Intelligent Design has Evolutionary Biologists Cowering in Fear

Prominent Atheist Professor of Law and Philosophy Thomas Nagel

Calls Intelligent Design Scientific and Constitutional to “Mention” in

Science Classes.

 

This article is especially interesting because Prof. Nagel is an Atheist.

Prof. Nagel makes some interesting observations; here are some highlights from the article, which can be viewed in its entirety by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.

Who is Thomas Nagel?  THOMAS NAGEL (B.A. Cornell 1958; B.Phil. Oxford 1960; Ph.D. Harvard 1963), University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Law. He specializes in Political Philosophy, Ethics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind.

---

Article HighLights:

---

• Intelligent Design:

Prof. Nagel says, it potentially can be scientific to argue that DNA and life points to an intelligent designer, even if science cannot tell you the identity of the designer or what is going on in the designer’s mind

• Evolution:

Prof. Nagel tells us that he “has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life” (p. 202). He reports that it is “difficult to find in the accessible literature the grounds” for these claims.

Moreover, he goes farther. He reports that the “presently available evidence” comes “nothing close” to establishing “the sufficiency of standard evolutionary mechanisms to account for the entire evolution of life” (p. 199).

• Evolutionary Biologists:

Prof. Nagel acknowledges that “evolutionary biologists” regularly say that they are “confiden[t]” that “random mutations in DNA” are sufficient to account for “the complex chemical systems we observe” in living things (p. 199) — but he disagrees. “Rhetoric” is the word Professor Nagel uses to rejects these statements of credentialed evolutionary biologists. He judges that the evidence is NOT sufficient to rule out ID (p. 199).

• Should ID and High School Curriculum:

In light of these considerations, Prof. Nagel says that “some part of the high school curriculum” “should” include “a frank discussion of the relation of evolutionary theory to religion” but that this need not occur in biology classes if the biology teachers would find this too much of a “burden” (p. 204). Significantly, Prof. Nagel — who is a professor of law as well as a professor of philosophy — concludes that, so long as the proposal is not introduced by religiously-motivated persons “as a fallback from something stronger,” but by persons “more neutral” or “without noticeable religious beliefs,” it would be constitutional to “mention” ID in public school science classes, because doing so genuinely furthers “the secular purpose of providing a better understanding of evolutionary theory and of the evidence for and against it” (p. 203). He makes clear that the “mention” must be a “noncommittal discussion of some of the issues” (p. 205).

He acknowledges the prevailing attitude in the mainstream science community is that ID represents a “fundamentalist threat,” fearing that allowing even a noncommittal discussion of ID in science classes could lead to the fundamentalists gaining the power to suppress “the right to teach evolution at all” (p. 205). He also acknowledges the possibility that students who arrive in class with religious objections to evolution already in mind may seize on the mere mention of ID as a basis for “build[ing] much more than is warranted” from that favorable mention (p. 204, quoting Kent Greenawalt’s Does God Belong in Public Schools?).

But to Prof. Nagel, these fears are not sufficient to bar, as a matter of constitutional law, the accurate statement, in public school science classrooms, that intelligent design, while possibly wrong, is a scientific approach to the question of how DNA and the complex chemical structure of life came to achieve its present form (pp. 204-205).