Intelligent Design Tangles Science and Religion

I found the Opinion articles by Adrian Melott and Mano Singham (Physics Today, June 2002, page 48 ) particularly interesting and deserving of comment. Although I agree with much of what the authors say, I think some of their statements need to be taken further. What is it that we as scientists do, and how do we communicate it to the general public? What is the place of theory in science?

We scientists have not, in general, been very good at communicating to the wider community what we do, and many of us fall into the trap of “hypothesis testing.” My daughters’ high-school science teachers expect every experiment to test a hypothesis, and science fair judges will often give a project a poor grade if there is no hypothesis.

Certainly it is important that we have theories and hypotheses that attempt to explain our observations and to predict future observations. Hypotheses, however, do not exist without first having some observations on which to base them. We are often making new observations, especially in astronomy and Earth sciences. The cornerstone of science is good, careful, repeatable observation, not theory, but that fact is often not made clear.

A colleague told me about a comment from a creationist who complained that we scientists keep changing our theories. That theories do change is a crucial and often glossed-over point. We accept those theories that explain the majority of our observations and reject those that do not. At some point in the future, all of our current operational theories will be either rejected or modified, because they will no longer explain the majority of our observations. Every successful theory contains certain essential elements from previously successful ones; for example, Einstein’s theories of relativity, in the appropriate limit, reduce to Newton’s theory of motion. We should expect that every theory will, at some point, be supplanted. The ascendant theory of the moment must incorporate the most recent observations we have made.

Furthermore, we must avoid tangling science and religion. They are different worldviews–one physical, one spiritual. Too many scientists are willing to write philosophical and metaphysical treatises from their positions as scientists. We need to step back from such activities unless we make it clear that they are done outside our scientific expertise.

Just as we wish to discourage those with strong religious views from telling us what and how to teach in our sciences, we should tread lightly in crossing over and commenting on religious matters, except as private citizens. We all have the right to express our individual views of spirituality; we just need to do it without reference to our sciences.