Ms Tracy Case

Taking a Stand for Science

Tracy Toll

Ivy Tech Community College

Sociology 111-04H

July 16, 2014

In recent years there has been this controversial new movement called "Intelligent Design". ID claims that life is too intricate to have occurred at random, it believes that there had to be some sort of design, something that shaped how things happened. Another controversial type of science /religious movement is known as evolution. The evolutionary theory provides an explanation for how life evolved on earth over a period of time. Over the last 100 or so years creationists (fundamental Christians) have challenged this theory, but recently the Intelligent Design movement has been challenging it more. Intelligent Design has proven not to be a science, but instead a religious movement similar to Creationism and trying to get it into schools under the title of Science is deceitful. This idea of intelligent design is similar to Creationism, but are they the same?

Creationism tries to enforce the literal understanding of the Bible into versions of science and then into schools. According to the Discovery Institute, this movement had considerable support from Christian fundamentalists. The supporters of this movement known as Intelligent Design claim that it is not a religious idea, although their goal is to get "God back into science and into school classrooms." (Numbers, 2013). The focus of the ID movement is on requiring that it be taught as an alternative to evolution in science classes. "The movement has been successful at gaining support from many community leaders, including politicians and school board members." (Pierce, 2012). An upsetting component of the intelligent design movement is the effort to avoid laws that protect separation of church and state by claiming that it's not a religious belief but a scientific theory.

Intelligent design, while similar to Creationism, strips away more of the religious content and focuses more on the "designer" that allegedly created the universe. They believe that this designer intervenes on occasion with the natural process to create new forms of animal species and plant life. "ID claims that the evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer is found in the universe itself, and specifically in instances where natural laws "could not possibly" have brought about certain biological modifications through natural processes alone." (Pierce, 2012). Scientists claim to recognize that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory and its claims can be proven invalid.

Believers of ID use the Law of conservation of information to prove their theory. According to this law information cannot alter natural processes or the operation of physical law. The problem with this is that it only focuses on complex specific information, which means that it only focuses on "closed systems." In closed systems with the operation of physical laws, the information is constant. This all means that when ID claims that new organisms appear at random, new information, in a closed system, it violates the Law of Conservation of Information. If it's true as believers of ID say, that this is not a religious belief, then who designed the "designer"? This theory is based on justifications, rather than theoretical testing. Science is not proven by explanation; it is proven with test after test and then backed up with tons of information