Intelligent Design and the Illusion of Balance

Should John Jay High School teach creationism along with evolution? The call for diversity seems innocuous enough. Should we liberals be warmed by the prospect of a competing conception or a differing opinion? Responding to the question, as to whether intelligent design (ID) – creationism’s slippery new suit, which allows it to escape the United States’ famed separation clause – should be taught in public schools, president George Bush responded: “You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” The proposal, at first, seems moderate: teach one theory of the world (evolution) along with its counter-theory (creationism).

However, the goal of education is truth, not diversity. Contrasting opinions might lead to answers, but they are not answers themselves. Everything, under the liberal assumption of uncertainly, is questionable in at least some degree. Thus, schools and educators must accept truth as a standard of veracity. Meaning, though theoretically questionable, facts exist when enough evidence has been accumulated.

Evolution is a fact. So much so has it been proven correct, that the dearth of any credible scientific opposition is almost laughable. Creationism deserves to be taught in biology class as much as alchemy deserves to be taught in chemistry, phlogistons in physics, and the stork theory in a sex education course. All these are alternatives; likewise, they are all wrong.

When questioned, the assumptions behind intelligent design fall. First, from a scientific perspective, the theory offers little evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer. Advocates of the dogma bypass the scientific process; rather than publishing journals and peer-reviewed papers, they shrewdly pander to the masses and the politicians they have helped into office. Indeed, all they have to show is negative: the non-existence of certain fossil records in the evolutionary process. However, the existence of a complete, cinematic fossil record is a presumptuous demand on biologists, given that only an infinitesimally small amount of deaths result in fossil formations. Importantly, scientists can claim that no anachronistic fossil has ever been discovered: no dog remains have been detected from the pre-Cambian Era.

Those who preach the gospel of intelligent design make the claim that certain life forms are too complicated for the process of evolution. Not only have scientist proposed plausible intermittents for many of the known complex structures that exist, but, more to the point, is that if (say) the human eye is too complicated to have evolved, and the intelligent designer is more complicated than the eye, how is the designer’s existence accounted for?

The designer’s existence, the creationists insist, however, need not be accounted for. It is a matter of faith.

And herein lies the dangerous fallacy. If a theory is held aloof from the standards of scientific investigation, and makes claims with no basis, assertions without evidence, and implores “faith” when we ought to have skepticism, then it has no place in a science classroom. If John Jay HIgh School teachers were to spend the time – even if, as is likely the case, no more than fifteen minutes – exhausting arguments of the intelligent design theory, then they would be handing the creationists the greatest victory then can realistically hope for. The school would be imparting on its students the pernicious belief that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific perspective to have, and that, more broadly, certain views can be put up as viable alternatives to established theories, despite the fact that they make no valid points in the debate at all. Schools would impress on their students the false-reality that evidence is decoration for dogma. And this would be the end of American education.