Oh Lord

I'm no philosopher, nor am I the sort of polymath who has taken the time to understand biology as well as I do astronomy. That being said, I consider myself broadly educated enough to understand the basic principles of evolution, and the method by which they've been derived. Therefore I find it frightening to see the debate over the teaching of basic biology monopolized by would-be theocrats who seem to misunderstand not only biology, but the basic terminology of science itself.

The recent decision made by Pennsylvania courts which rightly struck down the teaching of intelligent design as science seems to have started the pendulum swinging in the other direction. However, I and my hometown have now apparently come under attack.

Each spring, I contribute a few answers to my mother's third-grade science class when they get to their astronomy unit. It's a fun little exercise, both for them in getting to hear from a scientist halfway across the country, and for me, in trying to craft short and (hopefully) entertaining lessons for kids interested in science.

In answering one particular question though, I seem to have sparked the ire of a religious leader in my hometown. Having read a response in which I outlined the formation of our solar system, he sent a letter to my mother, reproduced below. It's not a particularly exciting letter given that he's mostly recycling the emotional objections usually employed by the young earth creationist crowd, but since it's partly a personal attack, I feel compelled to defend myself. (I apologize in advance for my overuse of parenthetical statements. I guess I am addicted to them.)


The argument



No one knows how old the earth is. The age is constantly getting older as scientists realize how improbable the theory of evolution is and feel the need to add more years into the picture to convince people that it could happen. It was not many years ago that we were told the earth is 10 million years old! I could connect you with brilliant, educated scientists who believe, like me, that the earth is less than 10, 000 years old and the scientific evidence clearly points to this.

Public school is very difficult for conservative Christians who believe that God created all species about 6,000 years ago. Our children are continually brainwashed into accepting evolution from kindergarten on at school and on public TV.

I wish the good teachers of our schools in [Godlessburg] would have the courage to present the theory of evolution for what it is, a theory. I also wish they would have the courage to join the growing number of scientists that are convinced we are product of intelligent design and that the earth may be much younger than we have been told in recent years.



The Rebuttal

Again, this is hardly the stuff of state championship level debate team, as most of it amounts to an emotional appeal (along with an appeal to authority), but allow me to write an unjustifiably long response anyway.

There are two issues here, the largely imaginary clash of evolution vs. creation, and the related but separate issue of the Earth's age. Tackling creationism first:

First of all, let's make sure we're starting with accurate definitions of both "science" and "theory" since even these two basic terms are often tragically misused by creationists in their attempt to frame the debate in (intentionally or otherwise) misleading terms. I've pieced together the important bits of the standard dictionary definitions here, and I apologize if the resultant composites are unwieldy, but I want to leave no room for pointless semantic debate. These are the definitions accepted by the scientific community. Thus it was written, and thus shall it be:

  • Science - The process of making falsifiable or testable claims about the natural world, and testing the validity of those claims against observational evidence and experimentation in order to discover the methods and laws that govern the physical world and its phenomena.
    Let's also define two other useful terms in contrast to science:
  • Nonscience - Science considers only the natural world. If a claim deals with the supernatural it cannot be tested and is therefore a nonscientific claim.
  • Pseudoscience - The process of making falsifiable claims, but distorting or outright ignoring the results of tests against those claims. In contrast to nonscience claims, which are generally presented in the context of a religion and do not pretend to be anything more than religious guidelines, pseudoscience often seeks to cloak itself in the language and authority of true science, despite offering no real knowledge. People who practice pseudoscience are, in the best case scenario being intellectually dishonest, intentionally or otherwise, while in the worst case they are outright con artists. Some good examples include daily horoscopes, psychics, or just about anyone who claims to have special magical mind powers. Sorry, but John Edward isn't really communicating with the dead (see here), Yuri Gagarin is bending spoons with his hands, not his mind (see here), and Sylvia Browne is either a slave to her massive ego, or is possibly a nutcase. (many examples, but see here for starters).
Finally, one more important definition:
  • Theories - Sets of statements constructed in order to explain a groupof facts or phenomena. A statement can in general be considered a scientific theory only if it has been repeatedly tested, is widely accepted, and furthermore, can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.


