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

Theory of perceptual relativity

Soo-Ryum Yang
Science

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July. Nashville fireworks are OK; the Macy's one in New York is just little better. However, the Nashville Symphony's fireworks-synchronized performance was surprisingly impressive.

Now, back to the topic of this post. My good friend, couple of weeks ago, sent me a link to a very interesting non-fiction article from the New Yorker. The article essentially tried to explain how the classical feedforward pathway of perception misrepresents a more complicated mechanism that relies heavily on feedback and intra-brain processing.

Take for example, the visual system, the most complex sensory system and also, my research specialty. The traditional model of the visual pathway explains how electrical signals travel from the ganglion nerves in the retina to the optic nerves (the highways of neural signals) to the thalamus (a central relay station) to the primary visual cortex (processing area for basic visual features such as orientation and spatial frequency) to the extrastriate cortex (processing area for more complicated visual features such as color, motion, etc). Although this feedforward model suggests a one-way signal direction, it is now known that about 80% of the circuitry between the primary and extrastriate cortex is composed of feedback connections. In other words, when we see, we always (and only) perceive an illusion of a physical reality that has been modified and constructed by the brain. Thus, two different versions of reality arise.

(1) physical reality: the absolute, pure representation of an actual reality; independent of relative perception. (i.e. the green paper emits a certain, absolute unit of wavelength)
(2) perceptual reality: the illusion of a physical reality due to perception; may differ from person A to person B. (i.e. it cannot be ruled out that the brain of person A and the brain of person B will "see" two different colors when viewing the same green paper because brain A is intrinsically different from brain B)

So, is it truly possible to experience or witness physical reality? If physical reality cannot be experienced or "perceived", how do we prove that it exists? How do we define absolutes if the realities of those "absolutes" differ from person to person due to brain differences?

This post-modern theory of perceptual relativity suggests that optical illusion is not only confined to those fun, interesting visual tricks. Rather, optical illusion and illusion of all sensation form the fundamental basis of our perception, and thus our own relative realities.