Assumptions

On "As it Happens" tonight they interviewed an evolutionary who stated many times that the theory of evolution was science, but the theory of intelligent design was pseudoscience. His rock-solid evidence included the fact that there are chairs in evolution at universities (thus it must be scientific), that there are no supernatural assumptions made in evolution (thus making it scientific) and that a judge in the US has declared the theory of intelligent design to be a pseudo science.

The thing that bothered me the most was not the CBC would never interview a Christian or Moslem who was equally certain of their belief system without accusing them of fundamentalism. The thing that bothered me the most was that the scientist was not showing all his cards. He was saying that intelligent design must be wrong because it incorporates elements of philosophy and faith as well as science into its theory. But that evolution was true, hard science because it only looks at natural phenomenon. But he never actually states that there are two assumptions underlying this assertion. The first is atheism. The second is naturalism. And these are, I hate to tell the man, philosophic stances -- they are belief systems. Thus, his evolutionary theory is based on certain philosophic assumptions, just as intelligent design is based on certain philosophic assumptions.

One of the things that aggravates me about much of modern thinking is that we have put science ahead of philosophy. The reason why Philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences and academic disciplines, is because all other disciplines rely on unspoken, mutually agreed upon philosophic assumptions. If these assumptions are not examined and understood, we take things for "truth" based on the narrow perspective of our own academic discipline or belief system without really knowing why we do so. This creates narrow thinking and aggressive fundamentalism of all kinds. Including the evolutionary kind that will neither listen to nor allow any theory that differs slightly from their own.

The thing I find most bizarre in all of this is that the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be a science, nor is it in particular conflict with evolutionary theory. It is simply a way of allowing what modern scientist have found to be evident to co-exist side by side with what thousands of years of humanity has found to be equally evident -- that something greater than ourselves exists somewhere within and/or outside of the universe, and may have been involved in the process of creating the universe. Perhaps if the evolutionist was less of an atheistic fundamentalist he would have been able to see this critical point.