Regarding the old Creation vs. Evolution debate and what should be taught in schools...
The I.D. movement has made claims that their concepts are science... I cannot really agree.
The proponents of the Big Bang theory and macro-evolution claim that their concepts are scientifically produced... I cannot agree to that either.
What is science? Science is knowledge. The word's etymological roots are in Latin: scientia - knowledge, sciens from scire - to know. Ok, knowledge. Both intelligent design people and Big-Bangers claim to possess this knowledge.
But, as science is understood in the present day (hopefully it hasn't been changed too much to obviate this discussion), and more specifically the scientific method, science is a practice that produces knowledge gained by observation and the practical testing of theories. The way I learned about it from a wee age is that you observe some phenomenon, create a hypothesis to explain it, test this hypothesis, approve it enough to claim it as a theory, test it more, and eventually (usually post mortum) it becomes a scientific law. Voila!
Now, as far as I can understand, the I.D. people cannot claim to be practicing science. But, I am not really focusing on that now. My main intent here is to show that the evolutionary crowd and those who tout the common explanation of cosmological origins that goes in hand with evolutionary theory cannot claim to practice science either. Why? They have an explanation of origins... an idea not based on observation, or at least only observation and then a guess. An explanation not tested by practical methods at hand. Not reproducible. Not even falsifiable, as far as I am aware with our present body of knowledge.
Wait, those are the same accusations they lay at the feet of proponents of Intelligent Design. How strange?
The question looms... is origins a field in which we can actually practice science --contribute to the body of knowledge found in the study of the natural world by way of the scientific method? I kinda of doubt it. We can make guesses based on data, but they remain guesses. We can suggest explanations, but we cannot reproduce the events to test our case. So, if they only want science to be taught in the classrooms when teaching origins, they should probably just shut up altogether.
Maybe, they could include it in a philosophy course...
I was just going to say, Derek, before I finished reading your post -and then I saw you said it for me- that really any explanation of origins is highly difficult to reproduce, therefore, maybe science can't really explain it. Unless we're changing the definition of science to what we can backward-project with computer simulations of what we see happening today, which again is highly debatable among different people - but I don't really want to launch that debate!
ReplyDeleteYes, it mostly boils down to a set of claims based on something non-scientific... guesses and ideas extrapolated from observation or revelation, in the case of Creation theory. When it comes down to that, I can hardly see any merit to the ideas in the Big Bang theory and macro-evolution. However, I do see a lot of merit in the Creation story... not because I can prove it to you in some science lab, but because a reliable authority has told me so.
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