Is Creationism Science?

[packbat]

A number of people have been talking about whether intelligent design is scientific recently in some interesting new ways: Megan McArdle, Alex Tabarrok, Robin Hanson, and most notably Thomas Nagel.

The focus of these remarks is best summarized in a post three years ago by Alex Tabarrok:

Suppose that you find a watch in the forest. If you know there is no watchmaker then the theory of evolution is a brilliant and compelling explanation for the presence of complexity without design. But suppose that you know a watchmaker exists then surely the simplest and most compelling explanation is that the watchmaker made the watch. Any other explanation, particularly one so improbable (see extension) as evolution would seem to be preposterous and beside the point.

I can only conclude from the above that these people did not ask themselves, "What do we do science for?"

This is hardly a severe sin, of course. The question is hardly primary among the ones that spring to mind. But the answer is, "Science explains the world in a way which lets us predict the world." This is and always has been where Intelligent Design - and creationism in general - fail: under those views, we have no reason to expect, say, the existence of the punctum caecum (blind spot) in vertebrae eyes but not cephalopod eyes - in fact, just the opposite.

Believing that one or more gods exist is no excuse. The only reasonable explanation for the evidence is that every species now extant is descended with modification from simpler species. And once we hypothesize that, the strictly simplest explanation, even if gods are present, is the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Comments

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

I ... er ... hm.

I don't think it's useful to answer the question of a watch in a forest by explaining what science is for. I think instead that it needs to be criticized for the useless metaphor that it is. A lot of biological processes have been directly observed; a lot of this is understood. We aren't just "finding a watch in a forest", we're seeing gears and springs and components scattered everywhere, and in some areas they appear to be kind of congregating together until they form something that works, and so on. And then from that, we're looking at this complete watch and reasonably surmising that it exists because it underwent the same process.

So it's a junk metaphor.

But, even getting away from the metaphor -- and I haven't read the opinions of those authors in depth, but I did scan through them to be sure I was on the right track -- this premise of there being any kind of science in creationism is bunk. And, while we're at it, let's call a duck a duck: intelligent design is creationism with a shiny new wrapper.

For one thing, these folks are conflating knowledge with belief. They're saying that because somebody knows that a God or gods exist, then they can make "rational conclusions" from that. Well, no. They don't know they exist, they believe they do; and even if they did know, they aren't making rational conclusions. They're making completely unpredictable conjectures without any kind of experimentation or statistical analysis and then they're post-rationalizing the results. i.e., "Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans because God hates parties."

To call this kind of nonsense "science" in any form -- whether "dead" or "bad" -- exhibits a gross misunderstanding of what science is, likely as a result of the deplorable science education in several nations now.

It is, to use one of my recent new favorite terms, fractally wrong.

And, politically speaking, that's exactly what supporters of creationism want to do. They want to muddy these discussions until nobody's sure whether it's science or not, and then they can say, "Then teach it in the schools!" Let's not fall prey to that. Creationism may be taught in many places, but it does not belong in any class falling under the category of science.

As for what science is for ... well, you're more educated than I am, but you're also a student of philosophy so I could see that being your approach. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that the earliest scientists -- Galileo, Archimedes, and so on -- used the scientific method so that they could make predictions about other events.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm pretty sure that science was first the domain of the curious, the people who were intelligent and in some cases educated, and who saw something and wanted to understand how it worked. That predictions can be made once a process is understood is just a side-effect. First, there must be somebody curious enough about it to want to understand it, and intelligent enough to have a chance of understanding it.

Which incidentally brings up an all-too-common trait among creationists, in that they tend to be incurious. That alone I think distances them from anything resembling science.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Excellent, excellent points. I think in this case we merely have a misplaced fairmindedness rather than 'wedge' tactics, but you're right about the effects.

Looking at scientists, too, I think you've got the right of it - they are seeking understanding, not predictions. I emphasize prediction from a kind of Bayesian-probability-theory/Popperian-falsifiability standpoint, but it's the other way around: they want understanding, and they test understanding by prediction. It's not "science explains the world in a way which lets us predict the world" - it's "science explains the world - and the explanations must let us predict the world, or they aren't explanations at all."

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

| It's not "science explains the world in a way which lets us predict the world" - it's "science explains the world - and the explanations must let us predict the world, or they aren't explanations at all."

I like that. :-)

YOU ARE A DUMB HEAD AND YOUR HEAD IS DUMB

[the-zaniak.livejournal.com]

THE EARTH IS NOT A WATCH

NO IT IS NOT IT TALKS ALL THE TIME

[packbat.livejournal.com]

OF COURSE IT IS GREENWICH IS THE HOUR HAND IT DOES ONE LOOP A DAY JUST BECAUSE IT IS A TWENTY-FOUR HOUR WATCH DOESN'T MAKE IT NOT A WATCH