The time has come for me to finally freak out and write a big long angry post about creationism, cos it’s really winding me up. Obviously the wackos have been hounding the US school system for some time now but it’s reached the point where the same stupid arguments are visible in mainstream press in the UK.

I realise a lot of what I’m saying here will be bread and butter to the scientists (and especially the biologists) among you. But I don’t want to miss stuff out that seems relevant.

So, let’s fight —

Politics

Back in the day, way back when summers were longer and sweets tasted proper, the US Constitution was worded to specifically enforce separation of Church and State: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Which, when it enforced this amendment on state governments, meant the United States could no longer teach Biblical Creation as biology.

Obviously there were many arguments over this; and there are still hard-line believers in literal Creation who promote their form of apologetics — ‘creation science’. As if that helped pull the wool over anyone’s eyes…

New kid on the block

Of course, some smart cookie eventually realised that the constitutional objection to God creating the world in 6 days wasn’t based in science, but in politics. Thus was born Intelligent Design (ID) — Creationism with all the explicit references to God taken out.

The underpinnings are still there, however — doing a search-and-replace with “Designer” instead of “Lord” fools only those who want to be fooled.

Who?

Most, if not all, of the movers and shakers in the Intelligent Design world work for the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think-tank.

Most of the contributors to this movement are evangelical Christians with backgrounds in theology and (strangely enough) mathematics. ID supporters with qualifications in biology seem remarkably thin on the ground.

Science

Of course, like ‘creation science’ before it, ID proponents would have us believe that they’re all about the pipettes and the white lab coats. So, are they?

Well, science is a much-abused word so let’s first pin down some specifics.

• Science — In order to be classed as a science, a field must say something meaningful about its chosen area of study. Specifically, the natural world. Making appeals to supernatural entities is explicitly outwith the realm of science… that’s called theology.

• Theory — This does not mean the same thing as “spurious guess” or “first thing that came into my head”. Not only does a theory have to have a massive weight of evidence behind it, but it must also make useful predictions which can be tested.

  If I were to show to the world that gravity doesn’t always affect me (through my leet levitation skills), that does not constitute a theory. It merely serves to knock down an old theory. A new one does not automatically spring up to replace it.

• Falsifiable — Something which can be proven wrong.An idea is scientific if it can be proven wrong. This doesn’t mean that it will be proven wrong, but merely that there is a way to do so.

  For example, the statement “all crows are black,” is falsifiable by finding a non-black crow. “All crows are either black or not black,” is not falsifiable, since all options are covered. White crows and rainbow-coloured crows still prove the statement correct.

• Hypothesis — A statement that can be tested through observation. It must be falsifiable.

The claims of Intelligent Design

So what does Intelligent Design have to say in the realms of science? In fact, very little. It claims that:

1. evolution fails to explain the origin of life;
2. evolutionary theory is inadequate to explain life’s complexity and diversity;
3. the only valid explanation for life’s complexity is an intelligent designer.

The first point can be discarded immediately, since evolution does not address the origin of life. The theory of gravity says nothing about where we came from, but that doesn’t mean we think it’s hokum…

The second point is explained through various obscure technical arguments, such as “irreducible complexity” and a “fine-tuned universe”, which many people have repeatedly shown to be nonsense.

But even if these arguments were valid this would not help the ID proponents’ case. There are no predictions. They do not state — beyond the simplistic “a designer did it” — any alternative hypotheses. Its proponents wish to knock down evolution and put… no alternative in its place; and yet they claim that their “theory” is on a par with evolution.

The published claims of creationism and Intelligent Design theorists (the line being very blurry at times) are often dishonest. The same flawed methodologies are used time and again without addressing these flaws.

Their science has been very poor, not to say non-existent. Their poor research record (I believe four papers have been published which make some support of ID in reputable journals) has been defended through accusations of conspiracy. Apparently the “Darwinists” are trying to keep down their competitors.

Education

But the Discovery Institute isn’t really about science. That much is evident from their lack of it. Instead, they want to take religion back to schools by nefarious means.

I trust I can rely on your vote

They use well-funded public relations to play the media game — press releases, glossy brochures, political lobbying — and gain the attention of the ordinary public. By repeating their statements often enough it begins to slip into public knowledge. Suddenly everyone “knows” that supporters of evolution are “coming under increasing threat”… not because it’s true, but because it gets reported a lot by media unwilling to take sides. (Read Melanie Phillips’ article from The Daily Mail mentioned above: a veritable catalogue of unsupported “common knowledge” and ignorance of the facts.)

They even have a slogan — “teach the controversy” — which has slipped into the speeches of too many politicians. In truth, this controversy does not exist. There are no flaws in evolution which Intelligent Design can explain; just gaps in our knowledge which get filled in daily.

Their phrases crop up everywhere — such as “it’s only a theory” (about evolution). Glance back up at the definition of theory and tell me how anyone with a full understanding of it could put the word “only” in front of it. There is no greater commendation for a scientific idea than being called a theory.

Religion in disguise

The lack of scientific integrity is apparent by the way ID’s supporters approach the problem of reform. Rather than trying to change academia first, then the schools, it has gone the other way round. It is attempting to hoodwink ordinary parents and children into believing that they are getting a real education.

This focus on perversion of science is no more obvious than in the few “faith schools” that have sprung up in England recently — creationism, not Intelligent Design, is taught in these schools. Without any rule to separate church from state there is no need for the subterfuge.

The alternative construct

I alluded, in a previous section, to the Discovery Institute’s desire to replace evolution with nothing. This is not quite true — they want to replace it with nothing scientific.

Instead, the aim is altogether, ah, loftier. They want to replace “scientific materialism”:

… we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. … We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

This paragraph is taken from a fundraising document and call to arms written by the Discovery Institute in the late 1990s. This Wedge Document specified exactly how they hoped to see, within twenty years, “design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life”.

This isn’t science, or anything close — this is a deliberate attempt to reduce the authority of reason and evidence in ordinary life, instead replacing it with their preconceived notions of how the world works. This is not science; it’s religion.