Science and Religion
Chapter 5 Creationism and Intelligent Design
E. coli is the poster-bug for ‘Intelligent Design’. It propels itself with an ingenious rotating tail or ‘flagellum’ – a sort of bacterial outboard motor. With its many connected parts working together towards the specified end of locomotion, this flagellum fulfils the criteria for design set out by William Paley in 1802. But surely the triumph of the modern theory of evolution has made it impossible to prefer Paley’s theological explanation of such adaptations to Darwin’s naturalistic one? Apparently not for everyone.
Since the early 1990s, supporters of the movement promoting ‘Intelligent Design’ or ‘ID’ in the United States have been mounting a challenge to the neo-Darwinian theory that all forms of life have evolved through the processes of genetic variation, heredity, and natural selection. Devotees of ID, including the lawyer Philip Johnson, the mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski, and the biochemist Michael Behe, say that it represents a serious scientific challenge to evolution. They think that certain aspects of the natural world, such as the bacterial flagellum, are too complex and too unlikely to have been produced by processes of genetic mutation and natural selection. And they use detailed calculations, based on debatable mathematical assumptions about information and probability, to quantify that unlikeliness and to justify their incredulity. Michael Behe focuses especially on complex chains of chemical processes within cells such as the series of reactions involved in the clotting of blood in mammals, known as the ‘blood clotting cascade’. He is, if you like, Paley with a doctorate in biochemistry. The most plausible explanation of the ‘irreducible complexity’ of the flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, and many other phenomena which rely on complicated interactions between multiple components, Behe believes, is that they were produced by an intelligent designer (whom he and most of his readers suppose to be God).
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has stated that ID is characterized by ‘significant conceptual flaws in its formulation, a lack of credible scientific evidence, and misrepresentations of scientific facts’ and that its central concept is ‘in fact religious, not scientific’. In a landmark case in Pennsylvania in 2005, Judge John E. Jones ruled against the Dover Area School Board’s policy of requiring biology teachers to read out a statement about ID. Judge Jones stated that ID was religious, not scientific; and that the decision of the Board to adopt this policy, breaching the First Amendment prohibition on state sponsorship of religion, showed ‘breathtaking inanity’. Religious leaders have come out against ID too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in 2004, has now been signed by over ten thousand clergy from different Christian denominations across America. In 2006, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, condemned ID as a kind of ‘crude creationism’ which reduced God to a mere engineer.
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Given the impressive array of scientific, legal, and theological opinion ranged against it, you might wonder how the ID movement ever became as popular as it undoubtedly has within certain sectors of American society. To answer that question it is necessary to understand the history both of anti-evolution campaigns in the United States since the 1920s and of state and federal courts’ use of the First Amendment to keep religion out of public schools from the 1960s onwards. What these histories reveal is that the ID movement is the latest in a series of attempts by a broadly conservative and Christian constituency in the United States to have religiously motivated anti-evolutionary ideas taught in the public schools. The debate about evolution and ID is a conflict not primarily between science and religion but between different views about who should control education.
Opponents of the various forms of scientific creationism and ID have sometimes portrayed them as a ‘return to the Middle Ages’. This reveals a common historical misunderstanding. These movements are the products of 20th- and 21st-century America. They simultaneously mimic and reject modern science and have become quite widespread in modern America through the convergent influence of a number of factors, including an advanced state of scientific development, a high level of religious observance, and a strictly enforced separation between church and state.
The Scopes trial
On 21 March 1925, Austin Peay, the Governor of Tennessee, put his signature to an Act making it unlawful for a teacher employed by the State of Tennessee to ‘teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals’. Other states, including Mississippi and Arkansas, adopted similar anti-evolution measures in the 1920s, but it was in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, that the issue came to a head.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw the passing of the Tennessee law as an opportunity to take a stand in defence of intellectual freedom. They placed an advertisement seeking a volunteer to bring a test case. Some of the lawyers and businessmen of Dayton, grasping the opportunity to put their town on the map, persuaded a local science teacher, John Scopes, to put himself forward. What followed generated more publicity than the townsfolk of Dayton can possibly have envisaged. The Dayton ‘Monkey Trial’ became international news and was the first to be broadcast on national radio. It also attracted two of the most famous lawyers of the age, William Jennings Bryan acting for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow for the defence. Bryan had stood three times for President, as the candidate of the Democratic Party, and three times had been defeated. Known as ‘The Great Commoner’ because of his belief in the absolute sovereignty of the people, an opponent of imperialistic foreign policy and supporter of votes for women, in later life Bryan became increasingly taken up with moral and religious crusades, including his support for Prohibition and his biblically based opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools. Darrow was a famous agnostic and a leading member of the ACLU.
