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Apr. 27, 2005 We often hear about ID (Intelligent Design) these days. While most religions have their own version of creation, we now have some wealthy and well connected nuts here in America that want to teach ID as science. To most ordinary folk, ID sounds much more reasonable than YEC (Young Earth Creation - the claim that the world is only about 10,000 years old and the evolution is a farce), and this makes it popular tool with the evangelize-no-matter-the-consequences crowd. “ID theory” is not a science, of course, since it doesn't meet the basic criteria of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is something specific and quite a bit elevated from “theories” such as my opinion about what's up with Micheal Jackson. Scientific theories need evidence, they need to make predictions which can be tested, and they generally need to be falsifiable (something which, if shown or discovered, will invalidate the theory). Evolution predicted that life has common ancestry, and DNA confirmed this. Evolution is also rather easily falsified – if we ever find an elephant bone in the same chunk of rock as a t-rex, than evolution goes down the toilet. Fossils are dug up all the time and the evidence continues to accumulate in favor of evolution, as expected. Back to ID – no scientific theory yet discovered can explain what happened “before” the Big Bang. Keeping that in mind, one definition of “universe” is, “all that is or ever was or ever will be”. Now, it seems, there may be something bigger, call it a “meta-verse”. It's that region “outside” or “before” or “bigger” than our universe. Maybe there are many universes within this region and maybe they poof into existence all the time. Of course, poofing into existence via “something from nothing” violates the laws of physics, but outside of our universe, those laws may not apply. Naturally, no one really knows anything about this region, if it exists, because by definition, we cannot examine it. There are some interesting hypothesis on the table right now that might eventually shed some light on this, but nothing as solid as a theory yet (higher dimensional spaces, “branes”, parallel universes and so forth). There are also some interesting experiments planned in the near future, such as attempting to watch particles in accelerators “leave” the universe. But, leave it to the post-yec ID crowd, they not only accept such a region, but they believe that it houses a conscious, sentient, super-intelligent being. Indeed, so intelligent, that it created our universe! Now, this is supposed to be a scientific theory. Amazing the leap from knowing essentially nothing about this region, to speculating that it contains a life-form of extreme intelligence and ability. Of course, the notion of God must be accepted going in by ID proponents; why else would this “being” have god-like attributes? This invalidates the “theory” - for this to be science, we would first need proof of God. We can't say God exists because the universe is here, and the universe is here because God created it – that's circular logic. These ideas may be fine as non-science philosophies or religious dogma, but science they aren't. Besides, to use a popular argument from that crowd, if the universe is so complex that it implies a creator, that creator must then be even more complex – and would therefore also need a creator and so on, which would seem to indicate an infinite number of gods. Some would at this point shout, “we can't ask the question, 'who created the creator!'” What? Why? Maybe not in religion, but science has no such taboo. This leads me back to the point of this piece – I have my own “theory”. I know essentially as much about this region as anyone else, so, my claim is that beaver-like creatures live in this region. They have semi-sophisticated “brains”, but they are not sentient – they create universes as a by-product of their activity, the way that beavers create dams. Beavers don't really know about the changes that they make and the impact that their changes have, after all, they simply do what they do by instinct. BD, or, Beaver Design, is as valid a “theory” as ID, and much more interesting, in my humble opinion. We might also call it NID – Non-Intelligent Design. We should begin to teach it in science class right away, along with the “theory” that pre-universe-sheep licked the universe into existence from a great pile of salt (or something similar – something I remember reading in a mythology book back in Jr. High). Of course since “BD/NID theory” won't appease the fundamentalists, it will probably never fly... ID is a lovely idea and something profound to imagine, but lets keep it separate from science – there is too much at stake in the post-Cold War era: the US “brain-drain” and its relation to the new 'global economy'. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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