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Old 05-22-2007, 08:37 AM   #43 (permalink)
raveneye
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On a more serious note, arguments by ID supporters tend to be 99% attacks on evolution, from various directions. So we can ask: can you analyze these attacks profitably within a science course, say a high school biology class in a public school?

Well let's look at some of them. The most fundamental attack is the Argument by Design, which has been around for centuries. This is a big subject, take a look here:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/design.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

This isn't all theology, there is some important biology here: Darwin wrote his book Origin of Species partly as a rejoinder to the argument from design, as did Dawkins his book Blind Watchmaker. So you could spend considerable time in a science course describing exactly how natural selection can produce highly adapted "designed" structures like Darwin and Dawkins did. This would be a scientific rebuttal of the ID argument from design. And it would be a very interesting course. It is perhaps a little ironic that Darwin himself did a damn nice job of demolishing ID already way back in 1859 (see for example Organs of Extreme Perfection in Chapter 6).

Other attacks are various. There is really nothing in science that ID supporters or creationists aren't willing to distort, misinterpret, or lie about apparently so that you'll think ID is the only alternative left standing. There is tons of stuff. Check it out here (scroll down to Biology):

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html

You could try to address all these arguments in a biology class I suppose, and it would still be a biology class, not theology. It would take more than one term unless the students are already pretty knowledgeable.

It would be exasperatingly inefficient way to teach biology though, because you're spending most of the time talking about other people's ignorance of the subject rather than the subject itself.

And of course it wouldn't matter how many of these claims you debunk, you still can't kill ID because it's not falsifiable. So what's the point? Many of the points still argued today were originally demolished by Darwin over a century ago, yet they still live on like zombies.

It might be worthwhile to give students a related term project though within a normal biology class, like requiring them to use their biological learning to debunk some of these claims. That would be reasonable, but probably not what the ID supporters want
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