I find myself nodding in agreement with the wisdom of the Kansas Board of Education. Not very much agreement, to be sure; the recent move to introduce official skepticism about evolution into its new public school science standards is just bad. Bad, bad Kansas.
But, amidst the bemoaning of this setback for Enlightenment values, we all had a little fun with the school board’s attempt to change the definition of science, as Risa has already pointed out. (See also John Rennie at the new Scientific American blog.) Seems that they have decided to open the door to explanations other than the purely natural — obviously, so that they can include religious (“supernatural”) explanations within a science curriculum.
But only after reading Dennis Overbye’s story in yesterday’s New York Times did I really understand what they had done. Here’s the new definition of “science”:
The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: “natural explanations.” But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.
The old definition reads in part, “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” The new one calls science “a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”
At the risk of alienating all my friends — the school board is right. Science isn’t about finding “natural” explanations vs. “supernatural” ones; it’s about finding correct explanations, without any presupposition about what form they may take. The distinguishing feature of science isn’t in the explanations themselves, it’s in the process by which we find them. Namely, we toss out hypotheses, compare them to data, and look for the hypotheses which account for the largest number of phenomena in the simplest possible way. Simplicity here is in the sense of “algorithmic compressibility” — the number of bits, if you like, required to specify the mechanism that purports to do all this explaining.
What the Kansas school board has tried to do is to open the door for unbiased consideration of natural and supernatural explanations by a common standard — that of scientific investigation. This is just what I’ve been arguing for all along. Scientists have to get off this kick that science and religion are completely distinct magisteria that have nothing to do with each other. Quite the contrary; religion (at least in its common Western forms) goes around making claims about how the world works, and it’s perfectly appropriate to judge such claims by the same standards that we judge any other suggested hypotheses about nature.
The thing is, if we judge popular religious vs. naturalist explanations for how the universe works by a common scientific standard, naturalism wins. Without breaking a sweat, frankly; by the beginning of the second half, we have to send in the scrubs from the bench, at the risk of being accused of running up the score. Intelligent Design, to take one obvious example, is laughably bad as a scientific hypothesis. It explains practically nothing (since it refuses to say anything about the nature of the designer, so we have no clue what such a designer would ever choose to design), while introducing a fantastic amount of new complexity in the form of an entirely distinct metaphysical category (the designer). I have no problem saying that ID is a “scientific hypothesis”; it’s just such a bad one that no sensible scientist would give it a moment’s thought if it weren’t for the massive public-relations campaign behind it.
Science doesn’t home in on naturalistic explanations by assumption; it chooses them because those are the best ones. That doesn’t mean that we have to “teach the controversy” in high schools; the number of grossly inadequate scientific theories is far larger than we could ever address in such a context. But it’s about time that we admitted that science is perfectly capable of judging supernatural claims — and finding them sadly wanting.
Torbjorn- thanks for the link to ID statement that “survival of the fittest” is a tautology. Though, just because they say it doesn’t mean its not true or interesting. But I would agree that its a somewhat extreme interpretation of the phrase, and your statement that fitness means you’re more likely to survive is a more substantive useful principle. I haven’t really read much of what the ID crowd has to say, but I have argued with someone who claims to doubt Darwin. Bringing out this distinction of whether “Darwinism” is a hypothesis, or a useful framework by which to generate other hypotheses, I found to be a productive way to get at what the real disagreement was.
RBH wrote:
Yeah, I admit I’ve been influenced by Kuhn and other sympathetic views (e.g. Holton’s Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought). I’ll have to read some Popper so I can more readily abuse him as well. But seriously, I have been meaning to read him and get beyond the sound bites to his real perspective.
Cheers,
Boaz
Boaz, you are welcome. The Talk Origins website seems to be useful, not least for recognising questions on evolution that science has already answered.
Sean: ” Much of the discussion is about how we would ever know that something was “really” supernatural, and we simply hadn’t yet discerned the underlying patterns. Absolutely right. Since naturalistic explanations tend to be simpler, the urge to keep looking for them is a perfectly sensible one. But maybe, provisionally, we can’t think of any, and some good supernatural theory is placed before us. No problem with that; science doesn’t pretend to be in possession of the ultimate immutable truth, we just do the best with the information we have at the time.”
Yes, and this does happen in practise. Although humans are not supernatural, one can say that stone tools are an example of intelligent design. Archeologist know how to see the difference between rocks that look like stone tools and real stone tools.
For me the question comes down to this: why does ID belong in a -science- classroom?
Maybe ID belongs in art class, or drafting class. Or political science. It certainly doesn’t arise from the scientific tradition, not as practiced now or as practiced in Hellenic Greece.
Once ID gets in the door, what’s to stop the invention of a dozen other “theories” that can pushed through the door with “science” written on it?
This is about mindshare, not education. I feel sorry for the teachers now compelled to study ID, because they’re required to teach it, without extra compensation. And I feel sorry for the kids, who’ll lose already scarce hours they need to help them stay competitive in a highly competitive, real world.
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