Blinded by science! Part 1

The Dover School Board's decision to teach intelligent design in the classroom has been ruled unconstitutional. This isn't particularly surprising; the only way it would have been avoidable was for the judge to be either fundamentally prejudiced against science or somehow incapable of understanding what makes 'science'.

Let's look at it a bit.

First, so we have some context, what is science? Most often you hear the word used to describe the body of information collected by scientists -- "a water molecule is made up of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom", "the planet Earth orbits the Sun", "baleen is made of the same substance as hair and fingernails", that sort of thing. It's not that this use is incorrect, but it's not the only definition of the word, and this can lead to confusion.

When talking about evolution and intelligent design, for example, scientists often use it to refer to the actual process of collecting that information: formulating ideas, and collecting evidence to either support or disprove them. If testing your idea shoots it down, you've still learned something about how the world works -- namely, that your idea doesn't describe it very well. If the test doesn't shoot your idea down, maybe it does describe how the world works -- but it's still possible some future test will shoot it down, or some other idea does an even better job describing it, so you acknowledge that possibility.

The point is, if your idea, by its very nature, can't be tested (and if that test can't be repeated to get the same results), it's not a scientific idea. This doesn't mean it can't be true; like Carl Sagan said, you can't prove you love someone, but that doesn't change the fact you love them. It's just outside of science.

If your idea describes the world very well, and tests support it rather than disproving it, it might eventually be considered a scientific theory. This is not the same thing as a theory in the casual, everyday sense of the word; it's not a guess, it's a description based on repeated trials and considerable observation of the natural world, and it can reliably predict what will happen in the situation it describes. It's possible that it might be wrong, but it probably isn't; even when a theory is replaced, the new theory is usually an extension of the old one rather than a radical change. Newton's classical mechanics were replaced by Einstein's relativistic mechanics, for example, but Einstein basically fit classical mechanics into relativity without a whole lot of trouble. What relativity didn't do was say "hey, mass and weight are completely unrelated" or anything so at odds with the previous theory; that kind of drastic change doesn't often happen.

Okay, we'll get to intelligent design later. I wrote too much for one post.