Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Continuation #2

To be "fair and balanced" I do think that Peter Wood has a good point on evolution:

Essentially, he notes that biological diversity and mutation may well be "random", but this belief is as much an article of faith as is the belief that they were planned by an intelligent being.

Diversity can be proven, and scarcity can be proven. Extinction can, of course, be proven. Even "natural selection" can be fairly easily proven. But, the underlying mechanism of all of this cannot be deduced, and that suggests that there is no unified theory of Evolution. We can say it's "randomness" or "luck", but that, in itself, is an article of faith, and not science.

So, it should, reasonably, not be taught as such. That would be where a science class could easily leave the final interpretation open to the individual student. So, creationists are quite right that the underlying mechanism of evolution is purely speculative and should not be taught in a science class. But, this doesn't explain why "underlying intelligence" is worthy of a science class either.

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