than anything that involves the supernatural is inherently not science. Science deals with the natural world. The other problem is that it's not an advanced enough "theory." It's a lowly hypothesis needing lots and lots more vetting before it's accepted enough to be taught to children. We not only need to teach science in the classroom, we need to teach our best science. We have enough problems without making our kids unnecessarily ignorant. Another way to assess whether something is science is by watching for the scientific community to deem it such. That's the way it works. Actually it was a college professor. Oh, well that's different, I think. I thought you were a little kid at the time. College students are supposed to be learning to think so challenging them with ideas like that is not so bad if it's not heavy handed. It sounded like yours might have been heavy handed. Lots of atheists can be heavy handed. I was under the impression that you were an atheist. Assuming I'm not mistaken about that, how did you make the transition from Catholic? I'm not an atheist, technically, although I don't get nit-picky about language when someone calls me that. I don't know if there is a deity or not. What I do know is that there's no way to know, and further that I don't care, which makes me an agnostic How I got there from being a Catholic is a long story, one I've discussed many times on SI and most of the local audience has heard it. I think the simplest way to explain it is that I just grew up. When you're ten you recognize that the Santa Clause thing is just mythology. When you reach a certain level of sophistication you recognize that most of the trappings of religion are, as well. Whether amongst the stuff that is organized religion there is a deity/pony, who knows? Another part of it was my disillusionment with religious institutions. There is the story of my alleged excommunication, which I will not bore folks with again. And an aunt who couldn't afford to buy an annulment. And the priest who cheated at poker. Stuff like that. Yet another part is that I don't have any use let alone need for it so why waste my precious life energy on it. Too much else to see and do and learn. Life makes sense and works for me at least as well without a deity so why cluge things up by interjecting one. Here's a piece I came across in my travels you might find interesting. "What's wrong with intelligent design, and with its critics By Alexander George AMHERST, MASS. – This week, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design may not be taught in the science classrooms of Pennsylvania's public schools. I agree with the verdict, but we need to be careful about our reasons for supporting it. Most critics of intelligent design seek to undermine it by arguing that the doctrine is not science. It's actually religion passing itself off as science. Hence, its teaching constitutes religious instruction. The Constitution disallows the state's establishment of religion. Therefore, intelligent design cannot be taught in the classroom. The problem with this argument is that it requires making the case that intelligent design is not science. And the intelligibility of that task depends on the possibility of drawing a line between science and non-science. The prospects for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that. Science employs the scientific method. No, there's no such method: Doing science is not like baking a cake. Science can be proved on the basis of observable data. No, general theories about the natural world can't be proved at all. Our theories make claims that go beyond the finite amount of data that we've collected. There's no way such extrapolations from the evidence can be proved to be correct. Science can be disproved, or falsified, on the basis of observable data. No, for it's always possible to protect a theory from an apparently confuting observation. Theories are never tested in isolation but only in conjunction with many other extra-theoretical assumptions (about the equipment being used, about ambient conditions, about experimenter error, etc.). It's always possible to lay the blame for the confutation at the door of one of these assumptions, thereby leaving one's theory in the clear. And so forth. Let's abandon this struggle to demarcate and instead let's liberally apply the label "science" to any collection of assertions about the workings of the natural world. Fine, intelligent design is a science then - as is astrology, as is parapsychology. But what has a claim to being taught in the science classroom isn't all science, but rather the best science, the claims about reality that we have strongest reason to believe are true. Intelligent design shouldn't be taught in the science classroom any more than Ptolemaic astronomy and for exactly the same reason: They are both poor accounts of the phenomena they seek to explain and both much improved upon by other available theories. The suspicion that religion is lurking somewhere in intelligent design theory is correct, but its locus is often misidentified. The religion isn't in the claims of intelligent design themselves. Rather, the religion is in the motivation for pushing a poor account of the natural world into the science curriculum. I think there are two reasons why people shy away from this way of viewing the matter. First, if you call intelligent design "poor science," then it seems you've allowed intelligent design a foot in the door by accepting that it's science. Science versus non-science seems like a much sharper dichotomy than better versus worse science. The first holds out the prospect of an "objective" test, while the second calls for "subjective" judgment. But there is no such test, and our reliance on judgment is inescapable. We should be less proprietorial about the unhelpful moniker "science" but insist that only the best science be taught in our schools. The second reason has to do with politics. The courts have had something to say about the constitutional guarantees of the separation of church and state. They've had nothing to say about the unconstitutionality of teaching bad science. Hence, if you wish to use the courts to stop school boards from introducing intelligent design into the curriculum, it seems you've got to argue that intelligent design isn't a science but a religious doctrine. If we're to be honest, either we should find alternatives to the courts to protect our curricula from bad science, or we should start arguing in court that the separation of church and state would be violated by intelligent design's injection into the science curriculum on account of its predominantly religious motivation. • Alexander George is a professor of philosophy at Amherst College." csmonitor.com