Is "Intelligent Design" Scientific?

Eric Strong
Science & Religion

One of the hottest debates in American society today is about whether creationism should be considered scientific. Many conservatives advocate “teaching the controversy”; in other words, they wish to allow “intelligent design” (or any of creationism’s often deceptive aliases) to be taught in science classes, alongside with natural selection and evolution. Are the grievances of creationists real, or is there some fundamental reason why creationism cannot be accurately presented to schoolchildren in their science classes?

A primary test of whether or not a theory can be considered scientific is called “Popperian Falsification”. Basically, this concept means that there must be at least some conceivable experiment that could be performed in order to prove that a certain theory is false. For example, in the case of evolution, it is famously stated that if a “rabbit was found in the Cambrian” (rabbits could not be found in the Cambrian according to evolutionary theory, since they evolved much later) then evolution could not possibly be true. In fact, any fossil found which could not fit in the nested hierarchy (the evolutionary “tree of life”) would potentially invalidate evolution.

It is easy to see why Popperian Falsification is necessary in science, because otherwise theories such as “the universe was created yesterday, and everyone simply had their memories implanted by a deceptive, omnipotent being” or “invisible gremlins live in cars and cause them to wreck” would be considered scientific, since there is no potential way to falsify those theories. Surely these theories aren’t true, or even investigable by science, simply because no one can think of an experiment that would prove them false.

Likewise, there is no possible experiment that could falsify creationism. Assuming that the designer is omnipotent, it could have created life in whichever way it wished. There is no logical conclusion that is entailed simply from the proposition “there is a creator”; there is no reason for life to turn out the way it did, since there is no limit to the kind of life that a creator could have created. Hence, any possible form of life that will ever be found could all have been potentially created by a designer, which means that there is no possible experiment that could be done to falsify creationism. Creationism thus fails the test of Popperian Falsification and cannot be considered scientific.

This does not mean, of course, that intelligent people cannot believe in creationism. Certainly, everyone has the right to believe whatever they want, whether they wish to believe the Earth is flat or that the moon is made of green cheese. The problem is that conservatives often want to claim that creationism is scientific and therefore has a place in the science classroom. However, since creationism fails one of the primary criteria for science, Popperian Falsification, there might be a place for creationism in history class as something that a large number people once believed, but there is no place for it in the science classroom.

For further reference:

Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by Robert Klee