Educational
Science education is, properly, a major part of schooling and it is important that young people learn not just scientific facts and theories but also the methods by which scientists arrive at their conclusions – the scientific method.
Science is fundamentally the application of reason to the natural world, and it has been phenomenally successful in elucidating the nature of our world and applying that knowledge to the benefit of mankind.
However, when science explores the question of the origin or the universe and of life, it encounters a set of challenges which don’t arise to the same extent elsewhere. It is clearly not possible to see what happened at the beginning or to ‘re-run the tape’. Science, therefore, has to use the method of ‘inference to the best explanation’, based on processes and phenomena which are known to operate with similar effects in the contemporary world.
There are elements of origins science, such as the digitally coded information in the DNA of all living things, which defy a naturalistic explanation. For that reason something other than a narrow and strictly naturalistic explanation needs to be on the table.
This means that science has to consider the possibility of the existence of intelligent mind beyond the natural universe in order to explain its origin and some of its most obvious features such as the information content of biological systems. It is from these sorts of phenomena that the position of Intelligent design (ID) has arisen.
It is a particular scandal that Government guidance forbids the consideration of ID in in school science courses. This is completely contrary to the investigative methods of science and ignores the tentative nature of all scientific theories including Darwinism.
This section of the website contains material relevant to education, particularly in schools, and shows why pupils of school age should be exposed to the arguments for design in the universe.