Creationists deny evolution, and usually go on to savage geology; indeed, all of modern science. They want a revolution in science, but they invariably rely on unsophisticated popular arguments. A leading creationist like Henry Morris will say, with a straight face, that since our population grows exponentially, we cannot have been on this earth more than a few thousand years. Anyone using such arguments is obviously not doing science.
In other words, creation-science is not really science. Creationists do not practice science; their community is structured to uphold a particular religious conviction and not to learn about the world. Creationism seems to be like belief in a flat earth. Our world could have been flat, but we know, if we take science seriously at all, that this is not true. And we can see that flat earthers do not practice science, but churn out excuses to protect their beliefs. Living things could have abruptly appeared on earth, but we have found evolution is a much better way to explain life. And creationists obviously do not engage in science but in an apologetic enterprise designed to protect fundamentalist religion from modern science.
Few critics of creationism would quarrel with these observations. But somehow these do not seem enough. When anti-creationists say creationism is not science, they often mean more than that special creation is a scientific failure, or that creationists do not practice science. They go on to add that creation is unfalsifiable, that it is supernatural, that it is inherently religious. Special creation becomes a fact claim which is intrinsically outside of science. According to this conventional wisdom, the creationist mistake is not mere bad practice or their tapestry of ludicrous arguments, but their belief that science could even consider special creation as a legitimate hypothesis, never mind verify it. As Judge William R. Overton put it in his decision against teaching creation-science in Arkansas,
the essential characteristics of science are:Creation science . . . fails to meet these essential characteristics.
- It is guided by natural law;
- It has to be explanatory with reference to natural law;
- It is testable against the empirical world;
- Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
- It is falsifiable. (Ruse and other science witnesses)
It would be lovely if we could find some essential characteristics of properly scientific ideas. If these characteristics excluded special creation, even better. We could chase creationism out of the science classroom, go home, and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, Overton's list does not describe science very well.
Item (5) refers to Karl Popper's idea of using falsifiability to distinguish genuine scientific claims from those only masquerading as science. Science is about explaining the world, so its theories must have some real content we can put to the test. Scientific theories can possibly be shown to be false. In contrast, Popper observed, pseudosciences produce an excuse to fit every observation. Scientific explanations discriminate between alternatives -- explanations which cannot fail convey no real information.
True enough, but this does not tell us much about science. Plus falsifiability does not distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Creationists -- and just about everyone on the fringes of science -- make real fact claims. These claims are, however, most likely false. Creationists assert that beneficial mutations happen too rarely for life to diversify even in geological time spans. Biologists think this claim is mistaken, not unfalsifiable. Creationists declare that functional order cannot self-organize without an intelligent designer. Physicists point out this is false; they do not say it is verbiage science must be blind to. There is nothing wrong with the content of most creationist claims; science is exactly how we find out they are not likely to be true.
Perhaps this is unfair to falsificationism. Yes, creationists weave a tangled web of bad arguments and false fact claims. But the central idea of special creation seems quite invulnerable to anyone knocking down its supporting arguments. Anyone debating creationists will soon get frustrated by their ingenuity in thinking up excuses to avoid saying creation is false. If we observe an example of speciation, well, it must merely be variation within a created kind, which is more like a genus than a species. If radiometric dating shows rocks millions of years old, radioactive decay rates must somehow have been messed up in the past. How can anyone falsify so slippery a claim as creation?
All very well, but legitimate science also adjusts its theories to save appearances. Take Newtonian celestial mechanics. This gives us a set of dynamical laws to calculate what goes on with the planets. But we apply the laws with certain boundary conditions. If our calculations do not fit what we observe, the problem might be our laws, but we might only have falsified our boundary conditions. A perturbation from a calculated orbit, for example, might be a sign of an unknown planet -- which is exactly how astronomers began to suspect the existence of our outer planets. Mercury's perihelion provides evidence for general relativity superseding Newtonian mechanics. But we could conceivably save Newtonian mechanics with new boundary conditions. Like we suspect an unseen planet, we could postulate a distribution of invisible dark matter behaving in such a way as to produce the slight perturbation in Mercury's motion.
Comprehensive scientific theories are not subject to strict falsification. Boundary conditions give us too much wiggle room. We may have to use ad hoc assumptions to save the theory, of course. Cosmologists today argue that most matter in our universe is an exotic sort of dark matter -- only to save their theories. But this is fine. Every theory has arbitrary boundary conditions, adjustable parameters, anomalous cases and so on. These only become excuses when we have an alternative theory. For Newtonian mechanics, Mercury's perihelion is a small but unexpected pestilence to be excused away; for general relativity, it is exactly what we would expect.
