‘It’s not science’
by Don Batten
Published: 28 February 2002 (GMT+10)
Anti-creationists, such as atheists
by definition, commonly object that creation is religion and evolution is science. To defend this claim they will cite a list of criteria that define a ‘good scientific theory’. A common criterion is that the bulk of modern day practising scientists must accept it as valid science. Another criterion defining science is the ability of a theory to make predictions that can be tested. Evolutionists commonly claim that evolution makes many predictions that have been found to be correct. They will cite something like antibiotic resistance in bacteria as some sort of ‘prediction’ of evolution, whereas they question the value of the creationist model in making predictions. Since, they say, creation fails their definition of ‘science’, it is therefore ‘religion’, and (by implication) it can simply be ignored.
Evolutionary teachers often use equivocation to indoctrinate unsuspecting students with the general theory of evolution (GTE).
Response
Many attempts to define ‘science’ are circular. The point that a theory must be acceptable to contemporary scientists to be acceptable, basically defines science as ‘what scientists do’! In fact, under this definition, economic theories would be acceptable scientific theories, if ‘contemporary scientists’ accepted them as such.
In many cases, these so-called definitions of science are blatantly self-serving and contradictory. A number of evolutionary propagandists have claimed that creation is not scientific because it is supposedly untestable. But in the same paragraph they claim, ‘scientists have carefully examined the claims of creation science, and found that ideas such as the young Earth and global Flood are incompatible with the evidence.’ But obviously creation cannot have been examined (tested!) and found to be false if it’s ‘untestable’.
The definition of ‘science’ has haunted philosophers of science in the 20th century. The earlier approach of Bacon, who is considered the founder of the scientific method, was pretty straightforward:
observation → induction → hypothesis → test hypothesis by experiment → proof/disproof → knowledge.
Of course this, and the whole approach to modern science, depends on two major assumptions: causality and induction. The philosopher Hume made it clear that these are believed by ‘blind faith’ (Bertrand Russell’s words). Kant and Whitehead claimed to have solved the problem, but Russell recognized that Hume was right. Actually, these assumptions arose from faith in the Creator-God of the Bible, as historians of science like Loren Eiseley have recognized. Many scientists are so philosophically and theologically ignorant that they don’t even realize that they have these (and other) metaphysical assumptions. Being like a frog in the warming water, many do not even notice that there are philosophical assumptions at the root of much that passes as ‘science’. It’s part of their own worldview, so they don’t even notice. We at CMI are ‘up front’ about our acceptance of revelation (the Bible). Unlike many atheists, we recognize that a philosophy of life does not come from the data, but rather the philosophy is brought to the data and used in interpreting it.
A philosophy of life does not come from the data, but rather the philosophy is brought to the data and used in interpreting it.
Perceptions and bias
The important question is not ‘Is it science?’ We can just define ‘science’ to exclude everything that we don’t like, as evolutionists do today. Today, science is equated with naturalism: only materialistic notions can be entertained, no matter what the evidence. The prominent evolutionist Professor Richard Lewontin said:
‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’
Now that’s open-minded isn’t it? Isn’t ‘science’ about following the evidence wherever it may lead? This is where the religion (in the broadest sense) of the scientist puts the blinkers on. Our individual worldviews bias our perceptions. The atheist paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, made the following candid observation:
‘Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective “scientific method”, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots is self-serving mythology.’
So the fundamentally important question is, ‘which worldview (bias) is correct?’, because this will determine the correctness of the conclusions from the data.
Science a creationist invention
Of course the founders of modern science were not materialists (Sir Isaac Newton, widely considered the greatest scientist ever, is a prime example) and they did not see their science as somehow excluding a creator, or even making the Creator redundant. This recent notion has been smuggled into science by materialists.
Michael Ruse, the Canadian philosopher of science also made the strong point that the issue is not whether evolution is science and creation is religion, because such a distinction is not really valid. The issue is one of ‘coherency of truth’. In other words, there is no logically valid way that the materialist can define evolution as ‘science’ and creation as ‘religion’, so that he/she can ignore the issue of creation.
There is no logically valid way that the materialist can define evolution as ‘science’ and creation as ‘religion’, so that he/she can ignore the issue of creation.
A valid distinction
However, we can make a valid distinction between different types of science: the distinction between origins science and operational science. Operational science involves discovering how things operate in today’s Creation—repeatable and observable phenomena in the present. This is the science of Newton. However, origins science deals with the origin of things in the past—unique, unrepeatable, unobservable events. There is a fundamental difference between how the two work. Operational science involves experimentation in the here and now. Origins science deals with how something came into existence in the past and so is not open to experimental verification / observation (unless someone invents a ‘time machine’ to travel back into the past to observe). Studying how an organism operates (DNA, mutations, reproduction, natural selection etc.) does not tell us how it came into existence in the first place.
Operational science is quite different to origins or historical science; you can't do experiments on the past and interpretations of the data are strongly driven by the world-view of the scientist.
Of course it suits materialists to confuse operational and origins science, although I’m sure with most the confusion arises out of ignorance. Tertiary (college / university) courses in science mostly don’t teach the philosophy of science and certainly make no distinction between experimental / operational and historical / origins sciences. Organometallic chemist Dr Stephen Grocott, although having been through at least seven years of university training, later remarked:
‘Though I’d been working as a scientist for 10 years, I really only learnt what science was through [your ministry]. Some of the things people call “science” are really outside the realms of science; they’re not observable, testable, repeatable. The areas of conflict are beliefs about the past, not open to experimental testing.
