One less elephant
by John Blanton
The story is an old one, so I will try to keep it short.
The young son asks his father, “What holds up the Earth?”
The father explains, “The Earth rests on the back of a huge elephant.”
“But, father, what holds up the elephant?” the child asks.
“The elephant is standing on the back of a very large turtle” the father explains, proud to pass on the wisdom of the best minds of the day.
“But what holds up the turtle?” the child persists.
“Why, son. From there on down it’s turtles all the way.”
More recently Dayle Shockley has written in The Dallas Morning News "Humans aren’t accidents."1 Shockley is a writer and motivational speaker. A review of her writing indicates she is politically conservative and strongly religious. Her writings tend to reflect an otherwise level-headed approach. But, like many deeply religious people, she rejects totally natural explanations. It is unacceptable for her to believe that humans and this wonderful universe just evolved. So she posits an elephant, instead. Only she uses the word “creator.” “Believing that human beings and all of the wonders of this magnificent world just evolved—or are the result of some cosmic explosion—seems much more unlikely and requires much more faith than does believing in a Creator,” she says in her News column.
Now I must say a creator is a great and wonderful thing. A creator is all powerful. With a creator everything is possible. The creator explains all that is otherwise impossible to understand. When the mysteries of the universe become too deep, or when the chain of reasoning becomes overwhelmingly complex, it’s only necessary to invoke a creator, and you’re done. Home by five o’clock even.
That’s because the creator does everything you want it to do, and the creator does not need to be explained. The creator is the final explanation. And the best part about the creator is that one must not attempt to explain the creator. I have this on good authority from people who have told me about the creator. Besides, anybody who attempts to explain the creator will quickly find himself up to his neck in turtles.
It’s fortunate for many of us that our jobs do not require a lot of deep thinking. Most routine tasks can be accomplished by following established policy and social norms. Even otherwise very intelligent people routinely slough off the heavy lifting and go for the easy answer. Shockley is fortunate in being able to do this. She has not followed her chain of reasoning to its logical conclusion. If she had she would have realized that invoking the creator does not explain anything. She has invented an explanation that in turn needs to be explained. Something that by definition “explains everything” actually explains nothing. It is the ultimate excuse—the intellectual equivalent of “The dog ate my homework.”
Where would we be today if our men of science invoked the creator whenever faced with a difficult problem? For one thing we would probably be a few hundred years back, back to the time when demons and black magic were the explanation for human afflictions, and doctors did not desire to search any deeper.
In the less distant past people traveled west to search the gold fields of California. Some, learning there was gold near Pikes Peak in Colorado, decided to stop there and go no farther. They never made it to California. From this, according to a popular legend, we get the word “piker” for someone who strives by half measures. In science we call these people “creationists.”
Which gets us to the main story. There is a movement under way by creationists to introduce a concept called intelligent design into the science curricula in public schools. Having failed more primitive approaches, they now want to dress creationism up in a "cheap tuxedo"2 and pass it off as legitimate science. They have even renamed the creator. It is now a designer.
For example, biochemist Michael Behe believes biochemical processes are too complex to have evolved by natural selection. He wants us to stop searching for the ultimate answer and just accept the designer.3
Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski asserts the information required to construct a complex living organism (such as himself) is too much to have come by natural means. He wants us to accept the designer.4
For these creationists there’s no need to drive all the way to California. It’s easier to just stop at Pike’s Peak and declare an elephant. Fortunately, real scientists are not fond of elephants of the allegorical kind. They like to keep on driving in search of the real thing.
An example: Twelve years ago I was attending a creationist meeting when the theme went something like this: “We know the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion, because a fusion reaction would produce a lot of neutrinos, and scientists are measuring only a fraction of the neutrino flux that would be expected from a fusion source. Without a nuclear power source the sun would have run out of gas a long time ago if it really were billions of years old. Therefore the sun is not billions of year old, and there has not been enough time for evolution. So Darwin was wrong, and Genesis is correct.”
Some people call me skeptical, but I know you can’t beat an argument like that. Since I was a little vague on the nature of neutrinos at that time I decided to do something about it. Later that year I went back to college, and after four years I had a masters degree in physics. In the mean time scientists had learned more about neutrinos, as well.
This year Dr. Raymond Davis, Jr. and Dr. Masatoshi Koshiba won the Nobel prize in physics "in recognition of their ground-breaking research into the emission of neutrinos produced by nuclear fusion reactions in the center of the sun. The observation of these neutrinos demonstrated conclusively that the sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei."5
My guess is the creationists are now off looking for another gap in current scientific research for their creator to hide in.
In the mean time, real science continues to advance, despite the efforts of the creationists to beg for “alternative explanations.” Real scientists have learned to not accept the easy answers, the answers that are not answers at all. They have learned to ask “why?” with relentless persistence. They have also learned, when they don’t understand something, to just say “I don’t know.” Before they get to the first elephant.
References
1 “Viewpoints” column in The Dallas Morning News, 5 October 2002.
2 A phrase coined by Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas.
3 Behe’s irreducible complexity is explained in his book Darwin’s Black Box.
4 Dembski discusses his concept of specified complexity in his book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence.
5 “Nobel Prize in Physics: Raymond Davis, Jr. for Contributions to Neutrino Research and Our Understanding of the Sun,” http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v49/n08/nobel_davis.html