Last week President Bush gave an interview to a group of Texas newspaper reporters at the White House.
Mr. Bush said in the interview, according to a transcript, “I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.” Asked again by a reporter whether he believed that both sides in the debate between evolution and intelligent design should be taught in the schools, Mr. Bush replied that he did, “so people can understand what the debate is about.” (source)
On the other hand, his science adviser, John H. Marburger, said in a telephone interview that “evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology” and “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.” Why does this matter? Because Marburger has it right, and “teaching the debate” has no place in science classrooms.
There isn't a debate among scientists. Intelligent design is not a scientific hypothesis. It postulates the existence of a designer that lies outside the realm of nature and therefore beyond the realm of experiment and observation. Whether it's called “specified complexity” or “irreducible complexity”, the evidence for intelligent design is simply that its proponents cannot imagine how certain features could have evolved through natural selection. It is, in other words, a failure of their imagination of which they provide us evidence.
Not to say that we have explanations right now for all of life's complexities and how it evolved. We don't. And that's what science is all about -- a search for answers to questions that we don't know the answer to, answers that we seek in terms of natural, observable causes. Proponents of intelligent design would have us stop scientific investigations at precisely the point that they normally begin, the point where we no longer have the answers.
There isn't a debate here to teach.
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