I heard these on a podcast yesterday and thought they were "spot on".
Barbara Forest, Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University wrote:Creationists often reject evolution by saying that evolution is, quote, “only a theory.” And that betrays either a deliberate or an unintentional misunderstanding of what a scientific theory is. Gravity is a theory —gravitational theory. Cell theory —all living things are constructed of cells. Electromagnetic theory, right? Germ theory? Germs make people sick. I mean, when you call evolution a theory, when you use the term “evolutionary theory,” that’s a very, very strong thing to say.
A theory in science is an explanation. It’s a large system which has withstood some very, very rigorous testing, literally attempts to debunk it, and has survived all of those attempts. So when creationists try to dismiss evolution as “only a theory,” they are misusing the word theory. They are using it in the ordinary sense, the non-scientific sense, of a hunch or a guess, and that’s not what it means at all.
If you have a scientific theory, you have already done years, decades, of scientific work, hard scientific research that you have offered to the scientific community for their evaluation. But never a single time has any intelligent-design creationist ever done that. Yet they’ve created a public relations concoction that they present to the public and to the media that they have some cutting-edge science that really needs to be taught to children—that there is another side to this issue and it’s only fair to tell it to the kids.
Well, there aren’t two scientific sides to this issue, because there aren’t two scientific theories. There’s only one. And if you believe that children should be told the truth, you have to tell them that the only scientific theory which explains the shape of life on Earth is evolutionary theory. And if you tell them anything other than that, you’re not telling them the truth, and that’s hardly fair.
Robert T. Pennock, Evolutionary biologist and Professor of Philosophy of Science, Michigan State University wrote:Evolution is portrayed by creationists as being equivalent to atheism. But that’s not part of the definition of evolution. Evolution is just what we have discovered empirically using the normal scientific approach. One can set aside the question theologically about what that means; that’s to depart from science itself. That’s to bring in religion, to bring in philosophy—I’m certainly not opposed to any of that as a philosopher of science. But it’s important for us to keep those things distinct conceptually. Science itself, when done properly, isn’t dogmatic, isn’t religious. It’s just a way of investigating the natural world, in the best way that we natural beings are able to do it.
Eugenie Scott, Executive Director, National Center for Science Education wrote: Basically, what intelligent design is, is a claim that evolution can’t explain things, therefore they win by default. That’s not a scientific view. Science makes its decisions by testing its claims, not just by accepting them because they sound good. So, because we have to test our claims, we can only use natural claims, because natural claims are the only ones we can test. Natural claims are the only ones that we can hold constant variables for. They are the only claims that we can control variables for. You can’t control for the effects of God.
If you teach intelligent design as a science, you are confusing students about the nature of science, about science as a way of knowing, the scientific method. You’re also confusing students and miseducating students about the position of evolution within science.
Evolution is no more controversial in modern-day science than heliocentrism—that the planets go around the sun. There are individuals out there advocating geocentrism—that the sun goes around the Earth. But we don’t give them equal time in the high school science class just because it’s fair.
Ken Miller, Professor of Biology, Brown University, author of the standard high school textbook, Biology. wrote:I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to take scientists in the past who were people of faith—and Isaac Newton is a good example—and say that Newton worked on the basis of a hypothesis of design. Well, it’s true that he certainly believed in a creator, and he believed that that creator was the architect of the universe he investigated. But here’s the key difference. Newton never proposed God as a cause in any of his theories. In other words, he didn’t seek to explain the way in which the prism broke light into many different colors by saying, “Well, it happens that way because it is God’s will, and I will stop investigating.” He sought a physical explanation, and his explanation was that light, white light, is composed of many colors, and what the prism does is to bend each color by a different amount. That’s not a divine explanation. That doesn’t use intelligent design. That’s an explanation based on the principles of physics.
The point here is that what Newton and other scientists did was to assume that the universe made sense because it had a designer, and then to use what we would call ordinary material scientific methods to investigate that universe. That’s just what science does today. What intelligent design pretends to do is to be in the tradition of Newton. What intelligent design actually is, to be perfectly honest, is they’re in the tradition of the Middle Ages, where they stop investigation by saying, “We cannot answer this mystery; it is the work of God, the designer.” This is a science-stopper.
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