Here's one of many articles describing the flaws and problems of so called "creation science" as a whole. It quite rightly points out that as soon as you posit "God did it" you are no longer doing anything that can be classed as science. Creationism is pure pseudoscience and only someone like starrise who fervently believes in it would argue that point.
My Favorite Pseudoscience
Reports of the National Center for Science Education
Title:
My Favorite Pseudoscience
Author(s):
Eugenie C. Scott
NCSE Executive Director
Volume:
23
Issue:
1
Year:
2003
Date:
January–February
This version might differ slightly from the print publication.
Paul Kurtz’s letter inviting me to write this article suggested that I describe “my own personal involvement” in the skeptical movement. My introduction to skepticism was a fascination with a particular pseudoscience, “creation science”. From the day I first heard this phrase, I was hooked.
In 1971, I was a graduate student in physical anthropology at the University of Missouri. One day, my professor, Jim Gavan, handed me a stack of small, brightly colored, slick paper pamphlets from the Institute for Creation Research. “Here”, he said, “Take a look at these. It’s called ‘creation science.’”
Wow. Here I was studying to be a scientist, and here were people calling themselves scientists, but we sure were not seeing the world the same way. They were looking at the same data: the same fossils, the same stratigraphy, the same biological principles, and so on. But from these data, creationists were concluding that all living things had appeared in their present form, at one time, a few thousand years ago. I was concluding that living things had branched off from common ancestors over scarcely imaginable stretches of time. They were concluding that the entire planet had been covered by water, and that all the present-day geological features of earth had been determined by this flood and its aftermath. I could not see any evidence for this at all, and much evidence against it. Why were we coming up with such different conclusions? The data were not all that different, but the philosophy of science and the approach to problem solving sure were.
I began collecting “creation science” literature as an academic enterprise: an interesting problem in the philosophy of science and critical thinking. Due to the pressures of graduate school and my first teaching job, I was not able to pursue it especially deeply, but students would occasionally bring up the topic. I would tell them that even if proponents of “creation science” claimed they were doing science, one cannot claim that one is doing science if one is doing something very different from what scientists are doing. “Creation science” was a good foil to use in teaching students about the nature of science.
Philosophers of science can — and do — argue incessantly over the definition of science. I do not know how many academic papers have been written attempting to solve the “demarcation problem”: what qualifies as science and what does not. Some partisans even go so far as to claim that science is impossible to define. I confess to having little tolerance for such “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” type discussions. In my present job as executive director of the National Center for Science Education, I regularly encounter the public’s misunderstanding of the most basic elements of science. I deal with people who nod in agreement with a typical creationist statement that “neither evolution nor creationism is scientific because no one was there to observe it”. I deal with people who agree with creation scientists stating that “evolution is not scientific because evolutionists are always changing their minds”. A very popular view is that we should “give the kids all the options” in a science classroom, and teach them both data demonstrating that evolution took place and “the evidence” for the “alternate theory” that God created everything at one time in its present form — two mutually exclusive views.
Against such a background, the philosopher’s discussion of the nuances of the demarcation problem become an intellectual luxury far removed from what people need to hear. Doubtless to the frustration of my colleagues in the philosophy of science, my job requires me to simplify — probably far beyond what they consider acceptable. But in doing so, I can make a little progress in helping the public to understand why science works, and also why “creation science” is not science. Maybe down the road the nonscientists I encounter can tackle falsificationism and the demarcation problem; right now, I would be happy if they understood two basic rules of science that I believe the majority of scientists would agree upon — however much they might disagree on others. And — more importantly for this discussion — “creation science” can be rejected as science based even on this simplest of understandings of what science is.
The nature of science
There are two basic principles of science that creationism violates. First, science is an attempt to explain the natural world in terms of
natural processes, not supernatural ones. This principle is sometimes referred to as
methodological naturalism. In time, a consensus of how some aspect of nature works or came about is arrived at through testing alternate explanations against the natural world. Through this process, the potential exists to arrive at a truly objective understanding of how the world works.
Please allow a digression here. I am not presenting a cut-and-dried formula — “the scientific method” — as if the process of science were a lockstep algorithm. It is much untidier than that. Of course science reflects the time and culture in which it is found. Of course scientists, being human, have biases and make mistakes. Yet the growth of knowledge in a field is not the result of individual achievement, but rather is a function of a number of minds working on the same and different problems over time. It is a collective process, rather than the result of actions of a solitary genius. Individual scientists may be biased, closed-minded, and wrong, but science as a whole lurches forward in spite of it all thanks to its built-in checks.
