Is faith in God enough to challenge evolution?

SCMP Article - (Feb 21, 2009)

The promotion of creationism/intelligent design (CID) has no place in universities, other than in classes of theology or perhaps the history of ideas. To promote it as a theory that challenges evolution is mistaken for many reasons.

First, it offers no predictive power whatsoever. There is no way of testing it. It is therefore not a theory but a dogma. The flat Earth hypothesis is more robust scientifically as it can at least be tested. This point alone demolishes any legitimacy for CID in a science curriculum.

By contrast, evolution's ability to generate predictions which have been affirmed again and again, and not once contradicted in innumerable tests, means it does not require the presence or absence of dogmatic faith, just the ability to weigh evidence.

Second, if everything is designed, why are we troubled with MRSA and other microbial resistance? Evolution is present everywhere in the modern world - the food we eat, the clothes on your back, the plants growing on your window sill, the microbes that assail us - all have been produced by manipulating the principles of evolution, intentionally or otherwise.

What, in contrast, illustrates CID? Nothing, again, beyond blind faith. Third, CID is not objective about the posited creator. It has to be a particular creator that

emerged from a small Middle Eastern tribal culture.

Why this particular supreme being? Indeed, why invoke a separate deus ex machina, fraught with problems that have been struggled with down the ages when a much cleaner explanation, if you must have one, exists in, for example, Shaivistic theology? The author Terry Pratchett captures this nicely in his allegory of mankind's gods as growing and shrinking in size as a function of the numbers of their believers.

The answer is, of course, that CID is a justification for the Abrahamic religions to continue proselytising.

Evolution cannot be allowed to be accepted, otherwise these three religions unravel conceptually, destroying their brand value.

This brand promotes individualism, from which emerged free-market capitalism and justifications for expropriating the planet for self-indulgence, to the point of threatening the biosphere that supports life.

For this reason it must be challenged. There are many other reasons to reject CID and insufficient space to extrapolate them.

By all means teach CID, but as the Abrahamic theology it is. It has no legitimacy within any rational science department.

RICHARD FIELDING,

Professor of Psychology and Public Health, University of Hong Kong