Creation "science"

I wrote this for my granddaughter, who is about to begin a course in advanced placement biology, but others may find it of interest as well

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About “Creation Science”

You are about to embark on a year-long study of biology, focused heavily on the mechanisms of evolution. We will not deal with “creation science” at all, despite the fervent efforts of a small but vocal minority of Christian fundamentalists to have “creation science” taught along with evolution as competing theories. Creation science is not science – it is theology. Nonetheless, it is instructive to explore exactly why “creation science” isn’t really science – it will help to define what science really is.

Creationists believe, based on a literal reading of the Bible, that everything was created in seven days, calculated by some theologians to be about 6000 years ago. They believe that human beings were created just as they are, from scratch, rather than evolving over eons from predecessor species, most recently the apes. This may sound silly to you, but millions of people, including millions of Americas, really believe this. You may even know people who believe this.

Now it is certainly possible they are right (or that the Pueblo Indians are right, and we all emerged from an underworld through a hole in the floor of the kiva, or that the Hindus are right…. or….). But if their creationist theory is right, they have to explain a lot of other observations that don’t fit – ancient fossils in rocks, light from galaxies billions of light years away, carbon dating results, etc, etc, etc. It is certainly possible that God put all those things in place during seven days of creation just to fool us, but that presents even more difficult questions – like, “why bother?”

So what makes a scientific theory different?

First of all, let’s be clear that despite the sloppy thinking and writing of many non-scientists, there is no such thing as a scientific “fact”. Everything in science is a theory. Some scientific theories are new and untested, others have been tested for hundreds of years and withstood every test. Those that have a lot of evidence to support them are sometimes called “laws” or “principles”, but in fact they are still theories and someday someone may find a flaw in them.

For example, Newton’s “laws” of mechanics have been used for centuries, and were believed to be fully accurate descriptions of the way the world worked. Then along came Einstein and showed that although Newton’s “laws” of mechanics were pretty good approximations at slow speed, when speeds get up close to the speed of light they are less accurate, and relativity theory provides a better approximation. No doubt someone in the future will show that relativity theory also breaks down under some extreme circumstances (perhaps in the middle of black holes, for example) and some new theory is a better approximation under those circumstances, and so on.

Understand that all scientific theories are attempts at useful approximations of how things work in the world. The history of science teaches that nature is immensely complex and deviously subtle, so almost certainly our approximations are wrong – some just a little bit, some completely wrong. The best that can be said about the scientific method is that it keeps us moving forward to ever-better approximations.

So what makes a theory a “scientific” theory? Why is it that “creation science” is not a scientific theory but the theory of evolution is a scientific theory?

For a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must do four things:

1. It must make testable predictions. That is, it must make one or more predictions about the real physical world that I can go out and test.

2. It must be falsifiable. That is, one must be able to conceive of a practical test that would show that the theory is false or incorrect.

3. It must rely for explanation entirely on natural forces. That is, it cannot rely on the actions of gods, angels, supernatural beings, or invisible aliens to explain phenomena.

4. It must adequately explain all past observations, as well as any new predictions it makes.

Finally, a “good” scientific theory uses the simplest explanation possible, with the fewest variables.

It is quite possible, of course, that the “true” (in some objective sense) explanation is not the simplest. It is quite possible, of course, that there are supernatural agents in the world making some things happen. It is quite possible, of course, that some things are true that are not testable.

Nonetheless, for a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must live within the constraints above. And that is because those constraints give us some way to sort out useful (in a practical sense) theories from possibly true but useless (in a practical sense) theories.

Newton’s “laws” of gravitation allow us to predict the orbits of our spacecraft. It may be ‘true” (in some objective sense) that the spacecraft really follows those orbits because some god pushes them there, or because invisible aliens steer them with tractor beams, or because they “want” to follow those orbits, etc, etc, but those “theories” are of no practical help to us, whereas Newton’s theories, as a practical matter, allow us to successfully put spacecraft into orbit.

Notice, by the way, that “string theory” isn’t yet a valid scientific theory, because it has yet to produce any testable predictions. Until it does produce a testable prediction, it remains a fascination mathematical concept, but not yet a scientific theory.

So now let’s go back to “creation science” and see if it fits the criteria for a “scientific” theory.

Recall from above, for a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must do four things:

1. It must make testable predictions. That is, it must make one or more predictions about the real physical world that I can go out and test. What testable prediction does “creation science” make? I am not aware of any, nor have supporters ever proposed any.

2. It must be falsifiable. That is, one must be able to conceive of a practical test that would show that the theory is false or incorrect. What test could possibly falsify any prediction about the actions of an all-powerful deity? What test could falsify creationism? Whatever the outcome of any test, supporters would just say it was the will of God, and who can understand the workings of God?

3. It must rely for explanation entirely on natural forces. That is, it cannot rely on the actions of gods, angels, supernatural beings, or invisible aliens to explain phenomena. Creationism clearly fails this test as well, since it relies for its explanations entirely upon the inscrutable actions of God.

4. It must adequately explain all past observations, as well as any new predictions it makes. Again, creationism has trouble meeting the criteria, because it can’t explain all sorts of things in the observable natural world around us, like fossil beds and traces of continental drift.

Now it has been useful to examine “creation science” in this light, but there are lots of other examples in the everyday world of people making ”scientific” claims that aren’t real science – to sell diet plans or pills to cure who knows what, to justify dubious political actions, etc. etc. Keep an eye out for them and see how many you can spot.

By the way, “creation science” fails to be real science for one other important reason – real scientists know they don’t entirely understand the world in all its complexity and are trying to figure out how the world works and how it all came to be, while creationists are sure they already know the answers to these questions from the Bible. Anyone who is sure they already know all the answers by definition isn’t a real scientist!