August 30, 2005
There is no debate
by Jeff Langstraat
Well, our favorite fussy fuckwit returns to tell me how flawed my character is (a question I'll leave to people who actually know me), as well as to continue his obfuscation. I think some of our commenters make an error in asking Gibbons to comment on actual science--or even the pseudoscience of ID. Gibbons isn't a scientist, he's an apologist (his "PhD" says so) and therein lies the problem. In watching, and participating, in this incident one thing has become clear--Gibbons approaches science through an apologist's lens. It also becomes clear that he has no idea what the actual practice of science looks like.
Here's what I mean. The Christian Apologetics and Resource Ministry defines apologetics in this way:
Therefore, Christian apologetics is that branch of Christianity that deals with answering any and all critics who oppose or question the revelation of God in Christ and the Bible....Apologetics is the work of convincing people to change their views. In this it is similar to preaching because its goal is ultimately the defense and presentation of the validity and necessity of the gospel. It is an attempt to persuade the listener to change his beliefs and life to conformity to biblical truth and to come to a saving relationship in Christ.
This is where the conflict lies, and where people make errors in trying to debate scientific evidence, or science itself, with Gibbons and his ilk. There is an a priori assumption--everything in the Bible is True, written in exactly the way it happened. The Bible is all-encompassing in its explanatory power. That's why the oft-heard statement from Creationists/IDiots of "But there are holes in evolutionary theory," which those of us who have any understanding realize is a pretty meaningless critique, becomes so important in their attacks on teaching actual science. This example from round three of the Brayton/Gibbons fracas is telling:
"Until now paleontologists thought whales had evolved from mesonychians, an extinct group of land-dwelling carnivores, while molecular scientists studying DNA were convinced they descended from artiodactyls [even-toed ungulate]. The paleontologists, and I am one of them, were wrong." P.D. Gingerich, N.A. Wells, D.E. Russell, and S.M.I. Shah, Science 220(4595):403–6, 22 April 1983.By the way, this quote was from Gingerich, but not from any of the others listed. And it wasn't said in 1983. Or in Science magazine. But other than that, he got it right. But it's amusing to me that in his previous reply he quotes a scientist correcting himself and admitting error, and uses this as evidence for why we shouldn't believe anything scientists say, yet now he's pretending as though that correction never happened and that scientists still think that whales evolved from mesonychids. As I said before, Gibbons has found Gingerich and other scientists guilty of flagrantly and wantonly doing science.emphasis added
In the apologist's world, the alteration of a theory, any seeming contradictions, or any unexplained phenomena are all proof of that theory's failure. These "weaknesses" that inhere in the theory are to be attacked and exploited in order to prove that theory false. It matters not how or why a scientific theory has undergone alteration. No, the fact that it wasn't complete and able to explain every phenomenon signifies its inferiority to their Biblical narrative, which is total in its explanatory power.
This is where the Creationist's worldview is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry. What refuse to acknowledge is that every scientific theory has holes in it. Every scientific field produces contradictory results. Every scientific theory is altered as research progresses. Every scientific theory has unexplained phenomena. Every scientific endeavor fails the apologists' test of totality.
Thomas Kuhn described the process of normal science as a form of puzzle-solving. Disciplinary paradigms provide the theoretical and methodological means for fitting pieces together. One of the most exciting aspects of this puzzle solving--and again, this is a point the Creationists attack--is that the shape and content of the puzzle change with each piece that is added.
That's where Gibbons's attacks on evolution have been so damnable. He's not tried to prove an alternative theory (remember the Biblical creation story is proof of itself), he's out to "disprove" one. He does so in an intellectually dishonest way--by accusing scientists of practicing science. He and his fellow travelers try to highlight the "holes" in evolutionary theory and changes in it over time in order to make the theory look weaker than it is. Their anti-science approach leads them to posit their unfailing loyalty to a creation myth as an advantage to those silly scientists who keep changing their minds. The Bibile's explanatory totality is put forth as preferable to a "theory" with so many questions still unanswered--and remember, "It's just a theory." The only thing that places these two "theories" on an even par with each other is the Creationists' intellectually dishonest approach to science itself. It's the only thing that allows them to say, "See, evolutionists can't explain this; that's why their whole theory is bunk." That, is a lie.
Once we get over that lie, the Creationists have already lost any debate over their preferred narrative. In such fields as cosmology, anthropology, archeology, geology, biology, and radiochemistry, the creationist narrative has been debunked. It has no scientific standing. None. Zero. Those debates were settled years ago. The world is not 6000 years old. People did not pop out of some dirt on the sixth day of the earth's existence. The sun did not stand still in the sky. There are not vaults above the earth that emptied in order to flood it. Science, the asking of questions, the laying out of potential answers, the testing of those answers against what exists in the world, the development of new questions, and the finding of new answers has shown that story to be bunk. (And it did it through a transparent process and, yes, through debate.) No amount of creativity can save it.
The debate has occured. The Creationist narrative lost. Science has passed it by. In order to "regain" their "rightful" place as holders of the true master narrative, Creationists engage in deeply dishonest arguments. This may be because they don't really understand science at all. Maybe they're blinded by a religious fervor that filters out all contradictory evidence. Maybe they're willfully and deceitfully deploying these anti-science attacks. Maybe it's all three. Whatever their motivation, the threat they pose to science education and scientific progress is serious. Their position is not.
The fact that a debate over this issue still exists in this country points to the deep lack of knowledge Americans have about science. The Creationists, having lost the scientific debates, now seek to obliterate the history of those losses--of the real science that was produced while those debates were occuring--by moving the "debate" to the political sphere. They then conflate classical liberal political theory of debate--the marketplace of ideas--with the practice of scientific exploration. By extolling the political ideal of openness while engaging in the above fundamental mendacity about science, the Creationists are able to create a public controversy over settled science.
It's a brilliant if dishonest strategy. It also makes it easier to paint yourself as the victim. "Those nasty scientists keep beating up on us." The reason you lost isn't because of some atheist cabal to destroy Christianity. The reason they lost is because scientists found that their explanations just didn't hold any water. There is no controversy among scientists. No amount of intellectually dishonest posturing as victims is going to change that. They aren't victims, they're losers.
The Creationist attack on evolutionary theory is an attack on the practice of science itself. It's an attack on the ability--no, the necessity--to ask questions. It's a fraudulent attack on the process that gave us such widely divergent things as protease inhibitors and space exploration. I'd say that taking a pragmatic philosophical approach might be the best way to judge: Which has more to show for it, Science or Apologetics?
There is no debate.
Posted by in Culture War, Extremists, Science
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