The same goes for biology. Evolution fits our world much better, turning creationist explanations into tortured strings of excuses. Special creation is false, in much the sense that Newtonian physics is false. In fact, a better comparison is to how Aristotelian physics is false. Not only do we have a much better theory, special creation is no longer useful even as a first approximation.
Falsificationism misleads us about what is wrong with creationism. It also prevents us understanding what exactly creationists are claiming. The fact is, outside the company of philosophers and theologians, unfalsifiability is exceedingly hard to find. For example, consider the creation-science claim that "The whole universe had an `appearance of age' right from the start." God created a fully functional order, which means we sometimes mistakenly infer long ages past when the world is in fact new. A breathtakingly ingenious idea, though obviously inane. We might as well declare the world sprung into being last Tuesday at 3:04 pm, with full appearance of age. It looks like an excuse which can take care of any evidence contrary to creation. But is it really so devoid of content?
The last-Tuesday assertion is arbitrary, without context, worthless to anyone but the sort of philosopher who enjoys proving true knowledge is impossible. The creationist claim is set in a cosmology and history which could have had evidence for it. Creationism is a rather half-baked theory, but a picture of how our world works nonetheless. Creationists take scripture to be literally true, and find an overall theme uniting scriptural stories. And evidence for one story can count for another in a mutually supporting web of claims. If we had reason to believe prophets saw into the future, angels communicated in dreams, or the Tower of Babel story really took place, we would begin to take the six-day creation story more seriously.
We can even give creation with appearance of age some scientific content. Creationists say that when we extrapolate physical processes backwards in time, we end up with contradictions regarding the state of the universe, which resist reconciliation within naturalistic cosmologies. This indicates the world was supernaturally created, and it started from a more perfect state. Creationists also have some idea what was created with an appearance of age, and what was not. Adam would look like a man who had started as a child and grown up, so he would have an appearance of age. But he might not have a navel, and he would certainly have no memory of parents. So not everything would look like it had a history; if we looked close enough, we would find signs of recent creation. All this is quite half-baked and ridiculously out of place in modern science. Yet creationists make what seem to be straightforward claims about our past, embedded in a picture of the world which we can make some rough sense of. Unless we adopt the naive empiricism of creationists -- saying neither creation nor evolution is scientific because no one can directly observe the remote past -- we want our science to help us figure out whether such claims are true. And if there is anything to evolution, the creationist scenario is false.
So creationism is not strictly unfalsifiable. But there may be other reasons to deny creation can be a scientific hypothesis. Perhaps the problem is that creationists rely on miracles. If they run into difficulty, their God snaps his hands and makes things conform to scripture. There is no arguing with such an all-purpose excuse. Plus, anti-creationists like to say, if we allow even one miracle in an explanation, we can no longer rely on regular natural law. As in Overton's decision, explaining phenomena by natural laws is exactly what science is all about; whatever a miracle story is, it cannot be science.
Unfortunately, this objection to creationism does not quite work either. Creationists do not use miracles as arbitrary excuses; there is method to the madness. Neither is it true that science can only address events explainable by natural law.
Classical physics focused on laws; modern physics directs our attention to the accidents which make up our world. A quantum fluctuation, for example, is a random event -- we can infer no cause for it, and no law tells us when it will happen. Even our everyday physical laws are accidents. At low temperatures, the elegant symmetries of fundamental physics are broken. What dynamical laws are frozen out of symmetry breaking are completely arbitrary. When asked why things are the way we see it and not otherwise, the best a physicist can do is describe a series of accidents which took place after the Big Bang. We end up with a kind of explanation familiar from the historical sciences, where lawful patterns are a framework for accidents. In evolutionary biology, for example, the history of life fits a pattern of descent with modification, but the particular history we see is largely a matter of accidents.
Creationists need not apologize for claiming some events in history do not follow impersonal natural laws. Noah's Flood might be a miracle, but it is a claim we can understand. We could have found evidence that once all the earth was inundated, even that events took place much as told in scripture. In that case, it would also be reasonable to think a God initiated the Flood to punish human wickedness. If this God had to suspend the regular operation of his creation to flood the earth, so be it. Creationist miracles are not arbitrary interruptions in the regular flow of events. They are acts by a personal God, done for moral reasons we can more-or-less grasp, and which are recorded in trustworthy scriptures. To creationists, the overall pattern historical events fall into are not expressed by impersonal laws, but by the purposes of a personal God who promises salvation. Creationism is a hypothesis about history, but unlike evolution which invokes nothing but impersonal laws and accidents. It is more like hypotheses about human history, where we explain events by recounting the acts and purposes of the persons involved.
