The Scientific Method: High Priests in the Court of Merlin

I got the opportunity to sit and watch a truly fascinating PBS special a couple of weekends ago, on the 2005 case pitting the Dover School board's defense of Intelligent Design against Darwin's Theory of Evolution in Science class, and it got me going on my rant again.

Coincidentally, I first heard about the Scopes Monkey Trial not long before that and was equally fascinated. I can almost understand the reluctance to embrace Darwin in the 20's, but 2005?? In a Post-Genome Project world?

And yet another revelation, I discovered this graphic which illustrates the percentage of people from various countries, who believe or deny evolution.

One of the interesting aspects of all of these data points is the gradual encroachment of religious dogma into the scientific realm. It appears to be a concerted subversive effort focused on establishing creationism as a legitimate scientific issue with the intention of rolling back the cultural changes that have been attributed to the post-Darwin era.

It turns out that there are people that believe that most of society's ills can be traced to the denial of man as a spiritual being, which they claim is a necessary by-product of the Theory of Evolution. Without the belief in a spiritual or supernatural base for our moral underpinnings it is believed that we would run amok, amoral and evil.

To stop the progress down our amoral death spiral, it is proposed that we reassert the "truth" of the dominant religious text, and remove the cancer that is evolution from our minds.

The obvious problem with the insertion of religious dogma into the scientific process in the manner asserted is the effect it has on scientific curiosity and the seeking of scientific knowledge. When a scientist sees the world around him or her, they are driven to understand it, to question its origin, to question the rules and laws governing its behavior, to test these "laws" by assertion and experimentation.

This collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses form the basis of the scientific method. (Source: Wikipedia) When curiosity about observable fact is stymied by a dogmatic belief structure, we stifle the scientific process.

The very lives we live owe a tremendous debt to the scientists and scientific curiosity that preceded us. The iterative process of observation, questioning, testing and experimentation has led to the discovery of new technologies that we take for granted. Plastics, penicillin, seat belts, the internet, germ theory, television, cell phones, fertilizers, and on, and on.

We kill the curiosity in our children, by answering their first "why?" with "because God made it so", and with the death of that curiosity, dies all that makes us human, all that separates us from the animals.

We all have a responsibility to make our best effort to understand the world around us