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The clash between Bryan and Darrow, and the associated carnival of religious and evolutionary activism which descended upon Dayton in July 1925, has been memorably, if not altogether accurately, depicted in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. The story has been brilliantly and more reliably retold by Edward J. Larson in his Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998. Although the courtroom confrontation between Bryan and Darrow became legendary, as a legal drama it was of limited interest. No-one denied that Scopes had broken the law. Both sides accepted that Scopes had taught evolution, and when the trial came to its conclusion, he was duly convicted and ordered by the judge to pay a fine of 100 dollars. The main purpose of the case, as far as Darrow and the ACLU were concerned, was to obtain a conviction at Dayton which could then be appealed to higher state and federal courts, in order to test the constitutionality of the anti-evolution law. For Bryan, the purpose of convicting Scopes was to strike a political blow for honest Christian folk who wanted to shield their children from the anti-religious ideas of an arrogant intellectual elite.
15. The stall of the Anti-Evolution League in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes trial
Although some saw the Scopes trial as a simple confrontation between science and religion, the political speeches made by William Jennings Bryan at the time reveal that the more powerful dynamic was a generally conceived conflict between the fundamentals of Christianity and the evils of the modern world. Bryan was a defender of the newly formed movement for Christian ‘fundamentalism’. For the fundamentalists, the spread of Darwinism was both a cause and a symptom of the degeneration of human civilization which they witnessed all around them, from the barbaric violence of the First World War in Europe to the sensual
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decadence of the Jazz Age in America. Christianity and a literal reading of the Bible were bulwarks against these developments. Bryan and others feared that teaching children they were animals would brutalize and degrade them. Bryan noted that in a diagram in Hunter’s Civic Biology, the textbook from which Scopes had taught evolution, humanity was ‘shut up in the little circle entitled “Mammals”, with thirty-four hundred and ninety-nine other species’:
Does it not seem a little unfair not to distinguish between man and lower forms of life? What shall we say of the intelligence, not to say religion, of those who are so particular to distinguish between fishes and reptiles and birds, but put a man with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena and the skunk? What must be the impression made upon children by such a degradation of man?
Bryan and the fundamentalists got what they wanted. In the decades after Scopes was convicted, evolution rarely featured on school science syllabuses, even in states where it was not illegal. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction not on the constitutional grounds sought by the ACLU but on a technicality. It should have been the jury and not the judge who had set the amount of the fine. It would be another 40 years before an anti-evolution law would finally be challenged in front of the United States Supreme Court.
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16. A fundamentalist cartoon from the 1920s depicting the theory of evolution as the tune played by a new ‘Pied Piper’ – ‘Science falsely so-called’ – leading the children of
America down the ‘path of education’ towards the dark cavern of ‘disbelief in the God of the Bible’
Varieties of creationism
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‘Creationism’ is a term that can loosely be used to refer to any religious opposition to evolution. Such opposition has taken and continues to take many different forms. What all creationists share is a belief that the universe and life on earth were created immediately and supernaturally by God, and that human beings and all other species were each created separately and in their current form. In other words, creationists deny the common ancestry of all plants and animals. Creationists base their resistance to evolution at least partly on the authority of their sacred text, whether the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Bible, or the Quran. The Book of Genesis, for instance, relates that God, over a period of six days, created each kind of living creature separately, made man and woman in his own image, and set them above the rest of creation, before resting on the seventh day. As the King James translation put it:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
The Quran teaches that Allah is the Creator of everything, bringing the heavens, the earth, and everything in it immediately into existence, and making human beings out of clay and each species separately.
