Science is not decided by majority vote. Can the majority of scientists be wrong about scientific matters? Yes they can.
Scientific theories are supposed to be tested, reasearched, and expanded upon. Have you ever read Thomas Kuhn? Well in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions he documented numerous reversals in science where views once confidently held by the scientific community ended up being discarded and replaced.
An example...until the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, geologists used to believe that the continents were immovable (compare Kearey and Vine 1996 to Clark and Stearn 1960).
Intelligent design is at present a minority position within science. But that fact by itself does nothing to discredit its validity. To call some area of inquiry not science or unscientific or to label it religion or myth is a common maneuver for discrediting an idea.
Physicist David Lindley, for instance, to discredit cosmological theories that outstrip experimental data or verification, calls such theories “myths.”
Writer and medical doctor Michael Crichton, in his Caltech Michelin Lecture, criticizes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence as follows:
SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof…. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
In the past NASA has funded SETI research. And even if the actual search for alien intelligences has thus far proved unsuccessful, SETI’s methods of search and the possibility of these methods proving successful validate SETI as a legitimate scientific enterprise.
Just because an idea has religious, philosophical, or political implications does not make it unscientific.
According to evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould "Biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God…. Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us.”
Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins claims, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
In his book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer said we have to “face the fact that we are evolved animals and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too.”
Gould, Dawkins, and Singer are respectively drawing religious, philosophical, and political implications from evolutionary theory. Does that make evolutionary theory unscientific? No.
By the same token, intelligent design’s implications do not render it unscientific.
And if you think they do then I'm sure glad your not a scientist doing reasearch.
Sorry, posting a news story that turns out to be incorrect isn't the same thing as believing ID is science.
