Pre-Preface: This is my first “real” post, and I’m already annoyed I couldn’t think of a better title. I’m also annoyed that I was itching to write it 9 hours ago, and now I’m sleepy and won’t do that itch justice. BUT! I won’t ever use this thing unless I get used to it, so no more putting it off.

Preface: Most of this entry (and chances are, most entries to come) are very much based on the fuzzy picture and loose, sometimes second-hand, facts I’ve picked up here and there. If I make a huge error or misrepresentation, by all means, let me know.

Okay, so my friend Whitney asked me to come over to her place and help her write a paper. Every day I get asked out for coffee, a movie, or some other “fun” thing, and my reaction, at least these days, has been “I guess if I HAVE to”, and yet, as soon as she asked me, I said yes and was actually excited to help out. I think I need to get back into classes. I digress. So the assignment, simply put, was to choose a social problem and to weigh its pros and cons (from research, not opinion) and then give a personal opinion using a logical argument. She chose the problem of intelligent design taught in schools.

I thought I had a basic grasp of intelligent design. I understood it as: nature, science, and evolution have a harmony that suggest–imply, even, that there must have been an intelligent being which designed it. With this as my definition, my counterpoint has been that things work in harmony with each other in any system, or the system would cease to exist. Everything must overcome, adapt, or cease existence. If I roll over in my sleep and knock over my lamp, the lamp will fall over. It has no control over this, and since I was asleep, neither did I. There was not an intelligent force involved, only two objects hitting each other and gravity. If a giraffe has a long neck so it can reach the highest leaves, this is because it would starve otherwise, not because an intelligent force gave it a long neck.

Apparently, there is more to it, as Whitney enlightened me. Not to mention that the question isn’t whether or not intelligent design makes sense but whether there is a right to teach it in schools.

Intelligent design, according to Whitney, who had read and was using publications from The Discovery Institute as her source, is based on the concept of “irreducible complexity”, meaning that life and DNA can not be reduced to simple parts and therefore there must be a product of an intelligent designer. More to this rant’s point, The Discover Institute believes that this theory can not be proven or disproven scientifically and that this means that science is flawed and must be completely fixed so that such “truths” as their discovery need not be proved or disproved to be true. They say that science bears the burden of proof since their theory must be true.

This is the part that really got stuck in my head. The concept that an idea is so right and true that it need not be proven. My thoughts came to two points I find interesting enough to express here. The first is the problem of induction, as presented by Hume. The second is the idea of absolute truth and the sincere feeling that something is right even if it can’t be proven. I’ll tackle the latter first.

I was having coffee with Christian, who got bored while I was in the bathroom and started drawing in his notebook. On my return from peeing, I found myself left with my own internal dialogue while he sketched what looked like a bean with a nose. I started thinking about how pompous it is to suggest that your idea is true even without proof. And my next thought was “do I ever do that?” And then it came to me. There are definitely things I believe are true without considering any proof. If it came down to it, I could probably justify most of them, maybe even prove them. But could I prove them scientifically? I think it’s wrong to kill someone. I could justify this by saying 1)I don’t want to be killed 2)Most people don’t want to be killed, and therefore 3)People shouldn’t kill each other or else they make it okay to be killed. BUT I know that the argument is weak and also that people don’t want to WORK either (at least not a crappy job) but they have to in order for the 7-11 to stay open. To put it another way, I don’t need to justify why I think murder is wrong or have someone show me the proof to believe it. And if someone told me I was wrong to believe it without proof, I would expect them to prove I’m wrong before I stopped believing it was wrong. I would not stop just because it couldn’t be proven. Point? The feeling of truth, of rightness, can be strong enough that no official proof is needed. How can the things I think are right stay right when I know that so many have believed something was so true and I think they were wrong. A white supremacist thinks non-whites are inferior. They REALLY believe in this. I most certainly think it’s not true, and if neither of us can be proven right or wrong, how can we both be right and wrong? In this simple example, there is proof that I’m right, but in the case of God there is no way to prove or disprove and there’s the rub. I can call myself agnostic and straddle the fence, but when two culture threaten to kill for two different gods, how can they both trust the truth of their belief and only one be right?

This is starting to get into high school stoner territory, which I blame on fatigue. My point isn’t that religion is “so crazy, man.” My point is that there CAN be truths improvable by science, so how do we know when that instinct is a truth and when it is a misguided belief?

Induction is the belief that if something happens, it will happen again under the same circumstances. People use it to make decisions, science uses it to make predictions. If you throw an apple in the air, it will fall back to the ground (all things being equal.) Hume said that induction is irrational and to this day, no one has been able to disprove him. His argument is that a prediction can never be made, because one could just as easily predict the opposite and be right. Example: I threw an apple in the air 1000 times. Each time it fell to the ground. Conclusion: The next time i throw an apple up, it will fall to the ground (all things being equal.) Sounds good, right? Counter-conclusion: The apple fell 1000 times, therefore it must not fall the next time I throw it in the air, because what are the odds it will keep falling? This idea sounds crazy to a lot of people, but to some it sounds just as crazy to expect the same results over and over again. Example: I stepped on my brakes, my car stopped, Conclusion: Every time i step on the brakes, my car will stop. Pretty dangerous conclusion. The point? Philosophers and scientists have tried to logically rationalize why we can make predictions based on previous observation for over 200 years, and so far the best they’ve come up with is “it may not be rational, but it works and it would be more dangerous not to use induction.” Why is this relevant to Intelligent Design? Because scientists essentially are doing the same thing as the proponents of Intelligent Design. By trusting that induction works in spite of not being able to prove it, they are saying “we know it’s true even if it can’t be proven.” So why should either be taught in school if both are based on faith?

I’m running out of steam, but my final conclusion boils down to this: science changes all of the time. It allows for correction and improvement, at least it’s supposed to. Furthermore, even if induction can’t be proven, it can be seen everyday. What intelligent design can’t do is change, because it’s a theory proclaimed as true, not just possible. There is no room for a young patent clerk to come along and change everything we understand about intelligent design, it must simply be accepted. We can never see evidence of it, irrational or otherwise. We must only have faith in it’s truth. The question seems not to be “should intelligent design be taught in a science class as alternative theory” so much as “should non-science be taught in a science class?” Would it be appropriate in a Spanish class to spend time explaining how Spanish is not the only language, and then give equal time to French?

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