Many creationists have based their stance on a literal interpretation of scripture. Those religious traditions that place a strong emphasis on textual authority, notably some varieties of Protestantism and Islam, are therefore more inclined towards strict creationism. As we have already seen in the case of arguments about Copernican astronomy, however, it is not easy to specify which parts of the scriptures are to be taken absolutely literally. As William Jennings Bryan pointed out during his cross-examination by Clarence Darrow at the Scopes trial, when the Bible said ‘Ye are the salt of the earth’, the text did not mean that ‘man was actually salt or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people’. That text, Bryan said, was to be ‘accepted as it is given’, namely ‘illustratively’ rather than literally. Darrow pressed Bryan further. He wanted to know whether Jonah really had been swallowed by a whale. Bryan corrected him – it was actually a ‘big fish’. But, yes, he believed in a God who could make a whale, or a big fish, and a man, and who could ‘make both what He pleases’. Darrow moved on to Adam, Eve, and their family. Did Bryan believe that Eve was ‘literally made out of Adam’s rib’? Bryan said he did. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. But, Darrow wondered, ‘Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?’ Bryan was unperturbed: ‘No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.’
Then Darrow came to questions with obvious scientific relevance. When the Bible said that the sun had been stopped in the sky, did that mean that in those days the sun went round the earth? No, Bryan said, he believed that the earth went round the sun and what the passage meant was that the earth was stopped in its rotation. Then what about the age of the earth? Many bibles had the date 4004 BC printed in the margin to indicate the date of creation, as calculated from the text itself. Did Bryan believe the earth was about six thousand years old? ‘Oh, no; I think it is much older than that.’ ‘How much?’ He could not say. What about the six days of creation in
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Genesis? Were they twenty-four-hour days? Bryan was clear on that one: ‘I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.’ Rather, they were ‘periods’. God could have taken six days, six years, six million years, or six hundred million years to create the earth. ‘I do not think it is important whether we believe one or the other’, Bryan said. Soon afterwards, this famous exchange descended into acrimony. Bryan claimed that Darrow was trying to use the courtroom to attack the Bible. Darrow told Bryan he was merely examining ‘your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes’.
This famous moment during the Scopes trial reveals two important things about creationism generally. First, even among Christian creationists there has been disagreement about how to interpret Genesis. In the early 20th century, many adopted the ‘day-age’ interpretation favoured by Bryan according to which each biblical ‘day’ was in fact a geological ‘age’ during which many different species were created. Others maintained belief in a very ancient earth by inferring a long ‘gap’ between the first moment of creation and the six-day creation. Within that gap there might have been multiple cataclysms and new creations, responsible for producing the fossil record. ‘Young Earth Creationism’ or ‘Creation Science’ is a more extreme version of creationism, according to which the biblical chronology is to be accepted and fossil evidence is to be explained not by successive creations and cataclysms but entirely as the result of Noah’s flood, approximately five thousand years ago. The Creation Science movement’s key texts, second only to the Bible in importance, were works by the Seventh-Day Adventist geologist George McCready Price. His Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory (1906) and New Geology (1923) both explained geological evidence by a recent universal deluge.
Price’s books were the inspiration for the Creation Science revival of the 1960s and 1970s, led by a Texan Baptist teacher of civil engineering, Henry M. Morris. The Creation Research Society was founded by Morris in 1963, and the Institute for Creation Research in 1970. Both were designed to promote a more extreme and allegedly more scientific form of fundamentalist creationism than had ever existed before. As with Bryan’s anti-evolution campaign, the core motivation for the Creation Science movement was a desire to protect Christian communities from the corrosive and degenerate influences of the modern world. The range of evils thought to grow out of a belief in evolution in the 1970s were graphically illustrated in R. G. Elmendorf’s ‘Evolution Tree’, which bore fruit ranging widely from secularism, socialism, and relativism to alcohol, ‘dirty books’, ‘homosex’, and even terrorism. This brand of anti- evolutionary thought has spread from America around the world. In recent years an Islamic author from Turkey writing under the pen-name of Harun Yayha has produced many widely read books denouncing Darwinism as a ‘deceit’ and a ‘lie’ and drawing on the techniques and arguments of American proponents of Creation Science.
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17. A creationist image of the 1970s: the ‘Evolution Tree’ is nourished by sin and unbelief, and its fruits include a range of secular ideologies, immoral activities, and economic and
social evils.
