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.