Evolution vs. intelligent design Posted Friday, April 29, 2005 4/29/2005 12:35:00 AM

There has been a lot of evolution vs. intelligent design (ID) discussion on several blogs recently (here and here) so I thought I'd add my 2¢. I Believe everyone has a right to believe as they wish. If someone wants to believe that evolution is guided by a God (or gods) and that the earth was created 40,000 or 6,000 years ago so be it. More power to you. Matter of fact, in a way, I envy your ability to believe whole heartedly in something that's unprovable. But whatever your beliefs ID is not science and should not be taught in science classes but rather in theology classes. And I believe that theology classes have their place. I think there are inherent problems with theology in grammar school (biased teachers and such) but at the college level I feel if is very beneficial. Even as a non-believer and a skeptic I felt my history of religion class at collage was nearly as valuable as were my biology and anthropology classes.

Also, it is apparent that many IDers have very little knowledge of evolutionary science as it exists today. Pharyngula points out that Geoff Brumfiel in his article refer to evolutionary biologists as Darwinists. Pharyngula equates this to calling physicist Newtonists. As a physicist I would hate to be called a Newtonists. Science is not stagnant. Evolutionary Biology has improved a lot from the Darwin's natural selection. Modern evolutionary theory includes the concepts of punctuated equilibria and evolutionary synthesis which add to the evolutionary driving force. They also don't recognize that evolution is not a forward only process. There is not necessarily a magical driving force leading to the creation human beings in particular. If there was evidence that evolution was driving for the creation of a particular species I too would believe in ID. Rather humans are the result of many billions of failed biological experiments. We evolved the way we did not because of a designer but because we did (This relates to the weak anthropic principle). Evolution is as much working to create new forms of bacteria as it is to create a human. The number of bacterial species is immense and grows everyday. To quote from Stephen Jay Gould's Planet of the Bacteria:

On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are — and always have been —the dominant forms of life on Earth

With all this talk of skeptics and skepticism feel I should explain myself. Yes, I am a skeptic... I don't believe in ghosts, witches, or alien abductions. And no, I don't believe in God. However, I'm not going to criticize anyone for believing in God. You can believe in what you like. If you try to prove to me the existence of God through pseudoscience or logical fallacy I'll argue against you (if I can) but I feel everyone has to right to believe in anything they want. I believe that life exists on other planets without proof. My world view can accept the existence of extraterrestrial species. If your world view can include the existence of God they I'm happy for you. I ask simply that you be consistence with the facts. There is evidence that the world is over 40,000 years old and if you have an explanation for that (i.e. God made it look that way) then I'm satisfied and you will hear no arguments from me.