The New Dark Ages
Nov 8, 08:36 PM—Micah Wylde
Truly a sad day for America. The Kansas state school board has approved 6-4 new science standards for public schools. The most important change was to remove the requirement for explanations to be “natural”, which eliminated such theories as intelligent design, which was the goal of the legislation: to allow the teaching of ID in the classroom. Of course, it was wrapped up in nice language, with the promise of expanding the viewpoints to which Kansas children are exposed.
Which might actually have merit, except that there are no scientific (well, at least, using the rest of the world’s definition of science) theories that stand as alternate view points. ID, which is merely re-branded creationism, is not held as a valid scientific theory by the rest of the world, for several reasons: it is not falsifiable, and it is not a natural explanation.
Not falsifiable means that it can’t, like the existence of God or space aliens, be disproved; no matter how much evidence to the contrary an ID advocate could argue that all this evidence was merely planted by the guiding power to hide his existence, as some sort of test of faith. There is of course no way to debate that, no more than one could debate the statement: “The earth was formed when a giant watermelon was hit with a comet and the seeds streamed out and formed planets.” Which most people would laugh at, if it were actually argued (a similar parody can be found in the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
The main argument of ID proponents is to bring up supposed failures of evolution (though in most cases this is merely because they don’t understand evolution), like gaps in the fossil record, and then argue that because of these failures of evolution ID must be true. Which is a logical fallacy. Another fun argument is that of irreducible complexity; IE that some complex part of our bodies could not have developed without other parts concurrently. The idea is that nothing as complex as us could have developed naturally, that they most have been designed. This huge logical gap in this (as there is no science, merely logic games) is that the proposed creator (who ID proponents rarely name, in an attempt to make it seem to be not creationism) would need to be even more complex than us, in order to have created all this, and yet if here were that complex he could not have developed, he must have been created. And so on forever. Of course, if this is taken as a religious argument, then this is not a problem; as the creator is a supernatural force, IE God, they can claim anything they want about him.
It’s sad that we as a country have come to this stage. Though the only people who will suffer are high-school students in Kansas, it reflects very poorly on our whole nation. A nation who feels itself intellectually righteous enough to go into other countries and change them finds itself decrepit there.
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