Dave Rosborough

Every few weeks, it seems, some state, county, or other unit of government in the States tables a new piece of legislation to appease the “far-right Creationist / Intelligent Design” camp. The new trend seems to be towards “academic freedom” legislation - shouldn’t we allow our teachers the freedom to teach competing ideas? Shouldn’t we be open-minded? One can hardly imagine such legislation getting any play at all in Canada, but it seems to be quite a common occurrence in the US.

For me, the debate is a bit tiring. Now, oddly, I’m one of those pesky young-Earth Creationists (I don’t even waste my time couching it in “Intelligent Design” language, although I don’t mind it if you want to yourself), so you’d think I’d really enjoy this sort of thing, perhaps cheering quietly in front of my computer when the news article hits one of my favourite news sites.

Instead, what I actually do is groan inwardly (because so often the “far-right Creationist / Intelligent Design” camp gets their science wrong anyways), and then read, with the same sort of curiousity that makes others slow down to rubber-neck at a traffic accident, the extensive comments on the bottom of the article that inevitably follow.

The latest article that I’ve been reading is from Ars Technica. The comments, of course, range from the insightful to the insulting - insulting of my intelligence, if not my religion. There are the usual “why don’t we allow math teachers to teach that pi = 3?” comments, demonstrating a thorough misunderstanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, at least as espoused by, well, any philosopher of science in the past 150 years.

Then there’s the “Creationism isn’t science - it’s veiled religion” camp. They’re right in some sense, except that I don’t really see the point in veiling the religion bit. The problem is, if you want to take religious theories (note: not necessarily “theory” in the scientific sense of the word) of origins and throw them out, you’d more or less have to do the same with the evolutionary theories of origins.

The sense of the argument from those who comment on geek-news at Ars Technica or Slashdot seems to be that:

1. The scientific evidence for evolutionary origins of living things are overwhelming
2. There is no scientific basis for creation; in fact, a scientific basis couldn’t even be imagined for creation.
3. Therefore, creation doesn’t deserve a mention.

I can see where people get point #1 from, even if I don’t agree. Points #2 and #3, however, I’m afraid I don’t understand.

The “old-style” scientific method goes something like this:

1. Someone makes an observation about some phenomenon.
2. They hypothesize an explanation for that phenomenon.
3. They develop predictions that would be true if the hypothesis was true
4. They test the predictions, ideally by experiment, to support or refute the hypothesis.

So what is it, there, that precludes creation science? The observations are easy: life exists, life is complex. In fact, that’s far easier to buy now than it was even 60 years ago. The hypothesis seems obvious enough: “since life is so complex, it must have been made by something intelligent, like the Christian God”. Why is it that so many have a problem with calling this a hypothesis? One of the commenters on the article I was reading refers to creationism as the “antithesis of hypothesis”. In usual form, there’s no explanation of what invalidates creation as a hypothesis.

Then we move on to predictions. Can we really not imagine some rational predictions that would support the idea of a creator? Of course we can - but significantly, some of these are exactly the same predictions that evolutionists might make to support evolutionary theory. Google “creationist predictions”, and you’ll get lots of them - some good, some wacky, some are in between. But, clearly, there’s no issue here of coming up with predictions.

How about testing predictions? Well, we’ve got the same problem here that the evolutionary camp has. There’s some predictions that lend themselves very well to testing, and others which don’t, due to the time scales required for such research. We have a difficult time (or is it impossible?) developing experiments to test creationism, but we also have a difficult time developing experiments to test things like common origins. I’m using the proper sense of the word “experiment” here, mind you - we can certianly “test” predictions by making further observations, but that’s not the same as experiment.

Interestingly, in the philosophy of science, there are fewer and fewer people who support this nice, cut and dried view of the scientific method. Do a bit of reading of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper, and you’ll see that the idea of a standard “method” is rather non-representative of the reality of scientific discovery. Popper’s “imaginative” hypothetico-deductive model widely opens up the concept of hypothesis. Kuhn’s ideas of competing paradigms is directly relevant to the debate raging around the creation / evolution hypotheses, both today and in Darwin’s time.

One of the hallmarks of good science is a willingness to examine competing hypotheses. I think the last word needs to go to Imre Lakatos, one of the pre-eminent philosophers of science of the last century. His message, I think, applies to both camps - the creationists as much as the evolutionists:

Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behaviour is a certain scepticism even towards one’s most cherished theories. Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

Thus a statement may be pseudoscientific even if it is eminently ‘plausible’ and everybody believes in it, and it may be scientifically valuable even if it is unbelievable and nobody believes in it. A theory may even be of supreme scientific value even if no one understands it, let alone believes in it.

So, let’s move on already, but let’s do so in a way that embraces the controversy, rather than suppresses it. Let’s be skeptics of our own pet theories, by all means. Let’s allow our educators to talk about issues that matter to their students, rather than taking them to court for “shoving religion down our throats” when creation is mentioned. Who knows, we might actually learn something.