By Bill Storage, Jan. 21, 2024

Creation Science can refer either to young-earth or old-earth creation theories. Young Earth Creationism (YEC) makes specific claims about the creation of the universe from nothing, the age of the earth as inferred from the Book of Genesis and about the creation of separate “kinds” of creatures. Wikipedia’s terse coverage, as with Lysenkoism, brands it a pseudoscience without explanation. But YEC makes bold, falsifiable claims about biology and genetics (not merely evolution), geology (plate tectonics or lack thereof), and, most significantly, Newtonian mechanics. While it posits unfalsifiable unobservables including a divinity that sculpts the universe in six days, much of its paradigm contrasts modern physics in testable ways. Creation Science is not a miscarriage of science in the sense of some of the others. I’m covering it here because it has many similarities to other bad sciences and is a great test of demarcation criteria. Creation Science does limited harm because it preaches to the choir. I doubt anyone ever joined a cult because they were persuaded that creationism is scientific.

Intelligent Design

Old-earth creationism, now known as Intelligent Design (ID) theory is much different. While ID could have confined itself to the realm of metaphysics and stayed out of our cross hairs, it did not. ID mostly confines itself to the realm of descriptions and explanations, but it explicitly claims to be a science. Again, Wikipedia brands ID as pseudoscience, and, again, this distinction seems shallow. I’m also concerned that the label is rooted in anti-Christian bias with reasons invented after the labelling as a rationalization. To be clear, I see nothing substantial in ID that is scientific, but its opponents’ arguments are often not much better than those of its proponents.

It might be true that a supreme being, benevolent or otherwise, guided the hand of cosmological and biological evolution. But simpler, adequate explanations of those processes exist outside of ID, and ID adds no explanatory power to the theories of cosmology and biology that are independent of it. This was not always the case. The US founding fathers, often labeled Christian by modern Christians, were not Christian at all. They were deists, mainly because they lacked a theoretical framework to explain the universe without a creator, who had little interest in earthly affairs. They accepted the medieval idea that complex organisms, like complex mechanisms, must have a designer. Emergent complexity wasn’t seen as an option. That they generally – notably excepting David Hume – failed to see the circularity of this “teleological argument” can likely be explained by Kuhn’s notion of the assent of the relevant community. Each of them bought it because they all bought it. It was the reigning paradigm.

While intelligent design could logically be understood to not require a Judeo-Christian god, ID seems to have emerged out of fundamentalist Christian objection to teaching evolution in public schools. Logically, “intelligent design” could equally apply to theories involving a superior but not supreme creator or inventor. Space aliens may have seeded the earth with amino acids – the Zoo Hypothesis. Complex organic molecules could have been sent to earth on a comet by highly advanced – and highly patient – aliens, something we might call directed panspermia. Or we could be living in a computer simulation of an alien school kid. Nevertheless, ID seems to be a Christian undertaking positing a Christian God.

Opponents are quick to point this out. ID is motivated by Christian sentiments and is closely aligned with Christian evangelism. Is this a fair criticism of ID as a science? I tend to think not. Newton was strongly motivated by Christian beliefs, though his religion, something like Arianism or Unitarianism, would certainly be rejected by modern Christians. Regardless, Newton’s religious motivation for his studies no more invalidates them than Linus Pauling’s (covered below) economic motivations invalidate his work. Motivations of practitioners, in my view, cannot be grounds for calling a field of inquiry pseudoscience or bad science. Some social scientists disagree.

Dominated by Negative Arguments

YEC and ID writings focus on arguing that much of modern science, particularly evolutionary biology, cannot be correct. For example, much of YEC’s efforts are directed at arguing that the earth cannot be 4.5 billion years old. Strictly speaking, this ( the theory that another theory is wrong) is a difficult theory to disprove. Most scientists tend to think that disproving a theory that itself aims to disprove geology is pointless. They hold that the confirming evidence for modern geologic theory is sufficient. Karl Popper, who held that absence of disconfirmation was the sole basis for judging a theory good, would seem to have a problem with this though. YEC also holds theories defending a single worldwide flood within the last 5,000 years. That seems reasonably falsifiable, if one accepts a large body of related science including several radioactive dating techniques, mechanics of solids, denudation rate calculations, and much more.

Further, it is flawed reasoning (“false choice”) to think that exposing a failure of classical geology is support for a specific competing theory.

YEC and, perhaps surprisingly, much of ID have assembled a body of negative arguments against Darwinism, geology, and other aspects of a naturalistic worldview. Arguing that fossil evidence is an insufficient basis for evolution and that natural processes cannot explain the complexity of the eyeball are characteristically negative arguments. This raises the question of whether a bunch of negative arguments can rightly be called a science. While Einstein started with the judgement that the wave theory of light could not be right (he got the idea from Maxwell), his program included developing a bold, testable, and falsifiable theory that posited that light was something that came in discreet packages, along with predictions about how it would behave in a variety of extreme circumstances. Einsteinian relativity gives us global positioning and useful tools in our cell phones. Creationism’s utility seems limited to philosophical realms. Is lack of practical utility or observable consequences a good basis for calling an endeavor unscientific? See String Theory, below.

