Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

tech_fan
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:16:57 +0000

I agree with Mollie and Jessie on the practical issue, but think you are being too bold on one point.

Science is not a fundamental, logically defined category of knowledge or an activity amenable to a nice definition like the one given in that Wikipedia article above. People much smarter than I, like the late, great philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn (of MIT!) have thought about these things very deeply for their whole lives and concluded that if things like this are taken as the definition, then much of what we consider science today isn’t, and vice versa.

Science is a human institution; fundamentally it is a club. The club decides who is in and who is out based on who plays by the club’s current (unstated!) rules – NOT based on an abstract definition of scientific activity. ID today is definitely not part of the club, not because it fails to meet some abstract, putatively objective criteria of what makes science, but because it hasn’t won admission into the club.

Society has decided science is a very important club and should get 40 minutes a day for many years to hold club meetings with children in schools. During this time, the club gets to pass down what it wishes. And, indeed, since the vast majority of the club (especially the biology subclub) does not regard ID as clubworthy, it excludes it from its discussions.

While tempting and popular, it is silly to try to formulate a logical distinction between the ID theory and evolutionary theory, or the theory of quantum gravity. What makes the first unscientific and the latter two scientific is, maddeningly for you, sociological. Scientists regard the former as nonscience, and that’s enough.

It’s enough because science has been the most fertile manmade source of practical progress in the known history of he world. That entitles it to some leeway.

Indeed, the sociological definition is the only one that’s going to work. ID does make empirically testable claims and predictions (about the nonoccurence of certain kinds of evolution on certain timescales under certain experimental conditions) and has a peer-reviewed literature.

Objective criteria are easy to game. The one criterion that matters is whether scientists, as a worldwide community, accept your science. This definitely hasn’t happened for ID, and so for that reason it’s wrong to teach it in a science classroom.