The following was published May 23 2002 in the Midlands Voices section of the Omaha World-Herald.

'Intelligent design' isn't objective science
by Charles F. Austerberry, Ph.D. The writer, an assistant professor of biology at Creighton University, is part of the Nebraska Religious Coalition for Science Education (http://nrcse.creighton.edu).


A group called Concerned Citizens for Objective Science wants Nebraska's science teaching standards revised so that students will:

(1) "Investigate and distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science."

(2) "Investigate and understand the full range of scientific views on biological evolution that exist."

(3) "Investigate and understand why some topics, such as biological evolution, may generate controversy."

I support the first and third objectives. Students should not be taught, explicitly or implicitly, that evolution disproves God. Students should learn that the naturalistic, mechanistic and impersonal theories of science do not necessarily imply any single metaphysical stance, theistic or atheistic.

Might random chance be predictable or purposeful in some sense to God? Might natural law reflect divine will? Could a good God create species using a process in which other species, and countless individual organisms, die?

Those are important, valid questions that arise when students reflect upon the theory of evolution. Atheistic evolutionists answer them in the negative. Theistic evolutionists and evolutionary creationists answer them in the positive.

These unavoidable questions can be appropriately handled, at least to some degree, even in public schools as long as they are clearly distinguished from scientific questions.

The second objective is why I cannot sign on with this effort to change Nebraska's science teaching standards. Just what should "the full range of scientific views on biological evolution" include? The answer from the "intelligent design" advocates, who testified in favor of the changes, subverts their first objective.

According to their theory, science has somehow already shown that certain "irreducibly complex" features of living organisms could not possibly have evolved through "nondesigned" processes. Therefore, these advocates support (as science!) the untestable default theory of "intelligent design." The designer is unspecified. Some claim, rhetorically in most cases, that it could be a natural being such as an extraterrestrial alien. Most acknowledge their belief that the designer is God.

Hardly any biologists consider "intelligent design" to be scientific, but not because they are metaphysically biased against belief in God. In every active science there are many unsolved problems and open questions. But to twist them into "evidence" for "intelligent design" is to confuse and abuse science students. To assert that no natural solutions could ever exist for these questions is presumptuous and closed-minded.

Solutions to scientific problems often can't even be imagined, let alone analyzed and tested, for many years. Some phenomena currently without any natural explanations might never be explained scientifically. Some could indeed be the work of a designer. Naturally explained ("nondesigned"?) phenomena might also involve divine providence of some sort. Science can do great things, but it cannot tell us when all possible natural explanations have been exhausted, and it cannot identify particular instances of design when the unspecified designer could be God.

It's an ironic tragedy that well-meaning "intelligent design" advocates identified the right problem (atheistic implications being drawn, unsolved problems being downplayed) but then proposed a profoundly bad solution ("reinvent" the scientific method, claim unsolved problems as evidence for design). Scientific questions, solved or unsolved, do not constitute evidence for or against such a designer.

Simple admission of what is unknown is the only honest scientific stance, but such humility and patience are apparently not very popular. Basic scientists trying to understand how nature works are unusually curious, but they must avoid jumping to conclusions and must be willing to live (sometimes their whole lives!) without certain answers. No one scientist embodies that ideal perfectly, but it is nonetheless our code of ethics when we are doing science.

Scientists are also complete human beings, and many of us have strong religious faith. Most of us insist that our faith be consistent with our science, but we do not expect our science to be the prime foundation for our faith. That error was made at the beginning of the Enlightenment and led, ironically, to the rise of modern atheism.