For purposes of this thread, a “creationist” or “creation scientist” means a person who rejects the theory of humanity’s origins through biological evolution. A person who, for instance, accepts biological evolution but believes a conscious God must have been behind the Big Bang is not a “creationist” as I am using the term here.
Any scientist will tell you that true science begins with the rejection of authority, whether Aristotle’s authority or the Bible’s authority.
“Creation scientists” such as Michael Behe have always been suspect in my eyes because, no matter what arguments they have to support their position, the reason they hold that position in the first place is that they accept the authority of the Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) religious tradition and that tradition’s account of the creation of the world and humanity. (Yes, yes, I know – logically speaking, to suspect them on those grounds is the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem – but argumentum ad hominem often works pretty well as a rule of thumb: If you have any reason to suspect a person’s motives for asserting a given position, then you should subject that person’s arguments to an especially high degree of scrutiny. In this sense, the most important piece of information in any message is the name of the messenger.)
But are there any exceptions to this? That’s what I’d like to know. Are there any “creation scientists” who did not begin with the assumption that a conscious God made the universe, and then looked for evidence and arguments to support that, but rather arrived at their conclusions from dispassionately studying the scientific evidence? Let us remember that Charles Darwin started out a Christian, and then lost his faith as his observations of the world showed him more and more things he could not square with the Bible. Have any prominent “scientific creationists” undergone an intellectual journey in the opposite direction? (Personal epiphanies and theophanies and road-to-Damascus conversions DO NOT COUNT – we’re talking only about conclusions reached from a rational analysis of scientific evidence.)
Of course, it would be illogical to expect a creationist to be an atheist, at least after he or she arrived at the point of believing in the creation. But it would be possible for a creationist to be a “philosophical theist” like the famous skeptic Martin Gardner, who believes in and prays to a personal God while rejecting all traditional religious revelations as to His nature. Gardner, however, is not a creationist as I have defined the term above – he accepts that human beings originated through biological evolution. Are there any “creation scientists” who are also philosophical theists, or otherwise completely reject the authority of religious traditions or revelations as these bear on scientific questions, and who still find scientific reasons to prefer creation to evolution? Does anybody know?
I looked into creationism because a friend, who was otherwise very intelligent, kept insiting that evolutionary theory had extreme flaws. I never found anyone who remotely fit your description (nor any evidence to believe the ones who failed to fit your description had a point.)
There is the story of the Hindu creationist who began with assumptions different from his Christian counterparts (cyclical time with creation occurring continuously rather than as the historical act of a conscious God) and found evidence to support his beliefs, but somehow I doubt that’s what you’re looking for.
Exactly. They start with their immutable beliefs and construct an untestable framework to support them. Any evidence that goes against it must by their definition be flawed.
No, I’ve never come across such a creature. Maybe one will evolve
Such a person cannot exist. The scientific principle compels the scientist to accept the simplest – least outrageous – theory consistent with all observable facts. A big old man in the sky is most certainly not a theory sitting towards the least outrageous end of the spectrum. Hence, creationism is bad science, if it can even be said to deserve the term.
The late Fred Hoyle possibly qualifies.
He was technically a believer in panspermia - the theory that simple organisms like bacteria can travel between solar systems. While Daniel Dennett used this to argue that he was thus actually a closet Darwinist in denial, his particular beliefs on evolution were usually indistinguishable from some of those often held by young-earth creationists. Most famousy, he thought natural selection to be so fantastically improbable as an explanation of complex structures as to be irrelevant to the history of life on Earth. (There’s the complication here - which might make Dennett right on the matter - that Hoyle always believed in an infinitely long past, which allows for even the fantastically improbable to be significant. Just not on Earth.) And in arguing that Archaeopteryx was faked, he actively added to creationist misinformation.
The exact vision varied over time, but he saw new genes - and diseases - arriving from space. It was this stream of innovations that was meant to explain evolution on Earth. Where these genes were coming from was vaguer, but possibly the process was being organised by some sort of Universal Intelligence.
Hoyle’s exact religious views are also a bit hard to pin down. As far as I can tell, he was raised as a conventional Anglican, but he came to explicitly reject conventional religion. Writing towards the end of his life, he tried to summarise his religious beliefs in the last few pages of his autobiography. I don’t find his explanation terribly clear, but he seems to be identifying God as the universe. Or maybe as some higher dimensions of the universe. But this is still a God he might pray to.
More generally, our ability as humans to come up with diverse belief systems shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s difficult to point to a particular set of beliefs that hasn’t been embraced by someone, somewhere.
It is a frequent claim of creationists that there are fatal flaws in the ‘theory of evolution’, and that evolution is on the brink of collapsing. One example is the likelihood of abiogenesis, the development of the molecules necessary for life from inorganic and non-biological organic compounds. Claims made by creationists to “refute” abiogenesis almost always pander to non-scientists – they involve things like the probability of choosing 150 black jellybeans out of a pile of beans, half white and half black (a supposed analogy of choosing only left-handed amino acids to make a peptide). Therefore, the creationist then claims, life cannot have ‘come together by chance’, and therefore God must have created it.
(For an excellent discussion of how life might have began in geothermal vents, including a relatively non-technical version, see http://www.gla.ac.uk/projects/originoflife/)
–
Creationist arguments are really quite limited, and their ‘evidence’ is sparse aside from religious texts. Creationist ‘evidence’ is primarily comprised of logical arguments (e.g. the Watchmaker Argument), errors made in early evolutionary science (e.g. Piltdown Man), hoaxes (e.g. the Paluxy ‘dinosaur tracks’) and perceived flaws in evolutionary theories (e.g. the likelihood of abiogenesis). Rather than shaping theories to available evidence, creationists selectively shape evidence to conform to the One True Theory, i.e. creation according to Genesis (or some other model).
Creationism requires the acceptance of a theory of creation, and consists of interpreting the available evidence about the origin of life in such a way as to support that theory. Taking creationism according to Genesis as an example, it would be highly illogical for a person to believe only in the literal or even metaphorical truth of Genesis 1 and 2 without believing in the truth of the rest of the Bible. There is simply no incentive to adhering to creationism if one does not adhere to the religion to which the creation myth belongs. Thus, I believe there are no creation scientists who are not religious believers, though there are certainly evolutionary biologists who are.
‘Creationism’ within the boundary of science is probably impossible. Even if it were, it could never hope to prove more than that the universe was created. I doubt highly that it would be able to produce evidence of who created it, which is the general aim of creationists.
