How Intelligent Is Intelligent Design? by Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan, the author of Economics for Real People, is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com. While I don't agree with quite a bit of this article, I do find he hits the nail on the head with the following points:

Anyone who follows the US news in even the most casual fashion is aware that great amounts of energy are being expended on the battle over whether Intelligent Design (ID) should be included in school curriculums as a serious competitor, for the task of explaining the diversity and complexity of life on Earth, to the dominant theory, which is typically called Neo-Darwinism...

If ID is included in a biology course, the enrollees should certainly be informed that Neo-Darwinism is currently the orthodox view... But it is precisely such firmly entrenched orthodoxies that most cry out for challenges. Even if the dominant theory succeeds in repelling all rivals, they still can serve to rescue the mainstream from the danger of self-satisfied complacency. Furthermore, many of yesterday’s orthodoxies are now regarded as quaint curiosities, because some lonely dissenters refused to accept the prevailing wisdom. To me, teaching students that all scientific ideas should be open to criticism and that broad acceptance of a theory is no guarantee of its truth seems even more valuable than conveying the details of any particular theory...

Opponents of teaching ID in schools... still protest that ID is not a genuinely scientific alternative to Neo-Darwinism. They often castigate it as "agenda-driven science," an irredeemably biased venture unworthy of serious consideration. I think this complaint rests on unsustainable picture of "real science" as an entirely objective enterprise, pristinely untouched by scientists’ personal beliefs about the nature of reality. An honest appraisal of how major scientific advances were arrived at in the past will reveal the mythical character of that image... Most great scientists and most great scientific advances have been inspired by a passionately held vision of the fundamental character of the world we inhabit. That is true of the defenders of Neo-Darwinism no less than it is of the proponents of Intelligent Design, despite the gulf separating their respective visions: the Neo-Darwinists take such umbrage at their critics because of their pre-scientific commitment to a mechanistic worldview...

Then why wouldn’t it be more important that high school students learn that scientific theories are always tentative, that they must face competing theories, and that scientists are fallible, than that they learn the details of Neo-Darwinian evolution? The only reason I can see is an ideological one: students are being taught that scientists are quasi-magical people who bring enlightenment to the masses, the job of whom it is just to shut up and listen.

How Intelligent Is Intelligent Design? by Gene Callahan