The good news is that in the landmark legal case Kitzmiller v. Dover in Harrisburg, Pa. The bad news is that in response, creationists have reinvented their movement and pressed on. Consequently, besieged teachers and others are still likely to find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism, by whatever name.
Creationists' arguments are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of or outright lies about evolution. Nevertheless, even if their objections are flimsy, the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.
It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom. These answers by themselves probably will not change the minds of those set against evolution. But they may help inform those who are genuinely open to argument, and they can aid anyone who wants to engage constructively in this important struggle for the scientific integrity of our civilization.
Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution—or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter—they are not expressing reservations about its truth. In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution.
Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.
Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances.
Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources.
Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In pioneering studies of finches on the Galpagos Islands, Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild. The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.
Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time—changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change.
Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related. These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies and in the field as in the Grants' studies of evolving beak shapes among Galpagos finches.
Natural selection and other mechanisms—such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization—can drive profound changes in populations over time. The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology , hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries.
For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest known ancestors of humans roughly five million years old and the appearance of anatomically modern humans about , years ago , one should find a succession of hominin creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows.
But one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period 65 million years ago. Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way.
If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on Earth or even particular species , the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence. New species evolve by diverging away from established ones and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the s.
More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor. No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.
Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mids George W. Gilchrist, then at the University of Washington, surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science.
Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. Krauss, now at Arizona State University, were similarly fruitless. Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence.
Yet according to the editors of Nature , Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult which no one disputes.
In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more.
These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology. Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements.
Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution.
Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals—which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.
Teaching evolution alongside these other approaches would imply that creation science and intelligent design theory are as rigorously tested as evolution, and they are not. Learn More What Is Science? Web Activities. About the Project. While at the museum I spent some time talking to geologist Andrew Snelling. Another Australian, Snelling has a PhD in geology from the University of Sydney and worked in various capacities for the Australian mining industry before getting into "creation science" full time, first for the Texas-based Institute for Creation Research, and then since for Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum.
I mention to Andrew that I'm surprised to see animatronic models and fossils of dinosaurs around the museum. We don't have to be afraid of the real evidence," he says. In other words, dinosaurs were alive during the pre-flood Earth. So were trilobites, so were people. When I ask him how his background in geology is being used here, he tells me of his fieldwork at the Grand Canyon. This is a point that's made over and over, to the extent that it begins to sound reasonable. Their mantra is, "Hey, we're all doing science here, there's just a disagreement about the age.
Creation science has a big problem with orthodox radiometric dating and carbon dating. Apes to humans would be a case in point. This spells Creation not evolution.
To which the response comes that on the one hand one expects such gaps. Fossilization is an uncommon occurrence — most dead bodies get eaten straight away or just rot — and the wonder is that we have what we do have.
On the other hand argue evolutionists, the record is not that gappy. There are lots of good sequences — lines of fossils with little difference between adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or in more detail the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to the modern horse on one toe.
Moreover, in refutation of Creationism, we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood. For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never found down with the dinosaurs.
Those brutes of old expired long before we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this. Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down — entropy increases, to use the technical language. Energy gets used and converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service.
But organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law. This would be impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind evolution meaning change without direct divine guidance of organisms from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like humans.
There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous intervention to produce functioning life. To which argument the response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy from elsewhere. And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while. Eventually the sun will go out and life will become extinct.
The second law will win eventually, but not just yet. Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law that is, unguided law , especially not by blind evolutionary laws.
They must have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional. In fact, today the fossil record for humans is strong — we evolved over the past four million years from small creatures of half our height, who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we. There is lots of fossil proof of these beings known as Australopithecus afarensis.
Perhaps it is true that we humans are special, in that as Christians claim we uniquely have immortal souls, but this is a religious claim. It is not a claim of science, and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls. There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution, but this is the nature of science. No branch of science has all of the answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true of their branch of science.
Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the cultural context. First, as a populist movement, driven as much by social factors — a sense of alienation from the modern world — one would expect to find that cultural changes in society would be reflected in Creationist beliefs.
This is indeed so. Take, above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was very popular because it was thought to justify slavery Noll Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends making people into the property of others — the Bible elsewhere seems to endorse slavery. Remember, when the escaped slave came to Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey him.
Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist circles well into the twentieth century. Price, for instance, was quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites.
By the time of Genesis Flood , however, the civil rights movement was in full flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully. They explained in detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as inferior. The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy Scriptures. Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato or Aristotle.
Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons, Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright opposition to evolution of all kinds. We find in fact then that although Creationists were and are adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be called evolution!
This said, Creationists were convinced that this change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists would allow. Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during the days of Creation. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that Creationism is purely an epistemological matter — a matter of facts and their understanding.
Moral claims have always been absolutely fundamental. Nearly all Creationists in the Christian camp are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last Judgement. They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era. Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus — hence, we should engage in social action and the like.
Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others. For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family sanctity which today encompasses anti-abortion , sexual orthodoxy especially anti-homosexuality , biblically sanctioned punishments very pro-capital punishment , strong support for Israel because of claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End Times , and so forth.
It is absolutely vital to see how this moral agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods and Arks. Ruse discusses these matters in much detail. Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful, and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris particularly and his coworkers and believers — notably Duane T.
Particularly effective was their challenging of evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with bold statements provocatively made most often by Gish about the supposed nature of the universe Gilkey ; Ruse ed.
This all culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for state legislatures, that would allow — insist on — the teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools. In the biology classes of such schools, that is.
By this time it was realized that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the Constitution that which prohibits the establishment of state religion , it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution from such schools.
The trick was to get Creationism — something that prima facie rides straight through the separation of church and state — into such schools. The idea of Creation Science is to do this.
The claim is that, although the science parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as good science. In , these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was passed and signed into law — as it happens, by a legislature and governor that thought little of what they were doing until the consequences were drawn to their attention.
William Clinton was governor from to , and again from to his winning of the presidency, in The law was passed during the interregnum. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, the geneticist Francisco Ayala, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and as the philosophical representative Michael Ruse appeared as expert witnesses, arguing that Creationism has no place in state supported biology classes.
Hardly surprisingly, evolution won. The judge ruled firmly that Creation Science is not science, it is religion, and as such has no place in public classrooms.
In this whole matter was decided decisively in the same way, by the Supreme Court, in a similar case involving Louisiana. See Ruse ed. Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial was less theological or scientific, but philosophical. Paradoxically, the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand.
The Creationists had started to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing philosopher Karl Popper As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable. By this, Popper meant that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world. If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be rejected — or at least revised.
The Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a science than Creationism. To his credit, Popper revised his thinking on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was a genuine scientific theory; see Popper Part of the testimony in Arkansas was designed to refute this argument, and it was shown that in fact evolution does indeed make falsifiable claims.
As we have already seen, natural selection is no tautology. If one could show that organisms did not exhibit differential reproduction — to take the example given above, that all proto-humans had the same number of offspring — then selection theory would certainly be false.
Likewise, if one could show that human and dinosaur remains truly did occur in the same time strata of the fossil record, one would have powerful proof against the thinking of modern evolutionists.
This argument succeeded in court — the judge accepted that evolutionary thinking is falsifiable. Conversely, he accepted that Creation Science is never truly open to check.
On-the-spot, ad hoc hypotheses proliferate as soon as any of its claims are challenged. It is not falsifiable and hence not genuine science. They argued that in fact there is no hard and fast rule for distinguishing science from other forms of human activity, and that hence in this sense the Creationists might have a point Ruse ed.
Not that people like Laudan were themselves Creationists. They thought Creationism false. Their objection was rather to trying to find some way of making evolution and not Creationism into a genuine science. Defenders of the anti-Creationism strategy taken in Arkansas argued, with reason and law, that the United States Constitution does not bar the teaching of false science. It bars the teaching of non-science, especially non-science which is religion by another name.
Hence, if the objections of people like Laudan were taken seriously, the Creationists might have a case to make for the balanced treatment of evolution and Creationism. Popperian falsifiability may be a somewhat rough and ready way of separating science and religion, but it is good enough for the job at hand, and in law that is what counts. Evolutionists were successful in court.
As we shall see, the task of leadership then got passed to younger people, especially the biochemist Michael Behe and the philosopher-mathematician William Dembski.
