Cerin,
Let me take this one on because my students bring it up fairly routinely in one of my classes.
There is plenty of evidence against the theory of evolution (hence the large group of people who continue to disbelieve it, including many scientists). I read a book on it once which was very convincing. Unfortunately, I didn't retain many of the scientific details. It has to do with problems with the fossil record and out of place artifacts, and I don't remember what else.
There are two scientists who have chosen to 'take on' the theory of evolution (and I've also forgotten their names) by challenging the results of Carbon-14 dating.
They've made some pretty strong arguments in some cases - that's my understanding - but this does not unseat the theory of evolution; it only calls into question the dating of certain fossil records.
Carbon-14 dating was not available to Darwin when he developed the theory and the theory does not rest on this.
Yovargas is correct when he says that we do not properly teach scientific methodology in high school, and students come out with the idea that science provides certainty about facts, and that challenging those facts is what is required to overthrow theory. This is not correct. It is not what science does.
Science is not distinguished by the facts it accumulates - which have often been wrong, historically. Science is distinguished by the method it uses to gather facts and the method it uses to evaluate explanations of those facts.
Intelligent design does not belong in science class because it proceeds by a different method. We may prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution is an inferior theory and intelligent design is the superior theory, and intelligent design STILL would not belong in a science class because it proceeds by a different method.
There are two key principles that constitute the scientific method:
1. Only material, observable information is admissable.
2. In positing explanations for what is observed, all statements must be falsifiable.
Science restricts itself to a narrow realm of human experience - the matieral, observable experience - because our methods cannot be applied to other kinds of experience. When scientists express opinion about anything that is not observable, they are speaking outside their profession.
And every scientific query begins by attempting to disprove the theory in question. We are NEVER looking for data to prove a theory. Never. We are ALWAYS looking for ways to frame our question so that the theory can be disproven.
The body of scientific theory as such is the collection of hypotheses that have not yet been disproven.
In order for intelligent design to be taught in science classes it would have to begin by attempting to disprove the existence of an intelligent designer. You might imagine that proponents of the theory do not proceed in this manner. The intelligent designer is, furthermore, not observable ... its existence can be postulated but neither proven nor disproven by direct observation, so this can never be a scientific theory
per se.
We stick to our method because it works - where material, observable phenomenon are concerned. It gives us successful results in all sorts of hitherto unimaginable areas. It allowed us to cure all kinds of diseases and go to the moon. That is the only justification for scientific method. It is useful.
It says nothing, and can say nothing, about our beliefs concerning things that are not material and observable. Science does not, for example, say that there is no God. It says nothing, and can say nothing about God because God is not directly observable.
Not
everything posited by science is
directly observable - things that happened in the distant past, for example, are not directly observable. But in those cases we have developed secondary methods for determining what postulates are supported and what postulates are not supported. Darwin himself developed much of the methodology for this kind of inquiry. There is also a specific methodology for comparing two competing theories - very, very difficult to do. People train for years just to learn how to frame questions the right way so that competing theories can be compared, and, in truth, not many scientists are very good at this. Most of us just test unimportant hypothesis or develop secondary math models along the edges of important theories using techniques that other, smarter people have developed.
This by itself is hard enough, believe me!
I just object to it being taught as the undisputed truth.
If evolutionary science is taught this way, then it is taught wrongly. Science is not about undisputed truth. There are no undisputed theories in science. Science is about method.
The theory of "evolution" ... is a misnomer. Darwin did not use this word for his theory. His theory is the theory of "natural selection." The theory of natural selection says simply this: competition for scarce resources is sufficient to explain speciation.
This theory has never been disproven. We have not yet found any example of a mutation that resulted in a new species but cannot be explained in terms of the reproductive advantage it conferred.
Finding a species whose emergence cannot be explained in terms of reproductive advantage is the ONLY way this theory can be called into question. The age of a particular fossil is irrelevant to the theory. In fact, the recent availability of DNA testing has caused the greatest stir and the greatest amount of reclassification within the field. The family relationships between animals (claves) was previously determined by anatomical similarity and apparent lines of descent (which does depend on the fossil record) but now that we can test their DNA we have found that animals thought to be closely related (alligators and crocodiles, for example) are not so. But this does not overturn the theory, it is a correction around the edges of the theory, if you will. We may re-order the animals in any number of ways without calling into question the fact that they emergered as species because they possessed some reproductive advantage over their competition.
Natural selection is often described as "survival of the fittest," but this description is also incorrect because the fittest chicken can be walking down the road and a rock falls on his head (as one of my professors put it). There is no guarantee that within a given environment a perfectly appropriate mutation will appear, or that if such a mutation appeared it would survive to reproductive maturity. There is no 'end-game' in natural selection. It is a stochastic process. On average, those mutations that confer some competitive advantage will survive to reproductive maturity and they will reproduce. They will end up being the species we observe.
Technically, this theory does not even contradict intelligent design. It says nothing about how the process started, or whether some end result was intended by some intelligence outside the system. It only says that the observable species can be explained in terms of their competitive advantage.
Anyone who wants to say that God set the process in motion, or intervened to give souls to humans is free to do so. But we can't test such assertions using scientific methodology and so those assertions don't belong in a science class.
Jn