I will confess that I have limited patience for the “evolution controversy,” so I will move quickly. The argumentation on both sides would shame your average high-school debate team. In brief: science does not deal in “truths;” it deals in data and theory. There is no third category in science. Evolution is most emphatically a theory (scientists who do not know this may be scientists but they are not thinkers).
Theories are evaluated in science by their capacity to predict data. They are valuable because they save you the pain of gathering voluminous amounts of data which a little intelligent conjecture can sidestep.
For the Biblical creationists (or their mask, “intelligent design”), the question is: what data does your theory predict? The theory of evolution provides a framework for predicting things like how many bones a capybara will have if you know how many a mouse has, or where the gene affected by HIV will be on a human if you find it on a monkey. In fact, it predicts so many things that scientists have taken on the unfortunate habit of calling it a “fact,” which is nonsense but shows just how useful a theory it is.
The last time a Biblical explanation was in line with scientific discovery was when it was being discovered that limestone, a very common rock even in mountain ranges, forms under water. This could be predicted from the Bible, because it mentions a flood covering the entire earth. That’s a very meager record of prediction, and the Bible offers little more.
Many scientific triumphalists, with their shoddy messianic thinking, are to blame for the current debacle, in which 48% of Americans were found to give credence to the theory of evolution. But of course I will not exempt the 52% from culpability. Ignorantia legum naturae neminem excusat.
The chart, showing religion’s shame in this whole affair, is below. Obviously, someone needs to superimpose the chart on a reverse-image of the classic evolutionary icon [now done below]. From left to right you see the evolution of religion into know-nothingism (interesting to note that with only one or two exceptions the religions get younger as you proceed from left to right).
4 Comments