For better or for worse, one sees the heavy hand of Thomas Kuhn here, and his claim in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the change from one paradigm to another is akin to a political revolution, not ultimately fueled by logic but more by extra-scientific factors, like emotions and simple preferences. In the Arkansas trial, Kuhn was as oft mentioned by the prosecutors as was Popper. The former is the scientific stance of trying to explain by laws and by refusing to introduce miracles.
A methodological naturalist would insist on explaining all phenomena, however strange, in natural terms. Elijah setting fire to the water-drenched sacrifice, for instance, would be explained in terms of lightning striking or some such thing.
The latter is the philosophical stance that insists that there is nothing beyond the natural — no God, no supernatural, no nothing. According to naturalism, what is ultimately real is nature, which consists of the fundamental particles that make up what we call matter and energy, together with the natural laws that govern how those particles behave.
Johnson thinks of himself as a theistic realist, and hence as such in opposition to metaphysical realism. Hence, the evolutionist is the methodological realist, is the metaphysical realist, is the opponent of the theistic realist — and as far as Johnson is concerned, the genuine theistic realist is one who takes a pretty literalistic reading of the Bible.
So ultimately, it is all less a matter of science and more a matter of attitudes and philosophy. Evolution and Creationism are different world pictures, and it is conceptually, socially, pedagogically, and with good luck in the future legally wrong to treat them differently. Theistic Realism is the only genuine form of Christianity. But does any of this really follow? The evolutionist would claim not. Metaphysical naturalism, having been defined as something which precludes theism, has been set up as a philosophy with a religion-like status.
It necessarily perpetuates the conflict between religion and science. But as Johnson himself notes, many people think that they can be methodological naturalists and theists. Methodological naturalism is not a religion equivalent. Is this possible, at least in a consistent way with intellectual integrity?
To sort out this debate, let us agree to what is surely the case that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package deal.
Take one, and you take the other. Reject one, and you reject the other. You cannot accept Genesis literally and evolution. That is a fact. In other words, there can be no accommodation between Creationism and evolution.
However, what if you think that theologically speaking there is much to be said for a nice shade of grey? What if you think that much of the Bible, although true, should be interpreted in a metaphorical manner? What if you think you can be an evolutionist, and yet take in the essential heart of the Bible?
What price consistency and methodological naturalism then? It speaks of the world as a meaningful creation of God however caused and of a foreground drama which takes place within this world. And clearly at once we are plunged into the first of the big problems, namely that of miracles — those of Jesus himself the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana , his return to life on the third day, and especially if you are a Catholic such ongoing miracles as transubstantiation and those associated, in response to prayer, with the intervention of saints.
There are a number of options here for the would-be methodological naturalist. You might simply say that such miracles occurred, that they did involve violations of law, but that they are outside your science.
They are simply exceptions to the rule. End of argument. A little abrupt, but not flatly inconsistent with calling yourself a theist. You say normally God works through law but, for our salvation, miracles outside law were necessary.
Or you might say that miracles occur but that they are compatible with science, or at least not incompatible. Jesus was in a trance and the cure for cancer after the prayers to Saint Bernadette was according to rare, unknown, but genuine laws.
This position is less abrupt, although you might worry whether this strategy is truly Christian, in letter or in spirit. It seems a little bit of a cheat to say that the Jesus taken down from the cross was truly not dead, and the marriage at Cana starts to sound like outright fraud. Of course, you can start stripping away at more and more miracles, downgrading them to regular occurrences blown up and magnified by the Apostles, but in the end this rather defeats the whole purpose.
The third option is simply to refuse to get into the battle at all. Miracles are just not the sorts of things which conflict with or confirm natural laws. Traditional Christians have always argued this in some respects. Take the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
The turning of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not something open to empirical check. You cannot disconfirm religion or prove science by doing an analysis of the host. Likewise even with the resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion, his mortal body was irrelevant. The point was that the disciples felt Jesus in their hearts, and were thus emboldened to go forth and preach the gospel.
Does one simply go to Lourdes in hope of a lucky lottery ticket to health or for the comfort that one knows one will get, even if there is no physical cure? In the words of the philosophers, it is a category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set. Hume , is the starting place for these discussions.
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