Of course, some of the personal agents creationists call upon are gods and demons -- supernatural powers. Like most religious theories, creationism pictures a fundamentally personal world. Our world depends on forces beyond the everyday natural order which we can relate to as persons. Personality must be more fundamental than atoms or quantum fields or any conceivable material existence. Ultimately, we must explain events by understanding God's intentions.
So let us restate creationism as a supernatural theory about our world. A few thousand years ago a God created our universe, including many fixed kinds of plants and animals. Life is discontinuous, with unbridgeable gaps between these kinds. Living things are well-fitted to their environments, and when we classify them, we find a particular order in life. There are no designs differing radically from one another, or unclassifiable abominations haphazardly combining different features. This is what we would expect from a single, rational designing mind who created a perfect order. Besides the intricacies of nature, we also have personal testimony from this God, recorded in perfectly reliable scriptures. In them, we can see that nature and human history has a moral order, and that our world is ruled by a God who acts according to his moral character.
Such a theory tries to make sense of our world, proposing a pattern which our evidence should fit. It seems to be an intelligible fact claim; its similarity to a hypothesis about human history also suggests we can extend our ordinary ways of inquiry to address its supernatural aspects. It need not be beyond our science -- including critical history -- any more than claims involving human persons.
Just like the earth could have been flat, life could have been specially created by a God. We reject creation because we have a theory which does a better job, not because creation is tainted by supernatural associations. This should be fairly obvious: we can examine traditionally supernatural claims. Even those of us who reject everything supernatural usually give reasons based on our sciences. Scriptures, it seems, are fine as mythology, but not as reliable historical records. Psychical research could have given us evidence for spiritual realms, but it has produced no solid results. Blind evolution explains life much better than the fixed designs of a creator. Indeed, what we learn from evolution and disciplines like cognitive science strongly suggests that mind and personality are products of a very material brain. Historical, personal explanations are continuous with the impersonal explanations of natural science. If all this is true, special creation is not an inadmissible hypothesis, but a thoroughly false claim.
Then why do so many critics of creationism say the special creation of life is a claim science cannot properly address? One reason is that while falsificationism and the belief that science is restricted to naturalistic explanations are not strictly correct, they still express important insights. After all, creationists do take their beliefs to be non-negotiable, and so respond to criticism by producing a string of excuses. Anyone who does not smell a rat here is not paying attention. But this is a pathology in creationist practice, not a flaw in special creation as a hypothesis. There are no intrinsically pseudoscientific ideas, only pseudoscientific practices.
Anti-creationists who say science is restricted to natural explanations also have a point. Practicing scientists do have an aversion to supernatural claims. But this reflects historical experience, not some feature of science that is etched in stone. Before Darwin, for example, special creation was a theory which helped make sense of biology, especially since it was not confronted with a solid alternative explanation. We have since found a better theory. We have also learned that supernatural explanations are fragile, and that it is too easy to confuse a gap in our knowledge with a gap in nature a supernatural power must bridge. Our naturalistic explanations have been wildly successful, so many of us now think our world is natural all the way through. But things could have gone otherwise. Also, one day we may stumble upon a supernatural theory which does a better job than its rivals. This seems rather unlikely, but it would still be dogmatic to say our science must exclude supernatural hypotheses.
Insisting that special creation is not false like a flat earth but is beyond the pale of science is prudent in a culture where creation is an important religious belief. But even as a pragmatic political move, this strategy is asking for trouble. Creationists are not fools, and they can be quite persuasive when arguing that mainstream science is trying to exclude them by arbitrarily redefining science. Furthermore, while creationism is a bad joke within the natural sciences, some sophisticated religious philosophers and intellectuals criticize evolution and defend versions of creation which are not as obviously mistaken as popular fundamentalist creationism. If popular defenders of evolution keep relying on falsificationism, it will begin to look like evolution depends on an outmoded philosophy of science. If evolutionists refuse to even consider supernatural ideas, this will support arguments that evolution is merely working out the consequences of naturalistic presuppositions.
Creation-science is not science. It is an unscientific practice defending a false belief. In popular arguments, evolutionists have no difficulty proclaiming evolution is a fact. Perhaps it is time we paid more attention to its corollary as well: special creation is false.