The second general feature of creationism illustrated by Bryan’s testimony is its ambivalent relationship with science. The reason Bryan accepted that the earth orbited the sun and that it was much more than six thousand years old was because of the scientific evidence to that effect. Why, then, was he committed to the belief that Eve had literally been made from Adam’s rib, and that the Genesis account of creation was to be preferred to evolutionary science? At what point does the creationist stop believing the scientific evidence and start taking the Bible literally? And why? The answer in practice is, as we have already seen, that it has been the question of human evolution that has caused greatest unease, and it is at the suggestion of animal ancestry for humans that most creationists have felt they must draw the line.
Creationist ambivalence towards science is evident in other ways too. Many creationists, while resisting certain scientific results, specifically relating to evolution, still admire the success of science and seek to emulate or even appropriate that success. The recasting of fundamentalist anti-evolution as an alternative kind of science by Morris and the Creation Scientists was partly motivated by the desire to have creationism taught in the public schools as an alternative to evolutionary science. However, Price, whose geological works provided the scientific basis of their movement, wrote at a time before that had become the real issue. He genuinely wished to produce an understanding of nature that was both biblical and scientific.
One of the most popular books about Islam and science in the 20th century was The Bible, The Quran and Science by the Muslim physician Maurice Bucaille. Published in 1976, the book claimed that the word of God as revealed in the Quran (but not the Bible) contained many statements that could only be understood in the light of modern science. Bucaille started a craze among Islamic commentators for finding verses in the Quran that seemed to foreshadow scientific discoveries as diverse as the expansion of the universe and the mechanisms of sexual reproduction. Other Islamic scholars, while rejecting both Bucaille’s anachronistic hunt for modern science in the Quran and also Yayha’s second-hand creationism, still seek a way to produce an ‘Islamic science’ which is truly scientific and yet which is divorced from purely materialistic interpretations incompatible with the Quran.
The First Amendment
Intelligent Design is not strictly speaking a form of creationism. Proponents of ID do not mention the Bible, let alone try to interpret it literally, and do not explain geological and fossil evidence in terms of a biblical flood. They accept the antiquity of the earth and of humanity, and in the case of some really liberal ID theorists, such as Michael Behe, do not even deny the common ancestry of humans and all other forms of life. Behe accepts more or less all of the
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standard evolutionary picture but identifies certain key phenomena, such as the biochemistry of the first cells, which he insists cannot be explained without the intervention of an intelligent designer. Other proponents of ID claim that the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of new complex forms of life about five hundred and thirty million years ago is inexplicable without intelligent intervention. The defenders of ID, to an even greater extent than the ‘Creation Scientists’ of previous decades, try to stay scrupulously within the bounds of scientific discourse and mention a ‘designer’ and ‘intelligence’, but never God, and certainly not the Bible. Some suspect that this reflects not the scientific nature of their enterprise but simply a canny awareness of the fact that they will need to look and sound as much like scientists as possible if their views are ever going to make it into the classrooms of America’s public schools.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids the government from passing any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’. The original intention was not to exclude religion from public life altogether but to ensure that no particular form of Christianity become an established religion akin to the Church of England. There was also from the outset a broader hope that this Amendment would help to build, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘a wall of separation between Church and state’. The enactment of statutes forbidding state employees from contradicting the ‘story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible’ would seem on the face of it to put something of a hole in that wall.
From the middle of the 20th century onwards, the US Supreme Court became increasingly active in policing the observation of the Establishment Clause in publicly funded schools. State laws allowing time for silent prayer in schools, or for the reading of denominationally neutral prayers, or requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted on classroom walls were all declared unconstitutional. In the 1960s, an anti-evolution law from the Scopes era was finally challenged on similar constitutional grounds. A young biology teacher from Arkansas, Susan Epperson, supported by the ACLU, challenged a 1928 state law making it unlawful to teach ‘the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals’. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the law was in violation of the First Amendment. The Court declared, in November 1968, that ‘fundamentalist sectarian conviction was and is the law’s reason for existence’. The Epperson case marked the beginning of the legal process which would give rise to the Intelligent Design movement about 20 years later.
