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

NO IT IS NOT IT TALKS ALL THE TIME

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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