Science's true ID?
Aug. 12th, 2005 02:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
addersljIdle thought on the whole "Intelligent Design" debacle*.
Has it occured to any of the people that are frothing at the mouth about the moves to push ID into science that the main fault here lies with the way that science has been taught? At school, you get taught that science is fact. Once you move to post-school level, you discover that science is, on the whole, what we think might be true, but chances are something else will come along in a few decades and make us look at it in a whole different way again.
By taking an absolutist stance on science, which is, by its very nature, incorrect, you open the doors for certain folks to say "well, if you're teaching this idea of truth, you should teach the alternative as well." Now the correct answer to that is not "You're mad!" but "actually, we're not teaching a truth, we're teaching the latest thinking from a particualr world view we call 'science". Your alternative truth is actually the latest thinking from a particular world view we call 'theology', which you'll find right down the hall, buster."
Rather too many people seem to be letting the IDers define the battle ground. Sun Tzu, folks.
*You know, you take a bunch of religious people who the mainstream of religious thought in their native country think are 'nutters'**, stick 'em on a boat and let them found a country, and this is what happens. It's all us Brits to blame you know, for not properly dealing with our religious nutjobs***.
**Technical term, clearly.
***See **
Has it occured to any of the people that are frothing at the mouth about the moves to push ID into science that the main fault here lies with the way that science has been taught? At school, you get taught that science is fact. Once you move to post-school level, you discover that science is, on the whole, what we think might be true, but chances are something else will come along in a few decades and make us look at it in a whole different way again.
By taking an absolutist stance on science, which is, by its very nature, incorrect, you open the doors for certain folks to say "well, if you're teaching this idea of truth, you should teach the alternative as well." Now the correct answer to that is not "You're mad!" but "actually, we're not teaching a truth, we're teaching the latest thinking from a particualr world view we call 'science". Your alternative truth is actually the latest thinking from a particular world view we call 'theology', which you'll find right down the hall, buster."
Rather too many people seem to be letting the IDers define the battle ground. Sun Tzu, folks.
*You know, you take a bunch of religious people who the mainstream of religious thought in their native country think are 'nutters'**, stick 'em on a boat and let them found a country, and this is what happens. It's all us Brits to blame you know, for not properly dealing with our religious nutjobs***.
**Technical term, clearly.
***See **
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 07:19 pm (UTC)Strange how we seem to be devolving toward a less intelligent society instead of a more intelligent one. I guess entropy does win in the end.
On the other hand, Wired recently printed a story about studies that show young children scoring better on IQ tests now than in years past; the fact that they're playing video games was cited as the cause.
Apparently, video games teach problem-solving and the ability to process multiple levels of information better than schools.