In the 1970s, the creationist camp adopted a new strategy, campaigning for legislation mandating ‘balanced treatment’ or ‘equal time’ in the classroom for two alternative scientific theories – ‘evolution science’ and versions of Morris’s ‘Creation Science’, which did not mention the Bible but asserted a separate ancestry for man and apes, a ‘relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds’, and an explanation of geology by ‘catastrophism, including a worldwide flood’. These measures did not stay long on the statute books. The Arkansas balanced treatment law was struck down at state level in 1982, on First Amendment grounds. In 1987, a similar law passed by the State of Louisiana came before the US Supreme Court. The Court ruled that the statute’s purported secular aim of promoting academic freedom was a sham and that its real purpose was to ‘advance the religious viewpoint that a
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supernatural being created humankind’. Because the primary aim of the Louisiana Act was to ‘endorse a particular religious doctrine’, it was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
So, at the beginning of the 1990s, biblical anti-evolution laws had been declared unconstitutional; laws requiring ‘balanced treatment’ for evolution and ‘Creation Science’ had gone the same way; but opinion polls continued to find that between 45 and 50% of the population of the USA believed that human beings were created by God in their present form at some time in the last ten thousand years. (This figure remains the same today, with most of the rest of the population believing that humanity evolved through an evolutionary process somehow guided by God.) Legislators and members of school boards seeking to tap into the support of these voters now needed to develop a new strategy for getting God back into the classroom in scientific clothing. And that explains the birth of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement. School boards and state legislatures across the US have considered measures introducing ID into science education. Judge Jones’s ruling in 2005, which struck down the Dover School Board’s policy on First Amendment grounds, because of the clear religious intention behind it, strongly suggests that ID will have no more legal success than previous kinds of religiously motivated anti-Darwinism. The First Amendment will continue to do its job.
In 1925, William Jennings Bryan saw that the central political question to be decided was ‘Who shall control our public schools?’ Debates about ID continue to bring out the social conflicts that arise in trying to answer that question. Bryan said that an evolutionist school teacher should not be allowed ‘to accept employment in a Christian community and teach that the Bible is untrue’ and to ‘force his opinion upon students against the wishes of the taxpayers and the parents’. Bryan predicted that ‘school board elections may become the most important elections held, for parents are much more interested in their children and in their children’s religion than they are in any political policies’. In many parts of the USA Bryan’s prediction came true. In some cases, the decisions of the courts to strike down creationist laws did indeed go against the wishes of parents and taxpayers. But, as Judge William Overton stated in ruling against the Arkansas ‘balanced treatment’ Act in 1982, ‘The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote.’ No group, no matter how large or small, was allowed to ‘use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others’.
Things have changed since Bryan’s day, however. In recent years, it has been the democratic process itself rather than the courts which has done most to keep ID off science syllabuses. In Dover and elsewhere, members of school boards who have changed science standards to de- emphasize evolution or to include references to ID have generally been voted out at the next election. Was Bryan right after all, that it is best to let parents and taxpayers have the final say through the ballot box?
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Explaining complexity
But suppose that the courts and the people were not opposed to the teaching of ID, or that the question of whether ID might be taught in science classes were to arise in a country lacking the strict separation between state and religion enforced in the United States. What then? It would still be very unlikely that many people would consider ID a sensible subject for a science lesson. Good scientific, theological, and educational objections to such a proposal would be plentiful.
Starting with the scientific case against ID, there are two related points to make. First, evolutionary theory can in fact explain the biological complexity which ID claims defeats it; second, ID is excessively negative, looking for gaps in evolutionary science but without providing a coherent alternative theory in its place.
Arguments about ‘irreducible complexity’ are a new form of a very old anti-Darwinian argument, namely that complex structures could not have evolved by natural selection because the intermediate forms containing only some of the parts would not have been adaptive. What use is a part of an eye, half a wing, or three-quarters of a flagellum? In general terms, evolutionists have been able to answer this objection by finding, either in fossils or in living species, evidence of intermediate structures that did exist and were in fact adaptive. In the case of the eye, Darwin himself listed various forms of eyes, from a small patch of lightsensitive cells to the complex ‘camera’ eyes of humans and other animals, showing how each was adaptive and could have evolved into the next in the series. Scientists now estimate that this entire evolutionary process could even have been achieved within a mere half a million years. Advantages were also conferred by the precursors to fully fledged wings. Feathers, for instance, seem first to have evolved as a form of insulation before being co-opted by natural selection to aid a quite different function – flight. It is harder to produce these scenarios in the case of biochemistry because, obviously, chemical reactions, unlike feathers, do not fossilize. However, using evidence from currently living species it is possible to reconstruct evolutionary scenarios. This has been done, for instance, in the case of the famous bacterial flagellum, which, it has been suggested, evolved through the co-option of a very similar existing structure (known as the type three secretory system) used by bacteria for injecting toxic proteins into the cells of their hosts. So the answer to the question ‘What use is a part of an eye, half a wing, or three-quarters of a flagellum?’, is ‘Light-detection, warmth, and toxin- injection, respectively’.
