I've been thinking more about the evolution versus intelligent design debate. I think the folks on the side of intelligent design have been fighting for the wrong thing. They need to focus on the real problem: science versus philosophy.
Philosophy has lapsed into an unpopular subject in modern America. Philosophy is the rational (or sometimes the irrational) pursuit of truth. Philosophers want to answer questions lots of questions that are really only answerable as thought exercises. What is true? How does one test that something is true? What are good ways to search for truth? How should truth be structured? The biggest question tends to be, what is? Is life just an imagination of our minds? Is what is even knowable? Is existance guided by absolute standards? These are all philosophical questions. Perhaps science can help give us data that will help us answer them, but their answers are often found independent of the physical world.
Science is the study to find how things work. Science must assume a certain philosophical basis. First, it must assume that what we observe is real and not imagined (or why bother measuring and observing?). Second, it must assume that what we are observing is objective and repeatable. Finally, science asserts that all the knowledge it gathers is testable. If I assert that something is true, then I must be able to observe something that can tell me whether or not it is true. The really interesting (and not well-known) fact about science is that nothing can ever be considered really true—just not falsified.
For example, Newton's assertions about physics explained how planets and stars can orbit each other. His ideas were considered to be the truth until observations began to deviate from his suggestion. Einstein came along and added a new hypothesis to the system that appears to be more useful in explaining the motion of large bodies because it accounts for the fact that planets orbiting the sun appear to get heavier as they move faster. Einsteins theory of relativity tells us this. Relativity, however, asserts that light travels near or below a maximum velocity, but recent experiments have suggested that light can move faster than that under certain conditions. Another theorist will have to make sense of these problems.
The difficulty with theories like biology's evolution and geology's uniformitarianism is that they assert non-testable hypotheses. For example, uniformitarianism is the belief that the geological processes we see today explain everything we see in nature. Yet, how can we test this? Well, without being able to go back in time, we can't. Evolution states that living things evolve from one species to another through a process of mutation and natural selection. This is also not a testable hypothesis. Even if we find two fossils of what look like a human, only a little different, that doesn't mean they mutated from one form to the next or that it's not just some isolated genetic mutation. There is no way to falsify evolution.
Intelligent design, uniformitarianism, and evolution are all forms of philosophical belief. They are not testable and are, therefore, not science. Presenting these things in science classes is appropriate because they present frameworks for classifying observations. However, these are not science in and of themselves.
As such, I will restate my belief that students should be learning philosophy. How does one determine truth? Is truth rational? What are the rules of logic? Then, from there students are equipped to determine their own belief system as the basis for their science.
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