Ben McIlwain’s March 7 column, “All eyes on evolution,” warned scientists to improve their rhetoric or face steep losses to the intelligent design movement. However, the ID movement doesn’t scare me one bit. Why? Because contrary to what students would be led to believe by watching cable news, there is no apocalyptic battle being waged between scientists and creationists over what is taught in our public schools.
Out of the 15,000 public school districts in the United States, the ID movement has successfully implemented some aspect of its policy on a mere three occasions. In all three instances, the policy was either reversed by subsequently elected school boards, overturned by judges, or both, in the case of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania.
Proponents of ID claim their theory – which examines biological systems and claims they are too complex to have evolved naturally – is scientific and thus can be taught as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Yes, ID does incorporate enough scientific jargon to perplex even the most capable pipette-wielding BSCI lab assistant, but anyone who was forced to learn the scientific method in seventh grade knows experiments are a vital step in creating scientific knowledge. Experimental verification is the sole test that separates science from pseudoscience.
Even though the ID movement is well-funded and employs a number of highly articulate people, its strategy is far too feeble to counter the forces of secularization in America. If religious leaders want their ideas to be integrated into secular society, they need to stop pretending their ideas are scientific and start making them scientific.
Sound impossible? It isn’t. The father of the Big Bang Theory was also a father in the Catholic Church. Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest who studied at the Pontifical Academy during the reign of Pope Pius XI. Lemaître believed God created the universe and wanted to reconcile the ideas of theoretical physics and theology during a time when the vast majority of scientists believed the universe had existed for eternity. He studied Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and, in 1927, realized it predicted the universe was expanding. If the universe was expanding, it must have begun from a single point.
Lemaître’s idea was ridiculed by many prominent physicists. Even Einstein found it initially unsettling. Edwin Hubble – the same Hubble as the big telescope above the Earth – provided the first experimental evidence in favor of Lemaître’s theory in 1929, when he discovered galaxies outside the Milky Way were receding from Earth. Further verification came in 1964 when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, while operating a microwave receiver owned by Bell Laboratories, noticed a strange hissing sound. They went to great lengths to figure out what the hissing was, even transporting two homing birds nesting in the receiver to a location 20 miles away. They found their way back to the receiver, however. By then the scientists’ patience had waned. After diligently ruling out all other possibilities, Penzias and Wilson deduced the hissing was actually caused by cosmic background radiation, a by-product of the Big Bang.
Lemaître’s theory is a perfect example of how scientific progress can be motivated by religious beliefs. The difference between the Big Bang Theory and the “theory” of intelligent design is the former makes a prediction that can be tested by observing the natural world. The tenets of ID will only be accepted after they have been verified experimentally. And besides, who knows how our conception of the universe will change when the next Lemaître comes around?
Benjamin Johnson is a junior physics major. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.