With these definitions in mind we may immediately attack the central demand being made, that "you present the theory of evolution for what it is, a theory." Creationists generally seem to believe that the statement "evolution is just a theory" is sufficient justification for teaching alternatives. This is a misuse of the word theory, though. In proper scientific context, if evolution is a theory (and it is), it should be a rigorously defined set of principles with a large body of evidence that supports it (and there is) and it should be widely accepted. And again, it is. The majority of the Americal public seems to have been convinced of this "only a theory" nonsense. Fortunately, science isn't a democracy, and the public doesn't get to vote on what should be right. Indeed, the scientific method is designed precisely to counteract mankind's tendency to insist that the most emotionally satisfying explanation must be the right one.

Furthermore, if one is to propose a replacement or alternative to evolutionary theory, it must pass several tests.
  • The "no duh" test: It must actually qualify as a scientific theory.
  • The "adequate replacement" test: If it is to replace a theory that explains a wealth of past experiments and observations, it must provide a set of rules that correctly accounts for those data as well or better than the theory it is to replace.
  • The "predictor" test: If it is a valid theory, it must also correctly account for the results of experiments and observations not yet performed.


Creationism (or intelligent design or whatever name it is being dressed up in) does not pass any of these tests. The central claim of creationism ultimately must boil down to "a godlike creature (usually the Christian god specifically) made things as they are." First of all, this claim is nonscientific. It is not falsifiable. Creationists might cite nonfalsifiability as a strength, equating "can't prove me wrong" with "I must be right." However, nonfalsifiability means the central tenet of creationism is substanceless. I can claim with every bit as much validity that invisible, intangible, omnipotent unicorns have made things as they are, or that, as advocated on this site, a giant flying spaghetti monster created the universe in accord with his unknowable whims. None of these statements can be tested, none can be ruled out, and ultimately, none qualify as science.

This alone would be sufficient refutation, but for the sake of completeness, I'd point out that creationism also fails the other two tests I've put forth. "God did it" does not yield under any formalism a set of concrete rules by which past evidence can be explained, and furthermore, "God did it" can't predict the results of future experiments. (After all, who could presume to know the mind of God?)

So why all the debate?

The truth is, in scientific circles, there really is no debate. There is no "growing proportion of scientists who oppose evolution" (For a humorous look at this fact, see this site.) The matter is closed, and has been for some time. Even some Christian faithful have reconciled faith with science. 10,000 clergymen have endorsed a document (viewable here) affirming both their faith and their acceptance of evolutionary science. The Vatican has also declared that evolution is not at odds with Catholic doctrine. (Though if the world's worst human being, Jack Chick, speaks for them as he claims, creationists would merely consider Catholic endorsement of science as further proof of papal apostasy.)

The Age of Earth

While there are no claims made in the letter as to specifically what "scientific evidence clearly points to [Earth being less than 10,000 years old]," odds are they're going to be the same old dusty (and long ago falsified) claims that get trotted out again and again. Here are a handful in no particular order, along with the rebuttals:
  • The sun is shrinking at 5 feet per hour, meaning the Sun can have been undergoing fusion for no more than a few million years.
  • Such a statement is equivalent to me walking along the beach, watching the tide lower the water level by a foot in one hour, and then proclaiming "one year ago, the Earth was covered in a mile and a half of water!" The Sun's size does change over time, but it changes according to the whims of energy generation in its core and plasma physics at its surface and is capable of both contracting and expanding.
  • The rate at which comets lose material means they'll last for only a few thousand years before burning up, and yet there are still comets today. Therefore, the solar system must be only a few thousand years old.
  • This assumes that there's no potential source for new comets. In fact, the solar system is assumed to be ringed by a large cloud of icy material which can provide us with an endless supply of comets, and the orbital dynamics of long-period comets indicates that the assumed cloud must in fact be there.
  • Saturn's rings are unstable, and will disappear in a few hundred thousand years. Therefore, they cannot be billions of years old.
  • Transient events like this are argued as indicators of the solar system's age, but there's no logical reason why the age of Saturn's rings should mean anything. Had humans come to exist 10 million years ago, we would simply have observed a Saturn with no rings. Ditto if we came to the scene 10 million years too late. Jupiter's "Red Spot" is only a few hundred years old, and will last only a few hundred more. Is this sufficient argument for a solar system that is only hundreds of years old?
  • The rate at which cosmic dust lands on Earth (and presumably the Moon) coupled with the assumed age of the solar system implies there should be several feet of dust on the Moon. Yet, when Apollo astronauts landed there, (or, for the paranoid conspiracy theorists, did not land there) they found only a few inches of dust, indicating a young Earth.
  • This is apparently one of the more common arguments used by creationists despite the fact that it was disproven before the astronauts had even taken off. The rates of dust accumulation were the upper limits of very uncertain estimates that the experimenters themselves warned were probably very high.
There are a bunch more, and maybe I've come nowhere near the anticipated creationist talking points, but ultimately it boils down to the same sort of argument typically employed against evolution, wherein the critic will seize on some minor, tenuously justified counterclaim and insist, incorrectly, that if any counterclaim can be made, the entire science must then be wrong. So I'm not terribly concerned that this guy knows "brilliant, educated scientists" who affirm that the Earth's age must be young. I can fairly safely presume that they're making such affirmations based on specious objections like those listed above. (And as long as we're resorting to appeals to authority, I can walk next door and find 100 brilliant, educated scientists who could each point to ten distinct pieces of evidence that utterly rule out a young Earth.)

