A number of years ago I reported on a fantastic paper in the journal Science by a leading science education theorist, Jonathan Osborne, at Stanford. He found that students learn science best when they are able study both evidence “that supports … or does not support” a given scientific claim. The paper showed it is critical that students, when studying science, use arguments for and against given views: “Critique is not, therefore, some peripheral feature of science, but rather it is core to its practice, and without argument and evaluation, the construction of reliable knowledge would be impossible.” Now, a new paper in the journal Science & Education makes a similar argument.
The paper, “A Critical Religious Education Perspective on Argumentation in Science and Religious Education,” notes that argumentation is a vital part of science education:
Argumentation has become a central pedagogical strategy in science education and is widely used to foster critical thinking and conceptual understanding. An extensive body of research has contributed to the development of structured argumentation frameworks as effective tools to enhance students’ reasoning skills, scientific literacy, and epistemic agency.
A Point Made Many Times Before
The authors make a point that we’ve made many times before: Many studies show that students learn science best when engaging in critical thinking — that is, when they are asked to understand arguments for and against a particular viewpoint. Yet as I observed back in 2010, this wisdom is often ignored in education about evolution:
While leading science education authorities regularly laud the importance of implementing the inquiry method of teaching science, they effectively jettison this pedagogical philosophy when recommending standards for teaching evolution. Instead, they recommend teaching evolution as unadulterated fact, thereby losing many of the benefits gained from the inquiry method of science education.
It’s good to know that in 2026, the prevailing view in the field of science education theory remains that students should learn science through argumentation. The article in Science & Education continues:
Argumentation in science education is deeply linked to how scientific knowledge is constructed and justified. As Duschl and Osborne (2002) argue, science education should focus not only on “what we know, but also on how we know and why we believe it” (p. 40). This requires understanding how scientific evidence is used to build explanations and the selection criteria. Argumentation is a central classroom practice for achieving these goals. As Jiménez-Aleixandre and Erduran (2007) note, the use of argumentation in science education makes cognitive and metacognitive processes accessible, while also developing students’ communicative skills, critical thinking, scientific literacy, and scientific reasoning. It also supports “the enculturation into the scientific culture and developing epistemic criteria” (p. 5).
Recent literature suggests that research on scientific argumentation now extends beyond demonstrating classroom benefits toward broader concerns such as assessment, classroom culture, teacher preparation, and differing theoretical approaches. It also argues that argumentation-based instruction can support learning across cognitive, ontological, and intentional dimensions, especially when combined with scaffoldings such as collaboration, feedback, and contextual support. Within this literature, Toulmin’s model remains influential because it offers a practical framework for analysing how scientific claims are supported, justified, and challenged in classroom discourse. Toulmin’s argumentation model has also been shown to support high-quality argumentation and critical thinking skills in science classrooms.
The article further notes that “argumentation-based approaches can enhance students’ understanding of both religious and scientific concepts.” These are sensible approaches to science education and it’s unfortunate that so many evolution advocates oppose them when it comes to how evolution should be taught.
Evidence-Backed Surprise
Meanwhile, a new article in Science, “Advancing science by designing for surprise,” argues that scientists should interpret their results to formulate new and “unexpected” ideas. According to authors James Evans, Casey Petroff, and Gary King:
Information theory, pioneered by mathematician Claude Shannon, offers a different perspective: only surprises carry new information. … A paper that confirms what readers already believe tells them little they did not already know and perhaps nothing that changes their worldview
[…]
A paper that changes nothing about how people think is uninformative and uninteresting. Science advances through the systematic, rigorous deployment of the unexpected. It is time for the scientific community to learn how to design — and write — for surprise.
In other words, a scientific paper that simply “confirms what readers already believe” is “uninformative and uninteresting.” But papers that engage in “rigorous deployment of the unexpected” are what promote “advances” in science.
Are They Talking About Evolution vs. Design?
Having read countless papers from evolutionary biology — which frequently (if not typically) aim to simply bolster a theory that everyone “knows” is true — I would say this paper could easily be talking about the basic distinction between papers arguing for evolution versus those that support intelligent design.
And there’s another way that this Science article seems to unintentionally recommend scientific literature supporting intelligent design: ID draws from diverse fields to come to novel conclusions:
[C]itation impact disproportionately rewards surprises that cross disciplinary boundaries. The most impactful surprises come from “knowledge expeditions” where scientists from one field travel to address problems in a distant other. These outsiders bring alien data patterns, frameworks, and theories that disrupt expectations.
But how can we tell the difference between findings that are hyped and those that are backed by evidence? The answer, the article tells us, is to assess whether the thesis is supported by diverse independent lines of evidence:
Validating a surprise requires more evidence to be convincing, and the best such evidence is numerous, diverse and, at best, produces consilience. In the 1840s, philosopher William Whewell argued that when independent inductions from disparate phenomena converge on the same generalization, the conjunction is more robust than any single line of evidence. A surprising finding supported by a single, underpowered study is hype. But a surprising finding supported by independent methods, diverse datasets, distant researchers, and intersecting theoretical mechanisms is the most valuable kind of scientific contribution. Consilience makes the surprise difficult to dismiss as an artifact of clever framing. This implies a calibration norm: The intensity of surprise framing must track the strength and breadth of the evidence. This involves the author identifying the audience whose priors the evidence most violates, confirming the evidence can bear that rhetorical weight, and staking reputation on the claim.
In other words, a consilience of evidence from diverse fields is the best way to show that a scientific idea — even a “surprising” one — is correct. This too aligns strongly with intelligent design, which sticks to the evidence and whose motto is “Follow the evidence where it leads!”
ID Matches These Recommendations
I’m sure the authors of these papers didn’t mean to pay ID any compliments, but everything we’ve seen here closely tracks with intelligent design literature.
As the Science & Education article puts it, ID musters arguments for and against the reigning evolutionary paradigm and intelligent design, showing the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas.
And, as the article in Science recommends, ID papers draw evidence from disparate or diverse scientific fields — information theory, molecular biology, paleontology, cosmology, and engineering, to name a few — which converge upon a particular conclusion: that design in life and the cosmos is real. This “consilience” of evidence is precisely what the Science article argues is demonstration of a robust scientific conclusion.