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Inside the Black Box
When I was a freshman in high school, back in 1974, my science teacher, Mr. Riblett, started our science instruction with a simple experiment. He handed each of us a small, black wooden box. The box was hollow, and completely sealed; there was no way to open or see inside the box.
When we picked up our box, it became apparent that there was, indeed, something inside of it. When you moved it, it made a sound. Mine made a sound like something rolling around - perhaps a ball or a marble. My neighbor's box made a different sound altogether - it made a rolling sound if you moved it one direction, but a sliding sound if you tilted it another way. Other boxes made rattling noises, as if filled with plastic pieces. One box made no sound at all.
Our task was to determine what was in our box, and to explain why we believed this to be true. A master teacher, Mr. Riblett was teaching us to formulate a hypothesis (There is a ball in this box), determine an appropriate experiment, (I will tilt the box in various directions, I will flip it on all of its sides, I will shake it, and observe what happens), a set of observations (I will listen to the sounds emanating from the box from various angles, I will have my friends listen, I will feel the change in weight as I tilt the box), and how to come to a conclusion, based on the observations (I conclude that inside this box is a small, hard sphere, approximately 1 cm in diameter).
After we shared our conclusions, Mr. Riblett gathered up the boxes and put them away. We were aghast! "What's in the box?!" we demanded, as Mr. Riblett slyly ignored our pleas. "The important thing to remember," he told us, "is that you don't always get to open the box."
We hear a lot about the dichotomy between "theory" and "truth." Evolution is often assailed as "just a theory"; as something that cannot be proven, therefore it should not be treated as truth. In Kansas, and most recently in Georgia, it was recommended that the teaching of evolution be deemphasized, or even eliminated, in favor of religion-based proposals, such as "intelligent design." This does a great disservice to students in our schools.
Consider the theory of the atom. The United States was able to carry out the splitting of an atom based on an incomplete theory of the atom's structure, developed by Niels Bohr. To this day, no one has been able to "open the box" on the atom, but we can and do use the existing theory to spring forward to new and more exciting advances.
In the same way, no one can "open the box" of evolution. The value of the theory lies in the mountain of evidence that has been accumulated over the years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, chemists, and many others have observed the box over the years, and have refined our view of the contents tremendously. This theory is not a mere "supposition", any more than Bohr's model of the atom. It's a valuable and useful platform from which many new discoveries are being made.
Though proponents of "intelligent design" believe they can force us to hold to their stifling religious world view by equating "theory" with "supposition", the fact remains that evolution best explains the contents of the mysterious sealed box. And while the teaching of evolution will lead to even better observations and explanations of our origins, their ideas provide no basis for further exploration or gathering of knowledge.
And that's the bottom line. If the answer to our existence is "God did it," there really is no point in studying anything. If the physicists' complicated formulas on atomic theory are allowed to culminate it "and then a miracle happened", we can kiss our progess goodbye, and settle in for another few centuries of dark ages. I'd rather not pretend that I can see inside the black box through religion. The cost is simply too high.
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