I'd also like to stamp out this guy's complaint that "[Earth's] age is constantly getting older as scientists... feel the need to add more years into the picture to convince people that [evolution] could happen. It was not many years ago that we were told the earth is 10 million years old!"

De Solla Price claimed in 1960 that "90% of all the scientists who have ever lived are still alive today." This striking fact is explained in part because the population itself has expanded dramatically in the last two centuries, and in part because prior to this century, science was the domain of aristocrats who were independently wealthy and hence did not need to worry about finding sources of funding for their experiments.

The fact is, it takes a lot of experiments to reveal some fundamental truths, and a dedicated population of scientists that might carry out these experiments has come to exist only relatively recently in human terms. So prior to the modern era, there were in some cases simply no data with which some questions might have been answered.

Prior to the Curies' work with radioactive substances, it was not even possible to theorize any experiments by which one might measure the Earth's age accurately with radioactive isotopes. The earliest experiments would also have suffered from huge margins of error, so it's also hardly surprising that early estimates of the Earth's age were extremely low. Given the facts available at the time, along with the predominant philosophy, the natural supposition was to assume that the Earth, though possibly very old, was not too many orders of magnitude older than recorded civilization, and it is understandable that even armed with the scientific method, people were unwilling to adjust their estimates upward to the billions of years. If it helps put minds at ease though, I'd note that the age is now arriving at a fixed value, since all modern experimentation gives approximately the same value of 4.5 billion years, with smaller and smaller margins of error as time goes on.

In Conclusion

In closing I'd like repeat this quote:
Public school is very difficult for conservative Christians who believe that God created all species about 6,000 years ago.
Herein lies the core of the rotten apple. Fundamentalist doctrine is at odds with the results of empirical science and that makes the fundamentalists feel bad. Unfortunately for them, empirical science doesn't make room for feelings, but only for facts. And until the Christian Coalition succeeds in remaking the USA from a Christian hegemony into the terrifying Christian theocracy they so desire, public schools will (and must) remain secular, and the science taught therein will (and must) teach only the facts.

Links



I'm certainly not the world's best science writer, and I hold out no hope that this meager attempt to gather my own thoughts on these issues will be influencing nationwide science policy any time soon. Also, there are individuals infinitely more qualified to write in great detail about the science presented here. Fortunately, they already have. If you have several months to spare, you can read through the entirety of the links below for enlightenment, or maybe just for amusement. (I've reproduced all the links already in the above article here as well.)

TalkOrigins.org - A vast repository of searchable information both on the basic science of evolution, and on the claims of creationists and the refutation of these claims. Definitely recommended reading.

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science - The faithful do not need to abandon the principles of their faith when confronted with science. Over 10,000 clergymen and women from around the country have attested to this.

NCSE Project Steve - In an attempt to provide a counterpoint to lists of scientists who deny the validity of evolution (put together by creationists), the NCSE undertook a similar project to see how many scientists named Steve they could get to affirm the validity of evolution. At last count, the Steves have a healthy lead (and considering Steves account for about 1% of the population, they really represent the fact that evolution is "winning" by an insurmountable margin).

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Even if you insist that a deity created the universe, who says it gets to be your deity?

Chick.com - Jack Chick is the worst person in the world.* Witness as he condemns you to hell for your sin-cursed belief that Hindi and Native Americans and nice people can get into heaven. Witness as he condems you to hell for being Catholic, or Jewish, or left-handed (yes I am serious) or playing cards or reading Lord of the Rings. This guy is nuts. Under no circumstances would I recommend anyone actually use this link to visit the guy's page.

*"Judge not lest ye be judged yourself" Metallica 10:17


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