Even though it's a weekend, I was doing some work at the office of the Esperanto League for North America today ― "salarymen work from dawn to setting sun / but a consultant's work is never done". While I was there, I had a visitor ― Steve, a professor of biology at Amherst who is probably going to be ELNA's next vice-president, and who was in the area this weekend and wanted to visit the office. We talked a lot about ELNA, but gradually the conversation moved over to the inevitable question (which has nothing to do with Esperanto, except that our conversation was carried on in that language) ― inevitable, given that he is a biologist ― of Darwinism vs. creationism. In the process, I got to vent a few of my layman's opinions on the topic.
Maybe I shouldn't use the word "creationism" here. For some time "creationism" was rebaptized "scientific creationism". The problem with this was that it was fairly obvious that nothing about creationism was scientific; there was no science involved ― everything comes back to the Holy Bible, and particularly the Book of Genesis, which may indeed be revealed word, but has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific method. (My long-ago suggestion that, if textbooks are going to mention Biblical creation alongside evolution, they should also mention the Chinese creation myth, involving Pan-Ku the Nebula, a goddess named Nüwa, and a quarter of a million years ― well, that suggestion seems to have met with universal inattention. Except maybe in China.)
More recently, "scientific creationism" having bit the big one, so to speak, "intelligent design" has become the new buzzword. Apparently this has to do with God, who is intelligent, man having created God in his own image and so assumed that intelligence is the highest possible attribute of just about anything, a supposition that remains to be proven; but I guess we can use it as a working hypothesis.
There are two fundamental fallacies about "intelligent design" (more properly: creationism) that I'd like to address. The first one has to do with their arguments. Their claim is that Darwinistic evolution is "only a theory", which (shorn of the "only") is quite correct. The problem is that they ― and, far too often, the people they are trying to convince ― don't have the vaguest idea what a theory is, and confuse it with a "hypothesis" (or, more often, a supposition, which is what a hypothesis would be if somebody pulled it out of his rear end rather than being inspired by observations to create it as an explanation for those observations).
Just about everything in science is a "theory" (1) ― that is, an explanation for observed phenomena which serves to explain them (usually in the simplest way possible) and which has not been (yet) countered by any observations made. As an example, there is a theory of gravity. It is no more and no less of a theory than that of evolution. Yet, strangely, I feel morally certain that should those who argue that evolution is "only a theory" be asked to put on open-toed sandals, step outside, pick up a thirty-pound rock, hold it five feet above their toes and let go of it, they would refuse, despite the fact that gravity is "only a theory".
The other problem has to do with usefulness. Simply put, as far as understanding how things in the universe actually work, the Bible is useless. It may be "true" ― whatever that means ― and Darwinian evolution may be "false"; but experience shows that, if you learn something about evolution, you will be learning how to intervene in that process and maybe make the universe do something at your will. Doesn't matter if it's "true" or "false"; it's useful. On the other hand, the only thing the Bible has to teach us is that the universe, which operates on a basis of miracles, is infinitely capricious; you can't count on anything. In this sense, then, the Bible, "true" or "false", is useless. Not one of the great scientific developments of the 20th century derived from the Bible; Darwinian evolution contributed to many of them.
Some three years ago, a team of astronomers at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy discovered what was up to that time the most distant galaxy yet discovered, HCM6A, at a distance of z=6.56 or, if I'm not mistaken, roughly 13 billion light years. The discoverers claimed that this "pushed back the dark age" of the universe (the date at which reionization occurred); though I suspect that it did not actually push it back so much as add observational constraints to an already existing "theory" that reionization occurred at a somewhat earlier epoch. In any case, this discovery helped contribute its small bit to our understanding of how the universe developed and works. And what would the promoters of "intelligent design" have to say to that? Unfortunately, their arguments lead to the inevitable conclusion that the universe was created by miraculous intervention only a bit more than 6,000 years ago (Bishop Usher's calculation based on a series of Biblical "begats"), and that the photons observed by the astronomical team were created not by star-formation thirteen billion years ago in a distant galaxy, but by divine fiat, six thousand years ago, heading for earth, and actually mean nothing at all. And true or false, dear reader, how does that help contribute to our understanding of the universe?
(1) When I was in high school, I "learned" that theories, when they are shown to be inevitably correct, advance to the status of "facts". This is not correct, as far as I now know. Theories remain theories; facts are observations that support or counter them.