A second objection to ID concerns its negative character. This is another respect in which ID differs from Scientific Creationism. Creationists of earlier decades proposed an alternative theory which boldly, biblically, and patently wrongly asserted that the earth was only a few thousand years old, that geology could be explained by a recent worldwide flood, and that humans did not share ancestors with other animals. The defenders of ID, on the other hand, simply draw attention to what they claim are phenomena (such as the Cambrian explosion or the blood clotting cascade) that display too much ‘specified complexity’ to have evolved by mutation and natural selection, and at that point invoke their unelaborated concept of an
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intelligent designer, barring the way to further investigation. The ID theory makes no novel predictions beyond the failure of evolutionary science to explain these phenomena. It is not clear where ID theorists would draw the line between that which can be explained by evolution and that which needs an intelligent designer. And it seems likely that, in future, as good evolutionary explanations are suggested for their favoured examples, as has already happened in the case of the flagellum, the number of cases for which ‘design’ can be claimed will slowly but surely dwindle.
One of the main theological objections to ID follows directly from this last point. In claiming that supernatural intervention is required to explain a certain subset of natural phenomena for which a full evolutionary explanation may currently be lacking, ID theorists seem to be positing a ‘God of the gaps’ of the kind discussed in Chapter 3. As gaps in evolutionary science are filled with naturalistic explanations, God will gradually be edged further out. This tinkering God of ID, this God who seems to be an occasionally observable object in the natural world, found in our current ignorance rather than in our understanding, is no more attractive to theologians than to scientists – hence the thousands of clergy who have been moved to sign the open letter against ID mentioned above.
But is it science?
Judge Overton in the 1982 Arkansas case and Judge Jones in the 2005 case in Pennsylvania both declared that Creation Science and ID, respectively, not only contravened the First Amendment but were, in any case, not proper science. This is a common claim – that creationism and ID are not scientific because they fail to fulfil one or more criteria which characterize all genuine science. There are various candidates for such ‘demarcation criteria’. Some say that true science must be empirically testable, others that it must make ‘falsifiable’ claims, others that it must offer explanations only in terms of natural laws and natural processes.
Philosophers of science are much less optimistic than they were a few decades ago about the possibility of finding any really coherent demarcation criteria. It is accepted that many scientific claims – including many of the most interesting ones – are not directly empirically testable but only become so as part of a complex network of auxiliary theoretical assumptions and scientific instruments. For instance, a mathematical model of the Big Bang cannot be tested by direct observation, but only indirectly through predictions about the behaviour of measuring apparatus when a particular reaction is set off in a massive particle accelerator. Creation Scientists made very clearly testable claims about the age of the earth and the separate ancestry of all species. Although it is an unusually minimal and largely negative kind of theory, ID certainly can generate empirically testable claims too, such as the assertion that adaptive precursors will never be found for various specified processes and structures such as the blood clotting cascade or the bacterial flagellum. Creationists and ID proponents have regularly made testable claims. These claims have been tested and repeatedly found wanting.
It is also accepted that good scientists will often hold on to their theories in the face of Dixon, T. (2008). Science and religion : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from lehman-ebooks on 2019-06-11 13:11:22.
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inconsistent empirical evidence and seek to reinterpret that evidence rather than declare their theory ‘falsified’. There is not yet an evolutionary account which successfully identifies every single stage in the evolution of the flagellum (or in the evolutionary history of many other organs or biochemical processes), but that does not mean that scientists should declare neo- Darwinism to have been ‘falsified’. The modern framework of evolutionary theory successfully explains and unifies a huge body of evidence accumulated and interpreted over many generations. It makes sense of the fossil record, the geographical distribution of species, the physical similarities between related plants and animals, and the vestigial organs that testify to earlier evolutionary forms. Recent advances in genetic sequencing have provided a huge new mass of evidence which confirms evolutionary theory while identifying a whole new range of puzzles and anomalies. In the face of puzzles and anomalies a good scientist, especially when working with such a well-confirmed theory, does not declare their theory falsified, but designs new experiments and develops new theoretical models to solve those puzzles and resolve those anomalies. The central claims of ID theorists all seem to have been falsified. But in holding on to their theories and trying to provide an alternative interpretation of the evidence, they are only doing what all good scientists would do. A very significant difference, however, is that ID supporters lack any good reason for confidence in their original theory.
