The Agenda

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal may have just ruined his shot (however remote) at the vice presidency. While McCain could use a younger counterpart who appeals to the Christian Right, the electorate at large may not embrace someone who veers so far towards the shoulder on the concert of faith and public policy.

Jindal's vocal support of Intelligent Design is pitiable, but potentially toxic to McCain's bid for national approval. Especially when he frames his enthusiasm this way:

"The way we're going to have smart, intelligent kids is exposing them to the very best science and let them not only decide, but also let them contribute to that body of knowledge."

It's possibly worth noting that even as the nation was almost certainly even more deeply faithful in the 1960s, this is not the kind of thinking that got us to the Moon and back. The post-Sputnik surge in science education respected the religions of everyone (remembering, in part, that it was largely Jews who gave us the atomic bomb), but focused on established empiricism and reliable mechanics. Even the most devout fundamentalists of the early Cold War appreciated that the assumption that God favoured American rocketry over that of the godless Soviets was not alone sufficient to ensure that a man lofted into the stratosphere would return alive.

The history of nature may not be a matter of life and death, but that doesn't mean that Intelligent Design is harmless. It is misguided to regard science education as a process of disseminating theories. Scientific truths make up the meat of science study, but at the heart is not the countless facts and findings, nor even the theories they confirm, but the process itself, of how experiment confirms or rejects hypothesis. Science education is fundamentally about the method, not the results. After all, this same method, prosecuted now for centuries -- even millennia, if we include the empirical processes that provided the founding conditions of civilisation -- has delivered myriad, often conflicting results throughout its sometimes tumultuous history. One model gives way to another, as new techniques and refinements uncover evidence contradicting established views while supporting different ones. Thus the observation that science "contradicts itself," rather than indict the method, in fact repeatedly vindicates it.

What ID proponents either refuse to accept or fail to grasp is the understanding that science education is meant to teach a way of studying the natural world: a method by which theory is built on fact, not the other way around, and absence of evidence is not awarded equal value as experimental findings. The reason Intelligent Design does not belong in science class is not that fundamentalism is "wrong," but that it is inconsistent with this method, by insisting upon different standards of evidence, and different rules for the formulation of theory. It is no more appropriate to teach ID in science class than it is to teach science in church -- a notion that I dare say most ID proponents would reject out of hand, without anything resembing the level of debate they bring to this public issue. Intelligent Design is not science, but creationism in science drag -- and by that no more legitimately scientific than Mr. Jindal would be Jewish for sporting a yarmulke.

A crowning irony of this debate is how closely it follows the Darwinian algorithm (as all human activities ultimately must). If we fail to properly educate our youth, we will fall behind the rest of the developed world (and more and more, the developing world as well). Indeed, much evidence indicates that we already are. If we resolve this debate now in favour of the scientific method, it may only be decades before we catch up. But if we follow Mr. Jindal's lead, it's not inconceivable that we could fall behind by centuries. And if the fundamentalists behind this movement get what they really want? Speculation terrifies.

If we wish to remain at the forefront of science and technology in the world, we must adhere to the means that got us there. It is strange that Mr. Jindal calls the rejection of ID in public schools "political correctness," as the fractured logic of that gratefully fading policy would more embrace these dissonant ideas, by sympathetic reason of "acceptance" and "sensitivity" to alternative viewpoints and cultures, than reject them for the very fine reason that they do not make scientific sense and do not follow the scientific method at the core of our science education and technological accomplishments.

Let families and churches and communities of faith believe what they may, and teach what they please, within their own purview. This liberty is fully guaranteed by our laws. What the law does not defend is the promulgation of special notions based in particular faiths upon the larger society, in contradiction of established public policy. It is entirely legal to teach any peculiar worldview to anyone -- in private. But the public school must restrict itself to broadly accepted standards respecting all faiths. And in science in particular, public education is bound to the method that has served all peoples of all faiths throughout history, by restriction to long-proven empirical process, indifferent to the views of one religion or another.

No one disavows the worth of Mr. Jindal's faith, even as we may vehemently differ on several points of policy. The world can only benefit from more of the fellowship, mercy, humility, and compassion that has characterised the Christian soul for centuries. But the specific proclivities of one's faith do not describe an entitlement to force it upon others, nor does the law recognise any such privilege. And as the American people of a whole comprise a great diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and faiths, the people are not served by the promotion through government of special accommodation of discordant methods of instruction thinly disguised in service to the narrow views of one body of faith, not merely above all others, but above the dispassionate tenets of reason itself.

That the struggle between special faith perspectives and basic science already rages in local and county (and even state) school districts across the land is worrisome enough. To advance this policy from the office of the Vice President -- the head of NASA, also -- casts an ominous shadow over the future of American education, and may augur an age of ignorance not seen in living memory.

This is only a theory, of course. But we hope that Mr. Jindal will indulge our insistence that we be allowed to promote it publicly all the same.