An important check is that explanations must be tested against the natural world. Thus there is an external standard against which a scientist’s views are measured, regardless of his biases or the biases of his opponents. Unpopular ideas may take longer to be accepted, and popular ideas may take longer to be rejected, but the bottom line determining acceptance or rejection is whether the ideas work to describe, predict, or explain the natural world. The Soviet geneticist Lysenko foisted a “Lamarckian” (inheritance of acquired characteristics) theory of heredity upon the Soviet scientific establishment because Lamarckian genetics was more politically compatible with Marxism than Mendelian genetics. His politically biased science set Soviet genetics back a full generation, but today Russians employ Mendelian genetics. Wheat raised in refrigerators does not grow any better in Siberia than regular wheat, and after a series of 5-year plans gone bust, eventually the Soviet government figured out that Lysenko had to go. “Mendelism” works; “Lysenkoism” does not.
Science is nothing if not practical. The explanations that are retained are those that work best, and the explanations that work best are ones based on material causes. Nonmaterial causes are disallowed.
The second minimal principle of science is that explanations (which is what theories are) are tentative, and may change with new data or new theory. Now, do not misunderstand me: I am not claiming that all scientific explanations
always change, because in fact some do not. Nonetheless, scientists must be willing to revise explanations in light of new data or new theory. The core ideas of science tend not to change very much — they might get tinkered with around the edges — whereas the frontier ideas of science may change a lot before we feel we understand them well.
Here then are two critical strictures on modern science: science must explain using
natural causes, and scientists must be willing to change their explanations when they are refuted. Viewed in the light of these two basic tenets of science, “creation science” fails miserably.
Explaining through natural cause
When a creationist says, “God did it”, we can confidently say that he is not doing science. Scientists do not allow explanations that include supernatural or mystical powers for a very important reason. To explain something scientifically requires that we test explanations against the natural world. A common denominator for testing a scientific idea is to hold constant (“control”) at least some of the variables influencing what you are trying to explain. Testing can take many forms, and although the most familiar test is the direct experiment, there exist many research designs involving indirect experimentation, or natural or statistical control of variables.
Science’s concern for testing and control rules out supernatural causation. Supporters of the “God did it” argument hold that God is omnipotent. If there are omnipotent forces in the universe, by definition, it is impossible to hold their influences constant; one cannot “control” such powers. Lacking the possibility of control of supernatural forces, scientists forgo them in explanation. Only natural explanations are used. No one yet has invented a
theometer, so we will just have to muddle along with material explanations.
Another reason for restricting ourselves to natural explanations is practical. It works. We have gone a long way towards building more complete and, we think better, explanations through methodological naturalism, and most of us feel that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Also, being able to say, “God (directly) did it” is a “science stopper”, in the words of philosopher Alvin Plantinga (2001). To say “God did it” means one does not need to look further for a natural explanation. For example, creationist literature abounds with criticisms of origin-of-life research. Because scientists have not yet reached a consensus on how the first replicating molecule came about, creationists argue, this is an intractable problem that should just be attributed to “God did it”. Well, if we stop looking for a natural explanation for the origin of life, surely we will never find it. So even if we have not found it yet, we must nonetheless slog on.
“Creation science”, for all its surface attempts (especially in its presentation to the general public) to claim to abide by a strictly scientific approach, relying solely on empirical data and theory, eventually falls back to violating this cardinal rule of methodological naturalism. Sometimes one has to go a bit deep in an argument, but eventually, as in the well-known Sidney Harris cartoon, “then a miracle occurs”.
For example, to a creation scientist holding to Flood Geology, Noah’s Flood was an actual historical event, and representatives of all land animals plus Noah, his wife, their sons, and their sons’ wives were on a large boat. Q:
All land animals? A: Sure. The Ark is the size of the
Queen Mary. Q: But there are thousands of species of beetles alone! How could
all land animals be on the Ark? A: Oh, Noah did not take two of every
species. He took pairs of each
kind, and kinds are higher taxonomic levels than species. Q: But how could only 8 people take care of a
Queen Mary-sized boat full of animals? How could they feed, water, and clean out the stalls? A: They did not have that much work, because the rocking movement of the boat caused most of the animals to estivate, or go dormant, obviating the need for feeding, watering, and stall-cleaning. Q: But the Ark floated around for almost a year before landing! Small mammals, such as mice and shrews, have a high surface–area: body–mass ratio, and have to eat almost their weight in food each day just to keep their metabolism up. These animals could not have survived estivation. A: Well, then, a miracle occurred.
Push a creationist argument far enough, and sure enough, it will become necessary to resort to a miracle. But miracle-mongering cannot be part of science.
