Science, Scientism, and Intelligent Design

I guess this counts as a current political issue: the New York Times is running it.

As I have noted before, as a Catholic I have no vested interest here: Catholics do not see any contradiction between Darwinian evolution and Christianity.

However, I personally find any opposition to teaching intelligent design in the classroom along with Darwinism philosophically untenable.

The standard claim is that intelligent design is “not science.”

This is quite wrong in historical terms. Intelligent design is the most basic assumption of science itself: if here were no design in the universe, it would follow that it would be incomprehensible to us, its actions impossible to predict. The ability of science to predict—the very thing that defines it—is prima facie proof of design. If it is not science, there is no science.

The first scientists were keenly conscious of this. The point of the enterprise they named "empirical science" was, in so many words, “to find God’s footprints in creation”; or, as Stephen Hawking puts it, “to understand the mind of God.” Science itself arguably evolves directly from the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Here is the dictionary definition:

science • noun 1 the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment…

- Oxford

a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.

- American Heritage

3 a : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena

- Merriam-Webster

Note that, according to this definition, and quite properly, the "social sciences" are not really science. Yet they are commonly taught as such in schools.

Intelligent design, on the other hand, surely is: it is a postulated general truth regarding an important aspect of the natural world.

Note that the thesis that living organisms are "designed" is on precisely the same level of abstraction as saying they are "random." If one of these (the thesis of design) is too speculative or too abstract or too general to be admitted, the other must be as well. If one (random selection) is admitted as a reasonable scientific postulate, the other must be admitted as well, or else Darwinism itself is non-falsifiable, that is, by Popper’s classic definition, not science.

So anyone who rules out "intelligent design" as "unscientific" or not allowed in science class is tacitly admitting that their own belief in Darwinian evolution is not scientific, but an article of faith.