CREATIONISM AGAIN
October 5th 1999
In AT 22 (click on to Home Page for a link to this) the subject considered was 'Creation - What the Idea Entails and Does Not Entail'. Since that was written there has been a remarkable turn of events in Kansas; the education authority has ordained that evolution shall not be a required subject for official examinations in biology. This decision is presumably based upon a theological assertion of the doctrine of creationism along the lines of the Genesis stories - held to be inerrantly the Word of God.
The purpose of this, AT 40, is to make claims that this Kansas decision is theologically dubious and scientifically unwarranted and, since the basic premise underlying that decision is that the Bible is infallible as to information, it must be first made clear that, as a source of information, the Bible is indeed fallible.
To quote from a recent issue of LADY GODIVA ....
"The weakness of the Bible, as information, is partly that it does so very little to anticipate the well attested data we now have as to the scale, complexity and antiquity of the natural universe. Additionally, and more damaging to the factual credibility of the Bible, the Genesis creation story presents an account of the living world that makes no mention of micro organisms ..... yet these are far more numerous than macro organisms and, what is more, quite fundamental to the functioning of macro life.
We would not rate highly a purported history of twentieth century warfare that makes no mention of aircraft and of high explosives - would we?"
From the theological angle, we might usefully reflect upon:
EVOLUTION AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
It is supposed universally that the Natural Universe is orderly; the concept 'Law of Nature' is familiar even though the meaning of the term varies according to the user's predisposition.
Scientifically speaking, a Law of Nature is a generalised account of particular events of a particular type. For example the law of gravitation summarises such events as an apple falling off the tree and landing on the ground under the tree.
Scientists strictly do not regard the Laws of Nature, that the current data suggest, (the Empirical Laws of Nature) as being absolute, final. The current Laws are merely the best yet in any given area of inquiry. It is a philosophical question as to whether there are absolute Laws of Nature to which empirically constructed Laws approximate with increasing exactitude as our knowledge grows.
Theologically, it is held, by faith, that the Creator did His work methodically and that His Plan embraces absolute Laws of Nature - laws which govern the workings of the Natural Universe - UNLESS God, for his own good and sufficient reasons, sees fit to suspend any given law at any given moment thus generating a 'supernatural event'. Such events, consequent upon such suspensions, are termed miracles.
Considering that science leans so heavily upon the notion of the uniformity of nature (and hence upon the laws that are but parts of that uniformity) .... theologians often claim that Project Science is feasible only in so far as the Creator's work is methodical. No Method ... no Law ... no Science, is the way of it as seen by most theologians.
This view is tantamount to saying that God does not, for example, take a fresh decision every time an apple is released from its anchorage to the tree; He has made a general decision that, in such circumstances, apples will fall to the ground - and having decided upon the Law (of Gravitation in this case) He simply lets the apples 'get on with it'.
This, if a mere human may dare to say so, is a very intelligent way of doing things on God's part; God, it appears, is an organiser, an enabler, rather than a piecemeal plodder. Well done God!
And yet ....... simplistic creationists such as Biblical literalists, do not want us to think that God arranged for the living world to evolve, in a way consistent with His relevant Laws, from a simple start to the wondrous complexity we see all around us.
Simplistic creationists would have us believe that He made species after species rather as though he might have decided afresh about gravity every time an apple was due to part from its tree. What a Funny Old God that would be. Did He give us brains so that we might be content to think like that?
From the scientific angle, we might usefully reflect upon:
ON THE MUTABILITY OF SPECIES
It is a fair question to ask Darwinists "Yes we accept that Natural Selection can result in new varieties - as can artificial selection; we know this. But what about new species ?"
This is a fair question - Darwin's classic book was, after all, not 'The Origin of Variation' ........ and it is really not good enough merely to quote Darwin as having said the "varieties are incipient species". To leave things at that would be merely to invite the pantomime dispute - 'oh yes they are' against 'oh no they are not'.
It is apparent even to the meanest intelligence that tigers, tulips and tapeworms are very different life-forms and anyone who claims that they are mutually related, by something other than the mere fact of being alive, has a job on his hands.
The evolutionist who claims that all three share a distant common ancestry would have to produce a mountain of data to corroborate his theory - going back through three huge numbers of intermediate, mostly extinct, life-forms. It is little wonder that a believer in Special Creation can claim that Darwinism is just as much a faith-based position as evolutionists hold his to be.
In passing and writing as a chemist, I would be hard put to it to explain, to an intelligent and relentless sceptic, the reasons why we assign to carbon dioxide a molecular formula comprising one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms - and that is one of the simplest molecules we have. I would need to give a rather long course of lectures to prove the point satisfactorily! Moreover, I could not prove this particular case to be defensible without, inter alia, bringing in a lot of others as well. Molecular formulae are not assigned individually but they do fit into a system that is, in the round, comprehensively defensible. Evolution, principally by Natural Selection, is a far vaster systemisation of data than is the whole of simple chemistry ..... and its exponents and its opponents alike might usefully pause to reflect humbly upon that. We are little beings perhaps unimportant in, and certainly peripheral to, a big universe. But I digress too much.
Perhaps it is useful to consider the living world as a whole - which comprises a vast number of life-forms especially numerous in the cases of those manifestly less differentiated than tigers, tulips and tapeworms, respectively.
There are, I am told, several hundred different species of earwigs - and much the same can be said of many another life-form. It must be obvious to anyone that to determine whether two rather different earwigs are wide variants of one species or members of two distinct but closely similar species ...... could be a very difficult task. It is likely that the decision is, in the end, somewhat arbitrary and people who attempt this sort of classification must be receptive to the idea that the different sorts of earwigs are none other than widely varied organisms that are either just in, or just out of, the 'incipient species' frame and that the word incipient has, in the case of the two sorts of earwig mentioned, perhaps lost much of its force.
So it is credible that it is not mere faith alone that makes evolutionists see that tigers, tulips and tapeworms are not quite so far apart in the overall scheme of things as might appear if we take a less than overall view.
That varieties are incipient species and that, as a corollary, there is no absolute distinction between species ...... but merely an operational one that is more useful in some areas of biology and less useful in others ...... is more credible than that nature, or the Creator, or whatever, would have generated millions of species when thousands might well have been enough to form a many-layered functioning global ecosystem.
The Immutable Species Party have a point - but one that seems to be a good deal less credible when a broader, rather than a narrower, view of the biosphere is taken.
From the theological angle again, we might usefully reflect upon:
Mother Nature is immensely wasteful - 'easy come, easy go'. Would a thrifty Creator ..... with a hardline Presbyterian aversion to games of chance and cannily practising Special Creation ....... have been so extravagant?
If I am asked to entertain belief in god then I draw the line at accepting an implausible god. 'The Great Punter in the Sky' is at least a notion compatible with what we can observe and infer even if (as I happen to think) there is no particular point in embracing such a notion.
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