Testability and falsifiability are not satisfactory demarcation criteria. What about the insistence that proper scientific theories should be entirely naturalistic? This is a relatively new doctrine.
Neither Isaac Newton nor Charles Darwin, to take just two examples, felt that God had to be excluded entirely from their scientific accounts of the natural world. In scientific theories between the 17th and 19th centuries, God featured generally as a lawgiver rather than as a tinkerer, but God was not absolutely barred from professional scientific discourse until the later 19th century. In appealing to a supernatural cause as part of their science in the 21st century, ID theorists are certainly unconventional, eccentric, and out of step with recent practice, but that need not mean they are to be excluded from the realm of science altogether. There is no need for defenders of mainstream science to risk seeming ideological and doctrinaire by prejudging the kinds of entities that will feature in successful scientific theories in the future.
In short, opponents of ID who use the weapon of philosophical demarcation may be shooting themselves quite unnecessarily in the foot. In the United States, the pro-religious intent and effect of any policy mandating the teaching of creationism or ID will be enough to keep it off the statute book. There and elsewhere, scientists and theologians, as well as voters and judges, also have many good reasons to resist ID without straying into the fraught philosophical realm of demarcation.
Back to the classroom
The most recent slogan of the ID movement, echoing the calls for ‘balanced treatment’ of earlier decades, is ‘Teach the Controversy’. The publisher’s description of the ID textbook Of
Dixon, T. (2008). Science and religion : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from lehman-ebooks on 2019-06-11 13:11:22.
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Pandas and People states that it ‘promotes a widely recognized goal of science education by fostering a questioning, skeptical and scrutinizing mindset’. Other ID proponents claim they are seeking to improve public discussions of science and promote a more inclusive and ‘controversy-based biology curriculum’. This is disingenuous. Of course science thrives on constant criticism, questioning, and controversy. Such controversies can be a very useful way to teach science. To the extent that ID theorists have served as gadflies or catalysts to evolutionary science, they have performed a valuable scientific function. However, ID is not really a movement for educational reform. The ‘controversy’ in question has not arisen from any substantial scientific disagreement but is the product of a concerted public relations exercise aimed at the Christian parents of America.
Even if we are charitable and allow that ID might be a kind of science, it is a dreadfully obscure and unsuccessful kind of science. If, in the future, ID became the basis of a serious and fruitful scientific research programme and thus converted a substantial proportion of the scientific community to its views, then it might be reasonable to discuss the inclusion of ID on a science curriculum (if First Amendment objections could somehow be overcome). At the moment, ID is supported by a tiny handful of very marginal scientific figures, is rejected by the rest of the scientific world, and appeals to a wider public for patently religious reasons. There is an almost endless list of interesting scientific and philosophical controversies that would be candidates for inclusion on a ‘controversy-based biology curriculum’. But many would be excluded because they were too technically demanding, too far removed from mainstream science, or too clearly manufactured by a special-interest group for political and ideological reasons. The debate about ID would fail on all three counts. In addition to the political, legal, scientific, and theological reasons for excluding ID from science classes, then, there are perfectly good educational ones too.
There is no genuine scientific controversy about the relative merits of evolution and ID. But creationism and ID do draw attention to genuinely controversial questions about the nature of science and its place in society: Should voters, elected politicians, judges, or scientific experts have the final say about what is taught in the science classes of publicly funded schools? Why has modern America proved such fertile ground for the growth of anti-evolutionary movements? Can God ever be discovered through scientific methods? Can testability, falsifiability, naturalism, or any combination of these, be invoked as viable demarcation criteria? Wherever comparative religion and the history and philosophy of science are taught, creationism and ID can profitably be studied. Indeed, if the effect of the continued exclusion of ID from the science syllabus is that its advocates start a campaign for the inclusion of these other subjects on the curricula of publicly funded schools, then some educational good may still come out of this peculiarly American controversy.
Dixon, T. (2008). Science and religion : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from lehman-ebooks on 2019-06-11 13:11:22.
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