Both evolution and creation fall into the category of origins science. Both are driven by philosophical considerations. The same data (observations in the present) are available to everyone, but different interpretations (stories) are devised to explain what happened in the past.
The inclusion of historical science, without distinction, as science, has undoubtedly contributed to the modern confusion over defining science. This also explains the statement by Gould (above), who, as a paleontologist, would like to see no distinction between his own historical science and experimental science. Gould rightly sees the paramount importance of presuppositions in his own ‘science’ and assumes that it applies equally to all science. Not so.
Do you believe in hot water?
Creationists have absolutely no problem with operational science, because the evidence drives operational science. It does not matter if you are a Christian, a Moslem, a Hindu, or an Atheist, pure water still boils at 100°C at sea level. However, the true Hindu might still think it is all an illusion, and some atheists embracing postmodernism espouse that ‘truth’ is an illusion. However, origins science is driven by philosophy. One’s belief system is fundamental to what stories you accept as plausible. Now if the majority of practitioners of origins / historical science have the wrong belief system (materialism), then the stories they find acceptable will also be wrong. So a majority vote of ‘contemporary scientists’ is hardly a good way to determine the validity of the respective stories. And origins science, or historical science, is essentially an exercise in story telling—Lewontin alluded to this story telling in the quote above.
Define terms consistently!
It also suits materialists to shift the definition of evolution to suit the argument. Let’s be clear that we are discussing the ‘General Theory of Evolution’ (GTE), which was defined by the evolutionist Kerkut as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.’ Many, perhaps inadvertently, perform this switching definitions trick in alluding to mutations in bacteria as corroborating ‘evolution’. This has little to do with the belief that hydrogen changed into humans over billions of years. The key difference is that the GTE requires not just change, but change that
increases the information content of the biosphere.
Predictions or ‘postdictions’?
Many evolutionists proffer mutations and antibiotic resistance in bacteria (operational science) as being some sort of prediction of evolution (origins science). In fact, genetics (operational science) was an embarrassment to evolution, which is probably the major reason that Mendel’s pioneering genetics research went unrecognized for so many years (Mendel’s discovery of discrete genes did not fit Darwin’s idea of continuous unlimited variation). When mutations were discovered, these were seen as a way of reconciling Darwinism with the observations of operational science—hence the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Mayr, Haldane, Fisher, etc.
So, Darwinism never
predicted anything, it was modified to accommodate the observations. In fact, because Darwinism is so malleable as to accommodate almost any conceivable observation, science philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed that it was not falsifiable, and therefore not a proper scientific theory in that sense.
What about the predictions of evolution vs creation? The track record of evolution is pretty dismal. On the other hand, modern science rides on the achievements of past creationists. For a clear example of modern-day scientific predictions based on a creationist model.
Popper’s notion that evolution is not a falsifiable scientific theory is underlined by the many ‘predictions’ of evolutionary theory that have been found to be incompatible with observations; and yet evolution reigns. For example, there is the profound absence of the many millions of transitional fossils that should exist if evolution were true. The very pattern in the fossil record flatly contradicts evolutionary notions of what it should be like. The evolutionist Gould has written at length on this conundrum.
Contrary to evolutionists’ expectations, none of the cases of antibiotic resistance, insecticide resistance, etc. that have been studied at a biochemical level (i.e. operational science) have involved
de novo origin of new complex genetic information (see the book
Not By Chance (above right). In fact, evolution never ‘predicted’ antibiotic resistance, because historically it took the medical field by surprise.
Contrary to evolutionists’ expectations, breeding experiments reach limits; change is not unlimited. This matches exactly what we would expect from Genesis 1, where it says that God created organisms to reproduce true to their different kinds.
Evolutionists expected that, given the right conditions, a living cell could make itself (abiogenesis); creationists said this was impossible. Operational science has destroyed this evolutionary notion; so much so that many evolutionists now want to leave the origin of life out of the debate. Many propagandists claim that evolution does not include this, although the theories of abiogenesis are usually called ‘chemical evolution’.
Because Darwinism is so malleable as to accommodate almost any conceivable observation, science philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed that it was not falsifiable, and therefore not a proper scientific theory in that sense.
Falsified but not abandoned
So, why do evolutionists persist with their spurious theory? For many it’s because they have never heard anything else. For avowed materialists it’s the ‘only game in town’—the only materialistic story available to explain how everything came to be; the materialist’s creation myth. It’s a bit like the proverbial ostrich putting its head in the sand, thinking that all that exists is what it can see under the sand. The ostrich’s worldview excludes everything that it does not find convenient. In the darkness of the sand, all unacceptable facts cease to exist.
Light in the darkness!
Jesus Christ came as ‘the light of the world’ (John 8:12), when the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature. He came to shed the light of God in dark places. The greatest darkness is to live without God; to live as if you are a cosmic accident, just ‘re-arranged pond-scum’, as one evolutionist put it. Sadly, many are being duped into thinking that way and we are seeing the horrendous consequences in escalating youth suicide, drug problems, family break-up, violence, etc. How much we need the light of Jesus to shine! God will hold each one of us accountable—all of us deserve His condemnation. But the Bible says that He has provided a way of escape through Jesus Christ for all that turn to God, humbly admitting our need of forgiveness.
