In reading the debates over these issues, I was, unfortunately not surprised at the disgusting levels of anti-intellectualism and ignorance being advanced, often by elected officials.
Kentucky now permits public schools to teach "the theory of creation as presented in the Bible" and to "read such passages in the Bible as are deemed necessary for instruction on the theory of creation." Meanwhile, the author of the creationism bill in Florida queried, “Why do we still have apes if we came from them?”.
But overall, in the debates, two major points were repeatedly made by creationism supporters that can only possibly persist as long as they have for no other rationale than willful ignorance.
This foolishness has been clarified so many times, one would think any American over the age of 10 could explain the flaws of the talking point. But yet it persists.
The creationists use the term ‘theory’ as it is often used in colloquial English; meaning a guess or an unproven assumption. Of course, in science, this is not at all what the word ‘theory’ means. In science, a theory is an explanation for a series of interrelated facts.
That’s right. I said facts.
You see, the theory is the Theory of Natural Selection. It is an explanation for a series of facts. Evolution is one of those facts.
All life evolved from a common ancestor. Fact. Evolution occurred through a series of graded changes in organisms over time. Fact. Those changes arose due to mutations within the DNA of the organisms. Fact.
The Theory of Natural Selection explains those facts by positing that those changes are selected for by environmental pressures and beneficial mutations are preserved by giving an organism a selective advantage while detrimental mutations lead to a species’ demise.
This works in the same way as the Special Theory of Relativity, which explains a series of facts including gravity. Just because it is a theory does not make the fact that gravity holds us down any less true.
Importantly, creationism is NOT a theory. A theory must be repeatedly verified by multiple independent researchers utilizing the scientific method. If creationism is a theory, it is only so in the colloquial English sense of the word.
But if creationists want creationism taught in a science class, they really have no other alternative than to treat it as science. So let’s do that.
Any hypothesis (and creationism doesn’t technically qualify as a hypothesis because of the amount of known information opposing it) must be tested using the scientific method. Let us then figure out some tests we can do.
First, creationists claim that all life was created by an intelligent creator in its current form. Therefore, that aspect should be testable. If all life was created in its current form, then the relative age of the genetic material should be similar amongst all life forms. Agreed?
But if we were to examine the genetic material for natural changes that occur within it over time, we will see that some organisms have accumulated far more change than others and those changes correlate with the evolutionary age of the organism. Even worse, we see that fundamental genes, genes that are indispensible for life, have acquired far fewer changes than dispensable genes, suggesting that those genes must have been preserved and passed on throughout time with little flexibility for tolerating mutations. That is what we would expect to see if evolution were true.
Okay, so that test went in favor of evolution, not creationism. What else can we come up with?
If all life was created by an intelligent designer, then all adaptations for life should be intelligently designed to best suit each specific organism. We can agree on that, right? We can easily test that one too.
Again, however, we have a problem. If we look at the mammalian eye, we see that it was built inside out. The light detecting mechanism is facing the wrong way. Even worse, because of that, the nerve runs right in front of the lens causing a blind spot. Maybe that was the only way a designer could do it? Nope. If we look at the cephalopod eye, which evolved independently of the mammalian eye, it is built right side out with no blind spot. That seems to go against an intelligent designer unless he was impaired while designing the mammal eye or simply likes squid more than us. But if we trace back the evolutionary steps of mammalian eye formation that is precisely what we would have expected.
How about the mammalian heart? Because it adapted from the reptile 3-chambered heart, it also has a rather obvious flaw. The pulmonary blood volume is only a fraction of the systemic blood volume and even a minute change in output from the left ventricle can cause a substantial increase in pulmonary pressure. This design flaw renders the coronary arteries critically susceptible to atheroma. Not quite the way an intelligent designer would do it if he could design a four chambered heart from scatch. But if the mammalian four chambered heart had to adapt from the more primitive reptile form, we would predict that flaw.
Further, we have pelvic bones in snakes and whales and we have non-functional eyes in blind cave animals and we have unnecessary genes like those for teeth in birds, toes in horses, and yolk in mammals. Why would an intelligent designer put these things in an animal that would never need them? Of course if evolution occurred, well---you get the idea.
The list could go on and on. If creationists want to teach their mythology in a science class room, then they had better be expected to treat it like science. But for any test we can think of, creationism fails scientific scrutiny.
Science cannot tell us whether or not there is a god. Science doesn’t really care. But science can answer testable questions by doing what science does best; testing the nature of reality with objective observation and experimentation. Creationism has every right to be taught in school but should be kept in the humanities or religious studies curricula. If they want to be in the science classroom, they need to play by the rules of science and fail on their own lack of merit.
That failure is long past. Unfortunately, too many elected officials have failed to realize it.
