Dear America,
I haven’t written to you in a while, and for that I am very sorry. The last time we spoke was in March, when I was in Washington D.C. There has been no stop to the work I’ve been doing here on the West Coast since then, and I haven’t had the chance to collect my thoughts and write to you.
I want to begin this letter with an apology. As scientists and as teachers, we in the science community have failed you, America. Joining the chorus of people who want to inject non-science into the science classroom, “Senator Bill Frist appears to now be endorsing the Intelligent Design hypothesis as a competative scientific theory that should be taught alongside evolution in science class”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050819/ap_on_go_co/frist_intelligent_design;_ylt=AhlEb.2_cB5UnrT95HsPqwes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OXIzMDMzBHNlYwM3MDM-.
A captain of government speaking so surely of things scientific can only mean one thing: that all the hard work, the lives and the sacrifices of thousands of scientists over as many years, has been for nothing. And from nothing, I suppose nothing can be learned.
I’ll be brief, America, for I know you are busy with war and hot to return to your business abroad. The core tenet of science – that you hypothesize, experiment, and confirm or refute the hypothesis – has been the beating heart of progress in our species for its long years. One cannot make progress in the business of sorting knowledge from opinion with any other method yet devised. As such, proposing that an unverifiable higher intelligence is responsible for the order of our universe cannot lead to such a sorting. There can be no progress by such thought, only a sigh of resignation and a shrugging of shoulders.
I wish you well on your journey, America. I expect that without real science, the engine of progress upon which you have long built your dreams will soon cough and sputter. Those who might have been educated to keep it running, to make it better, will be muddied with the thought that they can let it be and a higher power will intervene to make it run again. Journey far and wide, while you can, for soon comes the time when no man or woman will know the fact from the fiction, the truth from the myth.
Regards,
Steve