In addition to the familiar “creation science” that got me interested in this particular pseudoscience, in the last ten years or so a newer form of anti-evolutionism has made its appearance: “Intelligent Design” (ID) creationism. ID harks back to the 1802 position of clergyman William Paley that structural complexity (such as the vertebrate eye for Paley or the structure of DNA for his latter-day bedfellows) is too complicated to have come about through a natural process. Therefore it must have been designed by an “intelligence”. The “intelligence” of course is God, and attributing natural causality to a supernatural power of course violates methodological naturalism. Recognizing that methodological naturalism is the standard of modern science, ID proponents argue that it should be scuttled, and replaced with what they call “theistic science”, which possesses the enviable ability to invoke the occasional miracle when circumstances seem to require it (Scott 1998). ID proponents are content to allow methodological naturalism for the vast amount of science that is done; they wish to leave the possibility of supernatural intervention only for those scientific problems that have theological implications, such as the Big Bang, the origin of life, the appearance of “kinds” of animals (the Cambrian Explosion), and the origin of humans. The strength of methodological naturalism is perhaps best illustrated by its general acceptance by both the ID and “creation science” wings of the anti-evolution movement — except when it comes to religiously sensitive topics.
The importance of changing your mind
So creationists violate the first cardinal rule of science, the rule of methodological naturalism, but they also violate the second cardinal rule — that of being willing to change or reject one’s explanation based on good evidence to the contrary. This is most clearly revealed by the creationist treatment of empirical data. Now, the problem is not that creationists sift through the scientific literature to find data that support the creation “model”; that in itself is not out of line. Scientists do seek confirming data (in the real world, as well as in the literature). But creationists
ignore evidence that disconfirms their view, because they are not willing to change their explanations in the light of new data or theory.
Judges are not famous for their scientific acuity (witness Justice Scalia’s dissent in the 1987 Supreme Court’s Edwards v Aguillard case), but one judge got it remarkably right. William Overton, in the decision in McLean v Arkansas, wrote,
The creationists’ methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing scientific data, and thereafter reach the conclusions stated in section 4(a).
Instead, they take the Book of Genesis and attempt to find scientific support for it.
While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion they choose, they cannot properly describe the methodology used as scientific, if they start with a conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation.
A theory that is by its own terms dogmatic, absolutist and never subject to revision is not a scientific theory.
For decades now, creationists have claimed that the amount of meteoritic dust on the moon disproves evolution. The argument goes like this: Based on scientific measurements, the amount of meteoritic dust falling on the earth is X tons per year; a proportionate amount must also fall on the moon. If the earth and moon were ancient as evolutionists claim, then the amount of dust on the moon would be several hundreds of feet thick, since in the scant atmosphere of the moon, the dust would not burn up as it does on the earth. When astronauts landed on the moon, they found only a few inches of dust, proving that the moon is young, so the earth is young, so there is not enough time for evolution, so evolution did not happen and therefore God created the earth, moon, and everything else in the universe 10 000 years ago.
Decades ago, creationists were told that the data they use for the amount of dust falling on the earth was inaccurate. More accurate measurements of the amount of meteoritic dust influx to the earth are degrees of magnitude smaller than the original estimates cited by creationists. Before astronauts landed on the moon, satellites had accurately measured the amount of dust occurring in space, and NASA predicted that the surface of the moon would be covered by no more than a few inches of dust — exactly what astronauts found. Even though this information has been available for decades, and evolutionists time and again have pointed out flaws in the creationist argument, the dust on the moon argument still is touted as “evidence against evolution”. If this were a normal scientific theory, it would have been abandoned and forgotten long ago, an empirical stake in its heart, but this creationist zombie keeps rising again and again.
It is hard to argue that one is doing science when one can never bring oneself to abandon a refuted argument, and “creation science” is littered with such rejects. More modern forms of creationism such as “intelligent design theory” have not been around as long, and have not built up quite as long a list of refuted claims, but things do not look very good for them at this point. Michael Behe (1996) has proposed the idea that certain biochemical functions or structures are “irreducibly complex”: because all components must be present and functioning, such structures could not have come about through the incremental process of natural selection. The examples he uses in his book Darwin’s Black Box, such as the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting cascade, appear not to be irreducibly complex after all. Worse, even granting the theoretical possibility that an irreducibly complex structure could exist, there is no reason it could not be produced by natural selection. A (theoretically) irreducibly complex structure would not have to have all of its components assembled in its present form all at one time. The way natural selection works, it is perfectly reasonable to envision that some parts of such a structure could be assembled for one purpose, other parts for another, and the final “assembly” results in a structure that performs a function different from any of the “ancestral” functions. As complex a biochemical sequence as the Krebs cycle has recently been given an evolutionary explanation of this sort (Melandez-Hevia and others 1996).
I am willing to give “intelligent design” (ID) a little more time to demonstrate that it is, as it aspires to be, a truly scientific movement. To be able legitimately to claim that ID is scientific, however, will require that its proponents be willing to abandon ideas in the light of refuting evidence — something that their ideological ancestors, the “creation scientists”, have been unable to demonstrate, and which we have seen precious little of from the leaders of the ID movement.
Continued...
