Evolution of Creationism

February 2, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

I hate to interrupt our Baloney dialog, but I can’t let this one go by unaddressed:
I am referring to Jerry A. Coyne’s thoughts in his February 4 article in The New Republic, “Seeing and Believing.” He so well illustrates the bias that he claims not to have. To begin, I must agree with his premise—Darwinism and belief in God are not compatible. I love the way he puts it in the fifth paragraph: Sure, “both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.)”
He is also probably right that the many scientists who will be celebrating and speaking on “Darwin Day” “will be speaking more to other scientists than to the American public.” (I find his statistics refreshing.) Where he misses the boat, however, is in a balanced view of the issue. In his second paragraph he lets his bias show: “On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts.” There is little more frustrating to me than a half truth. Yes, on one side is the bulk of scientists along with a determined court system. (I would have said a predetermined court system.) And on the other is the American people. But then how does he describe their positions? The Americans stand with religious mythology while the scientists and courts stand with letting children learn.
It really doesn’t take much investigation to reveal that most ID proponents advocate more exposure to evolution for children (meaning pros AND cons), while most evolutionists seek the status quo (can we call them conservatives?) of only exposure to supporting arguments and evidence.
As for the religious mythology part, consider the majority of Coyne’s article, dedicated to describing the evolution of Creationism. Again he is right in how Creationists have cleaned up their act and gotten down to scientific approaches instead of just pointing to their Bibles. He is right that judgments on laws and school board decisions have made them go back to the drawing board for more acceptable approaches. But he is wrong in assuming that there is no true science behind their arguments and he is wrong in conflating creationism and ID. Let me take those one at a time.
If science is truly non-theistic, it should not matter what paradigm the theorist holds. If a theorist holds that there is written revelation from God, or that there is the possibility of an undefined designer, or a spaghetti monster, or that nothing exists but mater and energy, so what? What should matter is if there is observable evidence to support testable hypotheses. And the determination of whether an hypothesis is testable should have nothing to do with credence the observer places in the theory. The evidence is there or not there (observation), and it does or does not support the theory (construct validity). This should be the test of inclusion as science.
And placing ID and creation into the same bucket, just because they oppose the same explanation of the observable universe, is only done by selective fact-gathering. The evidence presented in Coyne’s article is the slight changes in Creationist approaches to the law and courts. Then he leaps to made Behe’s views on change to be an evolutionary step in creationism. He can’t imagine two separate paradigms that question Darwinism, much less the reality—that ID is not a single belief system. A wide variety of faiths and lacks there of are behind those who are open minded enough to look at design evidence.
If ID is traced to any unifying thought, it is a vacation taken by a Berkley law professor who sought an intellectual diversion from his usual focus. Phillip Johnson picked up a stack of books on evolution simply to learn. What he discovered was an appalling dearth of factual support, which as a lawyer he found unacceptable. If anything, ID is the child of Darwinism. How could the author miss this? Doesn’t it speak for the possibility of this happening among other scientists? Is it too far fetched that other evolutionists have created other evolutionary trees to support pre-conceived notions of common origin that don’t really represent the total package of evidence?
Looking at the present, concluding what you want to believe, then searching the past for only the facts that support your view is not science. It’s not history. It’s a “just-so” story befitting of Rudyard Kipling.
But don’t we all tend to do that? Include myself. That’s why it is important for the sake of science to allow all biases to the table, not just those who from the beginning will not consider the possibility of a designer.

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