Defining Your Terms

In Grade 12 I took a class called Theory of Knowledge. At the time, I distinctly always remember walking out of that class with a sore head because I had to think more far too hard than I wanted to, especially late in the day.

The course had a myriad of things. From little research projects, to a summary of the famous Western philosophers, and debates on contentious issues.

Perhaps the most important thing that was done in the course (at least as I see it now 4 years later) was that we always had to do something called "defining our terms". Basically when one was arguing about some issue they had to make sure that they were blatantly defining what they were talking about so that if there was another person in the argument they would be completely aware of where you stood on an issue.

So that brings me to what I wanted to talk about. Jackie was having a conversation with one of her friends and wanted to know what he thought about Intelligent Design and evolution. He stated that he refused to learn anything on the topic based on religious grounds. She then told me why he so knew that evolution was a complete sham.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. However, it was the explanations that he was giving that left me a little puzzled. He was talking about the Big Bang Theory and discussing how somethings aren't rotating the proper way and stuff. It had me thinking. To make sure I understood what ID actually was defined as I yahooed it (for some reason I prefer yahoo as a search engine) and I garnered a whopping 32 000 000 hits. After skimming through the first two or three hits that ID could be defined as being a theory that there are many things in the universe and the earth that cannot be easily explained and as such are likely due to be created by an intelligent designer.

Alright so that's what ID stands for. Now having taken a mechanisms of evolution course in 3rd year undergrad, I decided that I would yahoo evolution. It garnered over 170 000 000 hits (so over 5 times more). The top 10 results were weak so then I yahooed 'definition of evolution' and got almost 14 million. After searching a few sites it seemed that the actual definition of evolution was elusive even for scientists because it depended on how you wanted to look at evolution. You could look at it from a billion year stance or one of populations or as the increasing resistance of bacteria since the advent of antibiotics.

To me it has become apparent that the two topics are not the same thing at all. Evolution is not the antithesis of intelligent design. Intelligent design is a complete theory of how the world is the way it is.

Having said that, I wonder what people are thinking when they want to have ID taught along with evolution in school. (The fact that teaching something that is faith based in a science class is besides the point). Science is to explain to students what there is in the world, how things work, where things are found, how they are made. What he know is constantly changing. It was only a few hundred years ago (or less since I don't want to do the actual research at the moment when I actually should be studying for my renal final on friday) that it was believed that humans were composed of 4 humours and blood letting could put the body in better balance. Now we know this not to be true. We cannot look into the sea or into somebody's DNA and proclaim to the world "I have found the meaning of life!"

Science should never be used to explain why the Universe is here or why there are humans on the planet. In should never be used to explain the WHY when it comes to these issues. There are no scientific answer to these questions. In one of my genetics classes last year a person was asking why bacteria have a certain type of genetic exchanger to the prof. He quickly responded "they just do...but if I was God I would have given bacteria these things because it makes them cooler".

So this has been one of my longest blog entries and I have completely lost the point to this posting.

To bring it back to what I was talking about when I was describing defining your terms I just wanted to say that people on both sides of these issues are not understanding the issue. Each of them offer something different and are not the opposite of the each other. One is meant to explain what the world is and the other one is used to explain why the world is so.

The fallacies of Big Bang theory have nothing to do with finches in the Galapagos islands.