A religious Postmodern definition of 'science'

The New York Times this morning drew my attention to a new definition of science coming out of the Kansas school system.

This document (pdf) outlines the changes. The new definition of science is straight out of postmodernism 101:

"2. Defines Science" as: "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." "

It's interesting that the document also notes that this definition excludes 'supernatural' explanations from the definition of science. However, this philosphical pacifier doesn't make a lot of difference to the argument--creation 'science' has moved on from Genesis 1; and creationists are now more commonly adherents of the theory of 'intelligent design'.

And while the document claims to exclude 'intelligent design' from the category of science, its hard to see how the above definition can uphold that claim--on the definition of science given above, intelligent design would be a valid alternative to the theory of evolution.

The document also states that the definition does not prohibit 'discussion' of intelligent design. And the changes go through great pains to ensure that the theory of evolution is presented as a theory that 'postulates', or 'seeks to explain' the world.

So here's the upshot: 'evolution' can be taught as 'just' a theory along with 'intelligent design' as an appropriate, or at least possible, meta theory which challenges the meta-theoretical implications of evolution-such as the concepts of variation and selection as just another variety of crass materialism. This is actually a neat solution (from the perspective of a fundametalist christian, that is) which avoids an outright debate between evolutionary theory and Genesis 1 at a level where observations and objectivity matter, but neatly shifts the whole package to a discussion about meta-theoretical implications where a straw man variety of the implications of evolutionary theory (such as 'man descends from the apes') can be contrasted against religiously inspired views without recourse to such things as material evidence.

I wonder whether this distinction between theories and meta-theories will actually filter through in the classrooms. It should be fairly clear that this step is a win for the religious right given that Christianity's problems with the theory of evolution have historically been focused more on its meta-theoretical implications than on the theory per se anyway.

The point is that 'intelligent design' doesn't stack up as a meta-theory either. To give credence to intelligent design would be to advance the empirically weaker meta-theory. By means of logical necessity, the theory of intelligent design is empirically empty. Why? Because it has no power to exclude certain ways the world could be; because all its explanations are by necessity post hoc, ad hoc arguments of the sort that the world was created to make it look 'as if' the theory of evolution, or any other cosmological theory were 'true' (and the word true has to be in scare quotes too for this to make sense).

A true postmodernist doesn't care about such distinctions--for the postmodernist such notions stem from a classical notion of philosophy of science which lost its last vestiges of validity somehwere in the mid-1960s, with the wider acceptance of Kuhn's notion of scientific paradigms. For the true postmodernist there are no a priori superior ways of 'making sense', just different ways. And in the end the 'way of making sense' that can muscle into power wins.