Creation Science II - Theology of Science

Reading Earth: An Intimate History, about the long slow movement of tectonic plates, sundering supercontinents and rejoining them again and again, over billions of years, about the emptiness of the Hadean times, and the nearly brainless life of the preCambrian and Cambrian eras, and I thought about a God with great or infinite powers and all the time in the world. And I thought about various Arguments from Design and Complexity.

The most extreme Creationist position is that everything we think we're learning from geology and paleontology is wrong, and that the world really was created in 4004 B.C. or some other comparatively recent date. The strictly empirical arguments they offer are generally shallow or incoherent, but the more profound and interesting theological ones cast our knowledge and perceptions of the mundane world in terms of an paranoiac epistemology like nothing so much as the worlds of the greater Phillip K. Dick. Given the Bible as literal and absolute, any merely physical contradiction (especially one that has been theorized in that provisional, always subject to revision or rejection, scientific method) can be disregarded, as a test by God of our faith or a check on our pride of intellect, or as a deceit by the Devil, which God permits for these same reasons.

In his Meditations after Descartes started for the quest of knowedge ab ovo, he went from the Cogito Ergo Sum to God by way of an Ontological Argument, and then he needed to establish whether our perceptions of an external world should be considered suspect. By way of answering, "Yes!" he considered and discarded the concept of an Evil Deceiver, since by his lights a Perfect Being (required by his Ontological Argument) could not practice (nor, by implication, countenance) such dastardly deceit.

In theological terms, I have to admit a strong bias in favor of the consistency of the extreme Creationist argument. Even assuming Descartes' argument is valid, determining the morals of a Transcendant Being on the basis of moral preference implied by "fair play" is ultimately (notice the word!) indefensible, whereas treating the literal meaning of the Bible as sort of an Ubik (Stays Crunchy Even in Milk) at least makes narrative sense. It's a take-it-or-leave it-and-go-to-Hell proposition, strikingly similar to the reason why Occam's argument was against rational theology rather than religion.

And I recognize that I'm just being churlish and vindictive when I want people who accept it not to pick and choose, but to reject all the fruits of the scientific method (e.g. antibiotics.)

It's actually the less extreme version of the Arguments from Design and Complexity that I find as incoherent as Descartes. In these, God intervenes in nature, not just in individual lives or human history, at one or more points of significance (suitability of the Earth; creation of life; the development of species; the first human), or more-or-less continually, guiding His creation.

My reaction to this - again, acknowledging that telling The Ultimate Ground of the Universe what He is permitted to do on the basis of my feeble reason is silly: why the elaborate setting of geological time if He is going to do the Deus Ex Machina thing? It's like constructing a stage set that looks like a cathedral, but is plywood and two-by-fours from the other side. Given infinite capabilities and (literally) all the time in the world, why wouldn't He create a world that could develop from the rules He set at the very beginning? Are we saying God couldn't do this, or that He didn't because he wanted us to have some hint of His existence? But why then buried under all the uncertainty for generations of souls - because, from our perspective at the beginning of the 21st Century, life and intelligence could have arisen naturally, along the lines suggested by biochemistry and various forms of the Theory of Evolution. Disproof will have to wait for later generations - leaving the rest of us in the lurch. Again, unlike science or Biblical literalism, it does not cohere, as a method or a story.

Creation Science I - Philosophy of Science

It's not science. Not because it is wrong, but because it can't be wrong.

Let's not make the common mistake that a science provides a correct set of statements about the world. A science provides nothing more - and nothing less - than a heuristic, a conceptual framework and method for making predictions about what we're likely to find and where to look. And the glory of science is that these predictions can fail to pan out, and one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories made the point that honesty about failure was the special heroism of science. Karl Popper talked about falsification as the essence of the scientific method. You cannot prove a theory, but you can disprove it OR disprove the offered alternatives. In a later development, Thomas Kuhn described the paradigm shift, that theory yielded to theory not because it was wrong, but because the accretions of minute corrections required to make something square with the data made it more unwieldly and less useful than another alternative. - not because a theory was falsified, but becuase This is what makes that brilliant dismissal by Freeman Dyson so biting: "Not even wrong."

Suspended over this from a horsehair is the very sharp razor donated by William of Occam.

Creation "science" can't be disproven, is untestable, because it cannot make a prediction other than, "You will never be able to connect all the dots, and where the dots do not connect, there is God."

Again, this might even be right, say we pious agnostics, but it cannot be wrong.