Science and Creation

Science and Creation

One of the less endearing – and more dangerous -features of the 20th century has been a worldwide tendency to substitute rhetoric for discourse. By now, reasoned debate is a rarity. There is seldom even any effort to understand an opposing point of view. Instead, a person attributes opinions or attitudes to the other fellow and proceeds to heap billingsgate upon him because of them, although they may not actually be what he means at all. Living near Berkeley, California, I have over the years watched this sort of thing develop in the academic community and its hangers-on, until I am inclined to agree with a fictional character of mine who remarked, “Sure, I'm anti-intellectual. I prefer people who think...”

Well, that may be just a little exaggerated, a hint of the same behavior I was condemning. It got your attention, though, didn't it? Let me try to make the rest of this essay an exercise in rationality.

I propose to discuss the “scientific creationism” is so much in the current news. My conclusion will scarcely surprise you: that “scientific creationism” is a contradiction in terms. If that were all, there would be no point ins stating it yet again. Why preach to the choir? However, it does seem to me that spokesmen for the scientific establishment have generally made their points poorly, because often they themselves don't quite realize what the concept of evolution signifies. Thus the argument we'll advance against creationism here will take a turn that may prove surprising, therefore enlightening, to some readers. Indeed, it will be only the first step in a brief exploration of the philosophy of science. 

We begin by forswearing. The creationists are not a bunch of yahoos. They are generally well-educated and well-mannered individuals, a number of them with excellent scientific credentials. (While I don't know just what James Irwin's views on evolution are, we all know he believes the Biblical story of Noah is substantially true, and led an expedition in search of the remains of the Ark – after having been on the moon).  Nor do most of them want to suppress any other doctrine. Socially and politically, they have several quite valid, important points to make. Secular humanism has in fact become the teaching of the public schools, to the exclusion of crucial parts of our heritage. The effects on culture are already sad, the implications for the future of liberty and even for national survival ominous. Would it really infringe anybody's constitutional rights if children were to learn something about the roots of their civilization?

The question remains: How shall we persuade a lot of perfectly nice people that they are undermining a cornerstone of their entire civilization? Illustration by Elena.

But this does not mean they should learn things, at taxpayer expense, which simply are not true. By now, the scientific attitude and the body of discoveries to which it has led are themselves basic to society, and not merely Western society. “Scientific” creationism is not content to maintain that the universe is the work of God. It claims that this Earth is, at most, a few thousand years old, and that the species of living beings we know today came into being in their present forms. Of course, the First Amendment guarantees any American the right to believe and argue for that, and teach it privately. But the notion has no more claim on “equal time” in public education than do, say, astrology, psionics, or Marxism.

It is scarcely necessary here to repeat what has often been pointed out: that if the creationist assertion were true, then our astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and archaeology must be false. For example, evidence for geological ages includes matters as diverse as the well-established laws of radioactive decay and a cosmic red shift observed by familiar techniques of spectroscopy. Much has been made of certain unexplained anomalies in certain mineral formations – far too much. Science is always coming upon such phenomena, and needing time and effort to learn what brings them about.. We don't yet understand ball lightning very well, either; but nobody says that, on this account, we should throw out our meteorology. Instead, what understanding we do have provides a context within which to seek explanations of countless details.

Thus the claim that our planet is less than a million years old, and has undergone no significant changes during its existence, is incompatible with science. At best, a person might declare that God created the universe recently, full of misleading clues to something quite different. Emotionally, I am inclined to think this is an insult to the Creator. In the famous words of Einstein, the Lord is subtle, but He is not malicious. Logically, we need only note that the declaration is, by its nature, untestable, incapable of being disproven; therefore it is devoid of empirical meaning.

We might, though, find it worthwhile at this point to refute one statement frequently made by creationists, that the development of matter and life from primitive to complex forms would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Even some who have accepted evolution as a fact, such as the late Lecomte de Noüy, have maintained that it would have been statistically impossible without supernatural guidance. They should have known better. 

Part of the problem arises because the second law is deceptively simple looking but has profound and far-reaching implications. It can be expressed in confusingly many ways, and has been. In one of my college textbooks (Physical Chemistry, by Frank MacDougall, Macmillan, 1944) the phrasing of the law goes: It is impossible to devise any mechanism or machine by means of which a quantity of heat can be converted into the equivalent amount of work without producing other changes in the state of some body or bodies concerned in the process. Another book (Introduction to Theoretical Physics, by Leigh Page, Van Nostrand, 1928) puts it as: No self-acting engine can transfer heat from a body of lower temperature to one of higher temperature. Here a “self-acting engine” means, essentially, one which is isolated from outside influences and which takes its working substance through one or more complete cycles.

There are numerous other, equally valid versions of the same truth, but these two should be enough to show that we are dialing with something which is quite basic and not at all self-evident.

There is no scientific argument against evolution, only an antiscientific one. Image by Elena.