Testing Evolution Pt. 1 posted by Ben

When I was in Washington D.C for the inauguration, I attended a rally outside the offices of a neoconservative think tank (i.e. rabid warmongers) responsible for designing much of our current Iraq policy back in the 90's. I was tired, the anarchists were doing the same thing that they always do, and my attention drifted. Across the street was a massive National Geographic building that had a big poster in their window that proclaimed in massive type that "Evolution Proved." Presumably, disregarding the grammatical construction of my prior sentence, this was to indicate the Evolution had been Proved, not that evolution proved anything.

That poster brought back a lot of memories, memories which were rekindled yesterday when I read a recent article in Discover magazine about computerized evolutionary models.

Click below to read the full essay.

Back at Pacific Lutheran University, there were a number of students who had decided to attend the university because it was Christian, and therefore safe. They wouldn't have to deal with drugs, or alcohol, or minorities, or especially blasphemy. These notions, that their lives would continue to be sheltered and the ideas untested, were quickly shattered. Some students flourished in the atmosphere of academic freedom, learning new theories, meeting new kinds of people, and ultimately, leaving the university with a faith that had been tested and often strengthened by their newfound ability to employ critical thought. Others found new faiths, some religious, some scientific, some both.

But some, when they realized that not everybody believed what they did, retreated into the surety of blind faith. They refused to discuss anything which didn't match their world view. They tried to get exemptions from the school's required religion classes. And mostly, they decided that because the school was out to destroy their faith, they had to fight back. Eventually this sense became a movement, which I was lucky(?) enough to experience from its inception, since its organizers and I all lived on the same wing, same floor of Foss Hall as freshmen. These were my first friends at PLU.

Eight years later, they have a thriving, 500+ member church in downtown Tacoma. (I don't know if they're still distributing their list of which professors were possessed by demons, though.)

This isn't their story.

However, it does provide a starting point for a discussion about evolution. You see, in the interest of fair and equal play, this group worked for a number of years running at PLU to sponsor what they called evolution debates. They brought in a Creationist expert and pitted him against one of the university's biology professors. I attended two of those debates.

It quickly became apparent that this was no debate. It was a crucifixion. The audience was packed with 'good Christian' students. (Definition: literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelicals with a hint of primitivism) The creationist 'expert' was not there to debate, but to ridicule the theory of evolution, all while claiming that he was an empirical scientist. The biology professor didn't stand a chance, and was reduced to repeatedly telling the audience to go out, research, think, and read for themselves, rather than blindly accepting what they were being spoon-fed. Not the best thing to tell a group whose power structure is predicated on its members blindly accepting whatever they are spoon-fed.

A couple of elements of the creationist spiel struck me.

1) The claim that creationism is a science and that evolution is only a theory: Without getting too far into that question, it seems to me that it is redundant to make a big deal about evolution being a theory. Of course it's a theory. That's how science works. You build theories based on empirical evidence and see if the pieces fit together. If they don't, you build a new theory. You submit your theory to peer review. Other scientists work on the theory. The theory evolves to fit new evidence. Most of what science tells us about the world involves a strong theoretical element. There is so much that we don't know. But all good theories contain a standard or rubric for provability. Given a long enough span of time (which I'll discuss in Part Two) evolution can be tested. When creationism claims that it is a theory, it misses a key element: provability. Instead, it says that because life is so complex, it could not have evolved all of its interdependent parts. Therefore, God must have made it. And anyone who has studied religion has a fair idea of how many people have successfully, empirically proved God's existence, motivations, and historical interventions.

2) Creationism is not a theory; it is an article of faith. It does not meet the basic standards of provability, and in its efforts to masquerade as a science, it willfully ignores proven scientific data from geologists, astronomers, and those folks who developed carbon dating. Instead, it makes vague assertions that a massive flood could have caused millions of years worth of geologic strata. It says that God could have planted the dinosaur bones to fool us. It twists whatever data it can find to fit a predetermined conclusion: that God created the earth as recorded in the Bible. And any scientist will tell you that if you go into a new experiment with a clear expectation of what your results will be, you set yourself up to see those results, even if they don't occur. By operating from the core assumption that there is only one answer, you automatically must disregard any data that doesn't fit. (Granted, evolutionists have been just as guilty of this!) There is no such thing as Creation Science. Calling it a science only distracts for its core faith-based agenda and allows it to masquerade among the willfully ignorant as an 'acceptable' answer to evolutionism.

However, I also drew a conclusion or two about the evolutionist perspective.

1) Evolutionists do not have the tools to disprove the existence of God, nor should they. By responding to the claims of the creationists, the evolutionist is drawn into a discussion that is not scientific, but theological. He or she is forced to make assertions about God. That's not the evolutionist's job. Her job is to use the scientific method to understand a particular life process. And unless she finds the unmistakable fingerprints of God on a strand of proto DNA or a primitive amino acid, God doesn't enter the picture. Which does not preclude the existence of God! In fact, the only people who her work challenges are those who believe that God created the world from nothingness. (Granted, some creationists accept that the world is older than 7000 years, which forces them to view the 7 days of creation as a metaphor, rather than the literal truth, but the notion that people evolved from less complex life forms still gives them apoplexies.) The notion that evolutionists cannot be Christians, and visa versa, is the product of simplistic thinking from both sides of the fence.

2) Because evolution is a theory about which much remains to be proven, it is as much an article of faith as the creationist perspective when an evolutionist claims that "This is how it is, end of story!" Unfortunately, people who are used to a black-and-white, literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelical faith operate from the a priori assumption that to claim uncertainty is to indicate disbelief. So when an evolutionist presents evolution from a legitimate scientific perspective, in all its theoretical goodness, that evolutionist's unwillingness to claim that "this is exactly how it works" is seen as a sign of weakness. The literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelical listening to the evolutionist is, by virtue of how he perceives the difference between truth and falsehood, able to use that scientific uncertainty to discount all aspects of evolution theory as being valueless, precisely because it is a theory. And so evolutionists, in order to communicate with the literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelicals, fall into the trap of presenting evolution as an article of scientific faith, therefore destroying their legitimacy and effectively claiming that God does not exist. In other words, they let the literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelicals frame the terms of the debate. At that point, there is no debate left to be had, only people yelling at each other about incompatible faiths.

End of Part One - Next: Computer Simulations and Evolution as Theory