Wikipedia (you might guess that I find Wikipedia great for learning the discography of Miley Cyrus but poor for serious inquiries), appealing to “consensus” and “the scientific community,” judges Creation Science to be pseudoscience because creationism invokes supernatural causes. In the same article, it decries the circular reasoning of ID’s argument from design (the teleological argument). But claiming that Creation Science invokes supernatural causes is equally circular unless we’re able to draw the natural/supernatural distinction independently from the science/pseudoscience distinction. Creationists hold that creation is natural; that’s their whole point.

Ignoring Disconfirming Evidence

YEC proponents seem to refuse to allow that any amount of radioactive dating evidence falsifies their theory. I’m tempted to say this alone makes YEC either a pseudoscience or just terrible science. But doing so would force me to accept the 2nd and 3rd definitions of science that I gave in the previous post. In other words, I don’t want to judge a scientific inquiry’s status (or even the status of a non-scientific one) on the basis of what its proponents (a community or institution) do at an arbitrary point in time. Let’s judge the theory, not its most vocal proponents. A large body of German physicists denied that Edington’s measurement confirmed Einstein’s prediction of bent light rays during an eclipse because they rejected Jewish physics. Their hardheadedness is no reason to call their preferred wave theory of light a bad theory. It was a good theory with bad adherents, a good theory for which we now have excellent reasons to judge wrong.

Some YEC proponents hold that, essentially, the fossil record is God’s little joke. Indeed it is possible that when God created the world in six days a few thousand years ago he laid down a lot of evidence to test our faith. The ancient Christian writer Tertullian argued that Satan traveled backward in time to plant evidence against Christian doctrine (more on him soon). It’s hard to disprove. The possibility of deceptive evidence is related to the worry expressed by Hume and countless science fiction writers that the universe, including fossils and your memories of today’s breakfast, could have been planted five minutes ago. Like the Phantom Time hypothesis, it cannot be disproved. Also, as with Phantom Time, we have immense evidence against it. And from a practical perspective, nothing in the future would change if it were true.

Lakatos Applied to Creation Science

Lakatos might give us the best basis for rejecting Creation Science as pseudoscience rather than as an extraordinarily bad science, if that distinction has any value, which it might in the case of deciding what can be taught in elementary school. (We have no laws against unsuccessful theories or poor science.) Lakatos was interested in how a theory makes use of laws of nature and what its research agenda looks like. Laws of nature are regularities observed in nature so widely that we assume them to be true, contingently, and ground predictions about nature on them. Creation Science usually has little interest in making testable predictions about nature or the universe on the basis of such laws. Dr. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) wrote in Evolution, The Fossils Say No that “God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe.” This is a major point against Creation Science counting as science.

Creation Science’s lack of testable predictions might not even be a fair basis for judging a pursuit to be unscientific. Botany is far more explanatory than predictive, and few of us, including Wikipedia, are ready to expel botany from the science club.

Most significant for me, Lakatos casts doubt on Creation Science by the thinness of its research agenda. A look at the ICR’s site reveals a list of papers and seminars all by PhDs and MDs. They seem to fall in two categories: evolution is wrong (discussed above), and topics that are plausible but that don’t give support for creationism in any meaningful way. The ploy here is playing a game with the logic of confirmation.

By the Will of Elvis

Consider the following statement of hypothesis. Everything happens by the will of Elvis. Now this statement, if true, logically ensures that the following disjunctive statement is true: Either everything happens by the will of Elvis or all cats have hearts. Now let’s go out with a stethoscope and do some solid cat science to gather empirical evidential support for all cats having hearts. This evidence gives us reasonable confidence that the disjunctive statement is true. Since the original simple hypothesis logically implies the disjunction, evidence that cats have hearts gives support for the hypothesis that everything happens by the will of Elvis. This is a fun game (like Hempel’s crows) in the logic of confirmation, and those who have studied it will instantly see the ruse. But ICR has dedicated half its research agenda to it, apparently to deceive its adherents.

The creationist research agenda is mostly aimed at negating evolution and at large philosophical matters. Where it deals with small and specific scientific questions – analogous to cat hearts in the above example – the answers to those questions don’t in any honest sense provide evidentiary support for divine creation.

If anything fails the test of being valid science, Creation Science does. Yet popular arguments that attempt to logically dismiss it from the sciences seem prejudiced or ill motivated. As discussed in the last post, fair and honest demarcation is not so simple. This may be a case where we have to take the stance of Justice Potter Stewart, who, when judging whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was pornography, said “I shall not today attempt further to define [it], but I know it when I see it, and this is not it.”

To be continued.