Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

 Why is it that with all the leading developed countries, including now the US, subscribing to the need to reduce greenhouse gases, the climate change sceptics refuse to give up.

They continue to undermine the prevailing views of the IPCC with an almost religious fervour. There are scientists who continue to believe that the majority of climate change scientists are wrong, and they need to be respected for advancing their views standing out against the accepted opinion.

But the majority of climate change scientists remain firmly in the IPCC camp. You see the same religious fervour with the continuing attacks on evolution theories, even after the 200 year anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, which occurred last month.

I maybe totally mistaken -and if I am – I apologise, but there seems to me to be an uncanny link between the climate change sceptics and supporters of intelligent design.

According to the New World Encyclopaedia, “intelligent design refers to a scientific  research program, as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

“Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act.”

“Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.”

The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank based in Seattle says intelligent design is a scientific theory. This was rejected in a court case involving Kitzmiller et al v Dover Area School District Pa. arising from a decision by the school board to develop a science policy, in which “students will will be made aware of  gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to intelligent design. Biology teachers in the district were required to read a statement saying “Darwin’s Theory is a theory” and that “the theory is not a fact. Gaps exist in the Theory for which there is no evidence…Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.”  Parents of several students in the district challenged the Board’s pollicy.

US District Court judge, John E Jones, ruled in December 2005 that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design in public schools. This was on the basis of the First Amendment to the US Constitution requiring a separation of church and state.

Subsequently in 2007, the Judge told a group of faculty, students and community members of the Cabrini College in Philadelphia, a Catholic institution, “to be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom to misrepresent well-established scientific proportions.”

The editor in chief of the college newspaper, who quoted the judge reported that Jones had received a flood of hate mail during the case, forcing him to have around- the-clock district marshal protection. Jones was also heavily slammed on Fox News as a “fascist.”

The attempts to have intelligent design taught in English and Australian public schools, alongside the science curriculum was promoted by Christian groups from the US, but subsequently rejected, when the science teachers refused to go along.

Climate change caused by too much man-made carbon emissions in a constrained planet where there will be about 9 billion people in 2050 seems to a simple person like me, to be against intelligent design. Is this the reason to oppose evidence that there are substantial changes in climate unlike anything previously encountered?