The human race has many instincts and urges, reproductive urges, surival instincs, social instincts and perhaps the most interesting of all the desire to understand our origins, and the origins of everything around us.
Why did the sun rise in the morning and set at night? What were the determine factors for whether or not we had a good amount of rain, or none at all? Why do people die and what happens to people when they do die?
For a significant amount of time, a very popular answer to many of these questions have been provided by the notion that there is a God or God's, all powerful beings capable guiding the course of peoples day to day life, or indeed the fate of entire nations and continents. Many attributed these beings with the reason for the very existance of the world.
More recently the most popular releigions are defined as monolistic, believing in one God and sharing a common agreement (in their scriptures at least) of the notion of creationisim, that the world was created by God.
From a personal perspective, i've yet to make my mind up on this. Deep down i think it would be reassuring that there was a god but i can't help this notion betrays any sense of personal responsiblity. It's almost like the feeling you get as a child when your concerned about something, but your parent reassures you everything is going to be 'Okay'. This is an entirely different debate of course and not what i want to touch on here.
During the course of our species existance we have aquired an important asset, knowledge. It is this knowledge that has led us to putting human beings on the moon, fighting off many fatal diseases, map the human genome and sadly creating immense tools of destruction.
The means of how we have come about this achievements are soley reliant on the knowledge aquired from what we term today as the Scientific Method.
The Scientific Method allows us to explain 'phenomena', such as what determines whether or not an apple should fall from a tree, aquire knowledge and more importantly go back and correct that knowledge based on measureable and observable Evidence.
As i said previously, there has been a Philisophical notion that life and our very existance came from God, or an all powerful being. What is interesting, is the determination of so many people, to thrust this notion from the realms of the philisophical, in to that of the realms of Science itself.
The most recent carination of this being Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design states, that through a combination of arguements, life must have been designed or created by a being of some form of intelligence (for example a God).
In the realms of Philiosphy, this is a perfectly acceptable notion, indeed billions of people around the world belive it to be true. Yet in the realms of Science it has yet to provide a single shred of observable or measurable evidence, the very ticket you need to become an accepted scientific theory.
Perponents of Intelligent Design (whom believe it should be considered a scientific theory, just like the theory evolution and the theory of gravtiy and the theory of relativity etc.) say they have evidence in the forms of irreduciable complexity and the improbability that life was created by pure chance. Let me take a momment to show you why these are not considered scientific fact:
Irreduciable Complexity
Irreduciable complextity states that some organisims could not have evolved, because in order to so they would have had to have a function at each evolutionary stage.
Irreduciable complexities champion, the propelling mechanisim in bacterial flagellum. The propelling mechanisim is a highly advanced piece of natural engineering, with many moving parts and a complex strucutre.
It has been shown however to have evolved from another type of bacteria that was used to deliver protein toxins into a host victims cell membrane (like a needle).
Thus we can see that it could of easily evolved from a delivery device into a propelling mechanisim, thus removing this particular piece of 'Evidence' from the argument.
Improbability of Life Happening By Chance
The second issue, of probability, states that the probability of life happening by chance is so small that it is unimainable. What the mathamatician that first proposed this failed to comprehend, is that the universe didn't have just one go to get it right. The sheer vastness of the univers and the amount of time it's been in existnance gives it rather a lot of opportunities to create life.
Conclusion
I think the idea that Intelligent Design should be labelled as Science as opposed to Philisophy is one that threatens the very nature of Science itself.
Why am i so concerend by it? Surely this is just a lot of hype about nothing and another chance for Secularists to bash religion? You may indeed ask this, and many of my friends and family have done so as well.
My answer to this is simple, if you start to plug the gaps in Science, the areas where Science holds it's hands up and says 'We simply don't know yet', with religious and philisophical ideas that have no measurable or observeable evidence you begin to discourage further investigation into these area's.
You start to limit Science and what it can discover, not to mention you also start to make Sceince itself lazy.
It is better to say 'We don't know for sure yet' as opposed to 'Well we've no idea how this is possible so it must be God'.
For the sake of our society we must continue to oppose this tresspass on the very nature of Science itself and remind Religion of it's place in modern day society (which is most certainly not in a biology class!).
Thanks for taking the time to read and i welcome any comments and questions.
Regards
Scott