All entries for Wednesday 02 December 2009

New thoughts on intelligent design in schools

I’ve written plenty on this in the past. It’s fairly obvious what my opinion is. And hundreds of others have debated it to death too. So I kind of wanted to throw out some stuff that I haven’t seen talked about before. These are half-formed and part-informed ideas but maybe they’ll be interesting.

It started with me reading this article, It treads the same old ground and my initial uncharitable response was that it’s just another old man, who when faced with his own mortality, is desperate to cling on the to hope that there’s something after. Mean and somewhat ridiculous but no more so than the bollocks he’s spouting.

So my initial counter-point was the same as ever: intelligent design isn’t a scientific theory (there’s no falsifiability to it for one), and even if you cast it in such a light that it could charitably be deemed to be one, it’s still a really bad one. It’s basically psuedo-science at best, and if we’re going to teach that in science classes then we may as well throw in homeopathy, psychics and UFOs too. They could all claim to be based upon scientific theory and evidence, but just like intelligent design, the so called ‘evidence’ has not been throughly vetted or peer reviewed, so it doesn’t get taught in science classes.

I fall back to my default position: intelligent design has it’s place in RE, let’s leave science to focus on real, respected theories. I’ve always adopted that position. It’s the obvious one for those of us arguing against the invariably religious intelligent design advocates: “you get your say here, let us have ours here, and lets all get along”.

What I never considered was the inverse.

Lets say we scientific folk bow to the pressure of the intelligent design lobby. Fine, you win. We’ll start teaching it as a theory in science lessons. If you want rid of this demarcation between science and belief then okay, we’ll start presenting it next to evolution as an option. To be fair it’ll probably be five lessons studying the development of evolutionary theory over the centuries, then five minutes at the end going “magic man done it” (thanks to Robin Ince for that one) as that’s the entire ID theory, but fine, we’ll mention it.

There are, however, consequences.

I want my science in your RE lessons. It sounds preposterous, but when you think about it carefully you do start to wonder why our schools teach Religious Education and not the broader subject, Philosophy, of which religion would simply make up a (not insignificant) component. Why was I taught about Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism at length, but never once encountered the phrase ‘secular humanism’ until I started reading the internet? The reason given, of course, is that religion is a big part of the lives of many people, and it’s essential to teach children about it as it’s part of making sure they can live and operate in modern society. Essential knowledge, just like learning how to use Google and Microsoft Word or learning how to read. It’s a notion that seems fair at first glance, those of us that aren’t religious are in the minority after all and kids need to know how to deal with what the majority think, even if they grow up to disagree with it. Problem is, last time we checked only 19% of Britons regularly went to a religious service and 33% don’t believe in a higher power at all. A third! Don’t believe at all! I’m not even in that group and I’m writing this!

Back when we weren’t a primarily secular nation the RE thing made sense, but now I no longer see why it should get special treatment. Sure, lets teach our kids about Jesus and Allah, but lets also teach them about Descartes and Popper. The religious apologists continually throw out that claim that ‘science is just as much of a belief system as Christianity’ and while you can explain how they’re technically wrong, you can also see the point they’re getting at. So next time you hear that one, how about suggesting we start covering the scientific method in RE classes instead? See where it goes. I’d be intrigued.

And y’know what else. In these new philosophy classes, we can teach our kids proper fucking science as well.

One of the criticisms the ID movement use of modern science teaching is that things like evolution aren’t presented as theories, they’re presented as fact. As much as I hate it, they done have a point. Pretty much all science is just a theory. Tim Minchin has a brilliant line about if everything is just a theory, maybe the theory of gravity will stop applying and the apologists will just “float the fuck away”. The irony there being that a lot of Newton’s theories were proven to be untrue in certain circumstances by Einstein. It’s not until you hit relativity in A-level physics that you’re introduced to the idea that what you’ve been learning the past ten years is all in flux and that science is a developing field, and you’re being taught theories, not absolute truths. The ID people think this is terrible, and I somewhat agree.

Funny thing is, I’m fairly sure the fact that science (and for that matter, history) is taught this way is the reason we still have 67% of the country believing in a god. Because if you start encouraging kids at a young age (or even at bloody GCSE age) to think for themselves, to question what’s given to them, to seek out alternative theories… well my friends, you’re going to raise a generation of atheists and agnostics. Because kids aren’t, on the whole, dumb. You tell them to start questioning what they’re taught in science class and you can be sure they’ll be applying that to RE too. More to the point, they might start asking difficult questions of mommy and daddy on the weekly trip to church. Maybe they’ll question the preacher or the cleric. It really is playing with dynamite, and I’m in favour of blowing their minds wide open.

Because science at school does sort of suck. Yeah, we get to set stuff on fire and see chemicals react, and we sure as hell have the scientific method beaten in to us: hypotheses, method, results, conclusions. Every GCSE science kid writes down those headings about a hundred time over the two years. It’s the way you do it, it’s the scientific method. But they never teach you why. They never tell you where it comes from, or the philosophical basis behind it. Which really sucks as it’s bloody annoying at times and a lot of kids grow up thinking we do stuff that way because their teachers were pedants that wanted everything in a set format. Or because that’s what you need to do in the exam. You never get taught about why it’s there and why it’s so important. Perhaps because that’s not really science either. It’s philosophy. Which we won’t teach at GCSE. Because RE is more important.

The message for the proponents of intelligent design is simple: you can’t have it both ways. And personally, at least once you get to GCSE level, I’m in favour of giving the kids the benefit of the doubt. Let them drop ID in next to evolution and let us get rid of this pointless, increasingly irrelevant ‘religious education’ and start teaching kids how to think, not what to think, instead.

Dean Love : 02 Dec 2009 23:37 |  Tags: Politics Religious |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem