Australian Schools To Teach Intelligent Design

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that schools within the Australian state of Queensland are going to be required to teach Intelligent Design as part of their Ancient History studies. While it is gratifying to note that it isn't being taught in science classes (since it most certainly isn't a science), one wonders what role a modern controversy can possibly serve within a subject dedicated to a period of history which occurred hundreds of years before Darwin proposed his groundbreaking theory?"

Comments

"Faith Science Basis?"

[eldavojohn]

"We talk to students from a faith science basis, but we're not biased in the delivery of curriculum," Mrs Doneley said. "We say, 'This is where we're coming from' but allow students to make up their own minds."

I really wish they had gone into detail on what exactly a 'faith science basis' is. I'm not saying they're completely walled off from each other but attempting to give your children solid foundational logic should not be approached from an angle that contains any sort of faith.

If they are indeed teaching intelligent design in much the same way as Niels Bohr's atomic model or -- perhaps more apt -- motivation for slavery then I have little problem with this. But if they spend anymore than a few hours discussing how it was flawed then I would consider this a waste of time instead of 'critical thinking.' It's great to see all the sides of a historical issue but that's all intelligent design is to me and, much more importantly, the peer reviewed journals and scientific community at large.

If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem. If you want to teach it to my kids as an outstanding theory or hypothesis, I'm going to sit down and have a lengthy discussion with them. If you do you teach it in the United States, I'm going to be there arguing that you spend just as much time on Native American origin stories or even better the original Hindu creation story followed by Swami Vivekananda's logic of compatibility with Darwinism and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness's decision to largely reject it.

Intelligent Design is an attempt to absolve the scriptures of ever being wrong in their creation story and salvage what is possible when presented with fossil evidence and short-term evolution evidence in smaller celled organisms. Other religions have similar damage control, why do the Christians only get theirs mentioned in state schools?

They are arguing that this helps critical thinking and allows the child to make their own conclusions ... but curiously this "critical thinking" that presents an opposing view is curiously the view that the localized religion adheres to. If you want to teach critical thinking, expose the child to more views than what the adults are already largely marketing to them in the home and at religious services.

This article bounces between acceptable and a BS facade to market Intelligent Design. Australia's a sovereign nation but I will speak up if this comes anywhere near my public schools.

Re:"Faith Science Basis?"

[MightyMartian]

If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem.

It's not even a disproved theory. At its core, ID is simply "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution". Other than a rather vague claim that some structures are too complex to have evolved naturally, ID makes virtually no positive claims at all, and I don't even that vague claim can possibly be considered positive.

It's a smoke show, just Creationism stripped of any direct references to God, designed to fool idiotic Fundy-populated school boards, but in its only test in a Federal court, it got laughed out the door. One of its most important formulators, Michael Behe, made a fool of himself, and, unforgivable for a molecular biologist, showed an extraordinary ignorance of the literature on the evolution of complex systems like bacterial flagella and the vertebrate immune system. It's other major formulator is William Dembski, who, being considerably smarter than Behe, keeps away from ever having to defend his own notions of Irreducible Complexity and the outright nonsensical Information Filter (which, if it actually worked, would represent a quantum leap in the statistical study of information and would make Dembski one of the most lauded mathematicians in history, but is, in fact, just a load of pseudo-statistical mumbo jumbo).

Who exactly ever believed in Intelligent Design? So far as I can tell, the two chief camps that promote it our Creationists and a small group of Theistic Evolutionists (mainly of Behe's mindset). The latter may even be sincere in so far as they believe that God's hand is in the mix somehow, but the former are only using ID cynically as a way around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and don't actually buy into any of it. In fact, as witnessed by the rubes in Dover, they don't even really care about ID, they just want to get Creationism in the classroom. They aren't even Theistic Evolutionists, they're out and out Creationists.

The whole thing is a scam, and one that has lost considerable force since Dover. The Discovery Institute, which is pretty much the leader in the ID charge, had already started moving to the bait-and-switch Teach the Controversy scam even before ID collapsed in court. The real problem here is that there are a lot of really stupid Creationists who themselves don't even know what ID is, and just assume that the scam artists who created it actually produced a scientific theory of Creationism.

Re:"Faith Science Basis?"

[Monkeedude1212]

They are arguing that this helps critical thinking and allows the child to make their own conclusions ... but curiously this "critical thinking" that presents an opposing view is curiously the view that the localized religion adheres to. If you want to teach critical thinking, expose the child to more views than what the adults are already largely marketing to them in the home and at religious services.

Yes. Oh God Yes (pun intended).

I went to a Catholic School growing, though here in Canada that doesn't mean a whole lot. Since there is such an unbelievable mix of culture, you get kids who are Half-Christian Half-Buddhist, or Catholic Jews, or just about any combo you can think of. Even people who weren't exactly Catholic could get in, there were kids who didn't have catholic parents, but said they weren't sure what they believed in, and were able to go.

In my High school year, one of the big projects was to research a religion you had little to no knowledge about, in small groups, and then present it to the class.

I think it was one of the most educational lessons I've ever recieved from High school. Not only do you see the differences between Eastern and Western Religions, but also why certain ones spark conflict, and the histories of how they've interacted.

I think most of all, it was interesting to hear a Jewish peer's view on Catholicism and Christianity as a whole, as well as a Buddhist and Hindu. Likewise, they found our explanations of their religions also valuable. I mean its easy to look at a hasidic jew and criticize their way of life, only to have someone point out how your holidays have evolved into some corporate spend-a-thon, since Santa Claus has nothing to do with Christ.

I dunno, it was kind of like taking a step back and seeing the big picture for once, and I wish more schools did this (and I hope mine still does)

Re:"Faith Science Basis?"

[digitig]

That's not actually a hole in the use of ID. It's a reason why most Christians -- even many fundamentalist Christians -- don't need ID. But there are some Christian fundamentalists whose reading of Genesis leads them to conclude that God created all the species as they are now on whichever of the seen days it was. They believe in development within a species, so they accept that horse breeding programs can lead to faster horses, for example, but not that new species can emerge. For those fundamentalists the idea that the creator used evolution is acceptable for development within a species but not for the emergence of new species because (they believe) that doesn't happen.

Re:"Faith Science Basis?"

[Blenster]

I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion.

It is often considered a threat to Christianity because without a literal Adam and Eve there was no "fall" and therefor we didn't inherit a "sinful nature" from them making the need for God to sacrifice himself, as a child of himself, to himself, to save us from himself, unnecessary. You are correct, though, that it is often literalists who take the most offense to the notion of evolution. I find that most Christians (people in general, really) are startlingly ignorant of the content of the bible and the actual mechanisms and theory of evolution.

Re:"Faith Science Basis?"

[Urban Garlic]

> I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion. How does us evolving from apes say anything about the existence of God? What does it even have to do with it?

You'd do well to research the cultural origins of creationism, as well as fundamentalism, as it's practiced in the United States. For the former, I recommend the introductory chaper of Laurie R. Godfrey's "Scientists Confront Creationism".

The short version is, it's at least partially a reaction against the *social* Darwinism of American uber-Capitalists in the late 19th century, people who ran factory towns and controlled almost every aspect of their workers' social lives, instructing them that the bosses were rich because they out-competed the workers in the capitalist system, and that the workers were valuable only insofar as they were cogs in the great capitalist machine, and that Science proved that this was so, and there was nothing the workers could do about it. The only institution the bosses did not control was the church, and in church, the workers learned that each and every single one of them was individually loved by God himself, and that their lives had intrinsic value insofar as they obeyed the scriptures. Unsurprisingly, the worker culture tended to value the church more highly than science.

There was a similar renaissance of new-age and occult thinking in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet pretensions to "scientific socialism", and scientifically-rationalized oppression, left people distrustful of anything that came with a "science" label, especially things that were both un-intuitive and morally offensive.

It's vital in exploring these issues to remember that scientific rhetoric has often been a tool of oppression, and that when people react against it, they don't always separate the actual science from the oppressive rhetoric.

Teach it?

[Kenoli]

What, exactly, is there to teach about intelligent deign?

"controversy"

[bcrowell]

The use of the word "controversy" here is taken directly from the creationist playbook. There is "controversy" about whether a big earthquake could cause California to fall off into the Pacific Ocean, but it's only a controversy between two guys sitting in a bar, it's not a controversy among geologists. When creationists say "teach the controversy," they're really asking teachers to present something that's not scientifically controversial as if it were.

I.D. is not a theory, it is dogma

[Anonymous Coward]

First, intelligent design is NOT a scientific theory.

On the other hand, Niels Bohr's aromic model IS a scientic theory.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_model

Here is why this is the case,
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory#Essential_criteria

Therefore it is incorrect to teach I.D. as a "disproved theory". It never was one in the first place. Where it can be mentioned is as a difference between theory and dogma, where I.D. is clearly an example of the latter,
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma

PS: Freaking slashdot reads my mind everything. CATPCHA: instruct

Re:history is a good place for it IMNSHO

[MightyMartian]

Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason.

Yes, it's a scientific theory, which is something considerably different than the colloquial definition. Why you guys keep trotting out this faulty and fallacious argument is quite beyond me. In formal definition, what you've committed is the etymological fallacy. Because a word or phrase may have multiple meanings doesn't mean that every application of the word invokes the same meaning. In science, a theory is a considerably more rigorously formulated claim or set of claims than just "wild ass guess", which is where you appear to be going. But it's a standard Creationist and ID stunt to try to diminish the rigorous nature of scientific theories to give a sort of rhetorical bump to claims that aren't even remotely scientific (and ID/Creationism is not science by any useful definition of the word).

And yes, I know about most of the evidence,

I'm doubting that very highly.

and yes I buy that (more than anything else right now). I also understand that we might possibly be all wrong at any moment. As for the cosmology comment, I knew that was a veering off track a bit... but creationism and ID is a bit more broad reaching than evolution as they both tend to go over the concept on how "everything began" while evolution is more "the origin of species" - so I threw that in there.

And now you're inventing definitions for ID and Creationism to bolster your argument. Creationism may certainly be more expansive, but ID, as formulated by Behe and Dembski, is not about how planets form, but as a direct challenge to features of biological evolution.

I have a pretty good suspicion that you are not at all familiar with biological evolution and Intelligent Design. You certainly know nothing about science judging by the statement Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason.