Responding to FTE

The Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) is a proponent of Intelligent Design (ID). They claim that ID is a scientific theory. It isn't. They want to have their bogus theory taught side-by-side with Darwinism, never mind that doing so violates the U.S. Constitution and would distract students from the study of modern biology and medicine.

According to the FTE web site, "As a scientific theory, all ID claims is that there is empirical evidence that key features of the universe and living things are the products of an intelligent cause."

The quote above shows a misunderstanding of what constitutes a scientific theory. A scientific theory must do more than provide a conceptual framework for information we already have, it must have predictive power and, ultimately, practical application. It must give us knowledge we didn't have before, not merely a different way of thinking about things we already know.

The human mind is a powerful mechanism, capable of looking at a cloud or an ink blot and seeing a dragon or a starship. We can look at any piece of information (such as that a rock, when thrown up into the air, falls back to Earth) and come up with any number of explanations for it. Aristotle said that the rock falls because the Earth is its natural home. Religion would say that the rock falls because God wants it to. Though these explanations both "work," neither is a scientific theory, because neither one can lead us to new scientific knowledge or new practical applications.

Newton's Theory of Gravity, on the other hand, is scientific. Newton said that the rock falls back to Earth because of a force called gravity which you can neither see, smell, touch, nor taste. However irrational or silly Newton's idea might sound, it fulfills the requirement of leading us to new knowledge. For example, the Theory of Gravity implies that a rock could in fact leave the Earth, never to return, via a principle called escape velocity. Communication satellites, moon missions, Mars landers, and Voyager spacecraft have done more than "prove" Newton's theory, they were made possible by that theory. This is the critical point.

Darwinism constitutes a scientific theory because it leads to improved methods of agriculture, animal husbandry, conservation, and most significantly, to the study of genetics as the mechanism by which inherited information is passed along.

Where does ID lead? Try this as an exercise: Pick a disease -- Multiple Sclerosis (MS), for example. Now, explain how you would go about finding a cure or treatment for MS using Intelligent Design as your guiding principle. Given that life on Earth is the product of an intelligent designer, what does that say about a disease like MS? Does it mean the design has become broken? How can you be sure? What if the design isn't broken, but MS is in fact part of the design, part of the plan? If that's the case, wouldn't it be impossible, dangerous, or even blasphemous to cure MS?

But the proponents of ID are nothing if not slippery. They've given up explicitly mentioning God in their documents. In some cases, they don't even attempt to promote ID, but merely to undercut Darwinism through creative interpretation of the term "theory" and through outright lies (such as that Darwinism is controversial to anyone but religious fundamentalists). This is unfortunate, since the Theory of Evolution is fundamental to modern biology and medicine. DNA research is uncovering the genetic causes for hundreds of diseases. Study of non-human DNA could lead to cures or treatments for thousands of maladies caused by viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Attacking Darwinism, then, is not a victimless crime. It is, in fact, a heartless endeavor that steals time from educators and researchers and, thus, could delay the arrival of some cure or treatment.

Of course, the proponents of ID are perfectly willing to treat DNA like it is their friend. Of Pandas and People, a book that ID proponents feel should be provided as a supplemental text in biology classrooms, tells us that, "If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause" (2nd ed., 1993, pg. 7). First, as we discussed earlier, science isn't based upon experience. It isn't just another way of explaining what we already know. It must lead us to new knowledge.

Second, the claim that our DNA "must have" an intelligent origin relies on a non-sequitur. DNA uses a base four coding scheme that is functionally equivalent to the base two scheme used in computers. Since we can use base two to encode textual information, surely we could do so using base four. And here comes the non-sequitur: the ability to encode textual information using DNA implies that DNA was designed by a higher intelligence.

The gobbledygook nature of our DNA (long stretches that encode for nothing at all, repeated sequences that are highly prone to errors during replication, and the Rube Goldberg convolutions whereby some genes are activated or deactivated) all would get a computer programmer fired. Moreover, human DNA does not in fact contain a copy of the Ten Commandments, never mind the New Testament. Its main job is to encode for proteins. Whatever coding mechanism it used to accomplish that task, we could point to it and say, "Aha. It's storing information, therefore it must have been designed."

Organizations like FTE continue to morph their arguments in an attempt to force their antiquated beliefs into the classroom. For parents, teachers, and school boards, countering this sort of sophistry can become a major time sink. Especially if you happen to be religious, you might feel that the effort isn't worth the gain. After all, where's the harm in having God mentioned (however obliquely) alongside Darwinism? However, there is harm. Even if it only leads one brilliant mind away from a career in biology or medicine, it could thereby delay the cure for some disease. Would God really be pleased by the unnecessary suffering of even a single child, just so a small group of people can continue clinging to a medieval, erroneous interpretation of the Bible? Somehow, I doubt it.

Proponents of ID like to claim they merely want fair treatment for their theory. Equal time, as it were. But equal time for ID isn't fair. To date, no cure or treatment has ever arisen either from ID or from its predecessor, Creationism. These "theories" have been around long enough that they could have produced something concrete, some solution to a real-world, ongoing problem. Not only have they failed, I'll go out on a limb and say that (despite well-funded organizations and think tanks like FTE), there isn't a single laboratory, a single scientist anywhere applying Intelligent Design in a search for new knowledge or some new application.

By their actions shall ye know them. While organizations like FTE devote enormous time and resources to lobbying for their theory, they make no attempt at all to apply it. Until they do, and do so successfully, we have every right to treat ID as religion and politics, not as science, and therefore to totally exclude it from the science classroom. It's more than fair, it's the right thing to do.