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15 answers to nonsense being spread by "creation science,""intelligent design," and "Expelled"



 
 
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Old April 29th 08, 11:02 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names[_1_]
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Default 15 answers to nonsense being spread by "creation science,""intelligent design," and "Expelled"

Scientific American Magazine - June 18, 2002

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing
down real science, but their arguments don't hold up

By John Rennie

When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural
selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it
fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics,
zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established
evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been
won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically
advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still
persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a
flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas
such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution
in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board
of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some
antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the
University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial,
admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a
"wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.

Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the
spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that
creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings
of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of
the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the
most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also
directs readers to further sources for information and explains why
creation science has no place in the classroom.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the
middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below
a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-
substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can
incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount
of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive
generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory
of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for
that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.

In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent
with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The
NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly
confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The
fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have
evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations,
the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot
see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their
existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in
cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make
physicists' conclusions less certain.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are
those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

"Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural
selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential
rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling
species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they
are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding
pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-
beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few
generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources.
Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to
the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Gal¿pagos
Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds
of population shifts in the wild [see his article "Natural Selection
and Darwin's Finches"; Scientific American, October 1991].

The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to
survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds,
irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the
circumstances.

3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or
falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and
can never be re-created.

This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions
that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution
and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species
over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of
new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the
level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil
record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be
related.

These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has
been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants
and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving
beak shapes among Gal¿pagos finches). Natural selection and other
mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--
can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference
from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the
historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology,
as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by
checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they
lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance,
evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans
(roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically
modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession
of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more
modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should
not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from
the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology
routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this,
and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document
the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from
inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil
record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens
appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even
particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast
in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining
characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in
the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the
narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would
eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.


4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any
issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find
articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace
evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are
all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the
University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary
literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation
science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he
found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by
Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M.
Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly
fruitless.

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects
their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and
other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even
submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious
journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or
advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain
evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one
disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world
good reason to take them seriously.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how
little solid science supports evolution.

Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how
speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral
relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a
species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are
like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of
evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is
nonetheless universal in biology.

Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take
scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the
disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-
authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most
eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated
equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that
most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--
which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet
creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous
prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they
present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to
materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.

When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that
seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in
context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove
illusory.


6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance
about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach
that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common
ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If
children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New
species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when
populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their
family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct.
The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may
become extinct.


7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have
learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other
building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves
into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation
for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities
of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth
in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those
constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet
was young.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing
to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even
if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for
instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago),
evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless
microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.


8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a
protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by
chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations
that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on
chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the
opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of
evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving
"desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating
"undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection
stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction
and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those
hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second,
could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences
of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College
wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while
preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be
correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like
Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336
iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could
reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.


9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more
disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved
from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have
evolved from protozoa.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it
were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible,
because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from
disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed
system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot
decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as
disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of
the word.

More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to
decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting
increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because
the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy
associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the
scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by
consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.


10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can
only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point
mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--
bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-
regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes
direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In
fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes
legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are
not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes
can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test
for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic
change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in
which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be
spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally
duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate
into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a
wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family
of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.


11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot
explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural
selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called
allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a
population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by
geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective
pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If
those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not
or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the
splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward
becoming a new species.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms,
but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are
constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for
causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms.
Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others
have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the
energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger
of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of
evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those
forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of
mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific
terms, is unproved.


12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take
centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative
stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about
how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's
Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct
community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms
that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In
practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms
isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils
do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical
and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of
apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of
these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of
selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat
preferences and other traits--and found that they had created
populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For
example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W.
Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if
they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain
environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the
resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different
environment.


13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures
that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils
intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most
famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers
and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs.
A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and
some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the
evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-
legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as
Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see "The
Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American,
May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through
millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our
ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern
humans.

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that
Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is
just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists
to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as
belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a
fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist
on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two.
These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an
unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from
molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as
evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products
diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary
relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records
the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various
organisms are transitional within evolution.


14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the
anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if
they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent
conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not
evolution.

This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on
evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian
William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the
most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that
natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex
structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine
invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to
Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on
inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate
organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the
example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The
eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of
its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor
the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is
half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even
"incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures
orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary
refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified
primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom
and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through
comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of
organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their
predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally
different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it
could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only
tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified
intelligence.


15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life
has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through
evolution.

"Irreducible complexity" is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of
Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical
Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible
complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap--a machine that could not
function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no
value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he
says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular
organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor.
The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into
motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those
that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this
intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is
virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He
makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other
molecular systems.

Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First,
there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites,
so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a
flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all
have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller
of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly
is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic
plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells.

The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe
suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve
multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The
final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the
novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for
other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve
the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used
in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the
University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that
Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

Complexity of a different kind--"specified complexity"--is the
cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski
of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free
Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a
way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only
logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years
ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.

Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate
that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or
designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and
cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have
demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield
extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in
organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as
yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the
complexity could not have arisen naturally.


"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of
modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the
universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.
Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts
governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions
experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to
flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous
descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new
particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover--their
definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must
fit within the existing framework of physics.

In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that
conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve
the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such
answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of
omnipotent intelligences?)

Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did
a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the
first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species
designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design
theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do
not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about
intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that
is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or
incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.

Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is
flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one
intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are
essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will
undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for
scientific ideas.

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can
push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative
answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of
light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing
the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape.
Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the
effort.

  #2  
Old April 29th 08, 01:29 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Quadibloc
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 7,018
Default 15 answers to nonsense being spread by "creation science,""intelligent design," and "Expelled"

On Apr 29, 4:02 am, "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names"
wrote:
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically
advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still
persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a
flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas
such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution
in science classrooms.


I am embarassed by the fact that, in the 21st Century, there are still
people who believe that someone who organized a band of brigands to,
among other things, pillage Jewish communities, and who took for
himself two wives from women left alive as the men of two groups of
Jews were massacred under his command, is God's most important
Prophet.

I am frightened when I read of some of these people burning down a
house of worship belonging to the followers of a denomination of their
own religion which happens to have additional writings to which it
refers - something like Christian Science in contrast with the
mainstream Christian world. Frightened, because earlier, in the first
year of the 21st Century, other intolerant followers of that religion
seized control of three airplanes... and anyone living in New York
City can tell you the rest of that story.

Despite this, it is not considered acceptable in mainstream political
discussion to suggest that our armies should march into the Islamic
world, with the intent of extirpating the religion of Islam,
presumably by rigorously suppressing its expression, perhaps using
Enver Hoxha or Kim Jong Il as our teachers of how to achieve the
required level of social control.

That there are Christians in the United States who believe that, since
what they regard as Holy Scripture contains statements relating to the
origin of current forms of life with empirical content, the truth of
these statements is as much an essential matter of faith as the
substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ or His resurrection... might
well be an embarassment to some.

But if September 11, 2001 is not sufficient reason to suppress the
religious beliefs of the world's one billion Muslims, mere
embarassment is not sufficient reason to suppress the religious
beliefs of the members of certain more conservative religious
denominations.

It may well be true that evolution is the modern, scientific
understanding of the origin of life, and creationism belongs to the
ignorant and uneducating. But that may not necessarily give you the
right to take the children of America's Fundamentalist and Evangelical
denominations and teach them that.

How you teach biology, and include evolution, which is very important
in modern biology, without teaching lies that falsely claim there is
any real doubt about evolution, and yet avoid indoctrinating children
against the faith of their fathers when that faith includes Young-
Earth Creationism as a tenet... is a difficult question to answer.

Yet, we see hints of a possible answer every time we open a newspaper,
and read about a crime for which someone is standing trial. Although
the facts may make it obvious he is as guilty as sin, yet the
newspapers refer to the accusations against the defendent as mere
allegations without directly commenting on their factuality.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining
characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in
the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the
narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would
eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.


Of course, falsifiability is a test that creationism fails more
thumpingly than evolution.

Did Adam have a navel? (In other words, look up Martin Gardner's
discussion of the book _Omphalos_ in "Fads and Fallacies in the Name
of Science", or the later book in which he addressed this matter
again.)

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are
all but nonexistent.


Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects
their evidence.


In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world
good reason to take them seriously.


It is certainly true that the typical creationist tract often contains
much reasoning that is of dubious soundness. There have been some
recent books published that have been touted as advancing more
intelligent arguments for intelligent design. While I hope for very
little from them, see below.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing
to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even
if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for
instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago),
evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless
microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.


Oh, look! Atheists believe in flying saucers! Isn't it a good thing
that Scientific American can't be cut by creationist film editors?

"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of
modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the
universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.


Ah, ha!

You deny that "a closed-minded scientific community rejects their
evidence", but now you're admitting it!

In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that
conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve
the mystery at hand.


This is not true. God is not a shadowy entity, He glows with the light
of a thousand suns! The only shadowy entities are the ones plotting to
undermine faith in Jesus Christ!

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can
push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative
answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of
light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing
the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape.
Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the
effort.


This is the reason why it is legitimate to be very suspicious of
people with a Creationist ax to grind. And to treat Divine
intervention as a theory of last resort.

But this point has to be used as the starting point for an explanation
of why methodological naturalism is legitimate, and is not necessarily
an enemy of religious faith as well.

John Savard
 




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