12th October 2004

Thoughts on “The Crusade Against Evolution”

posted in christian, philosophy |
The October 2004 lead article in Wired Magazine, “The Crusade Against Evolution,” provides some interesting food for thought.

If you have not yet read “The Crusade Against Evolution” in the October 2004 edition of Wired magazine, you should.

The evolutionism vs creationism debate rages on, in some ways with more sophistication.

One of the most important questions, however, which I think is not addressed in the article, is whether or not a scientifically informed view of the creation of the universe and the development of the human race over millennia must be mutually exclusive to a Christian view of these topics. I do not think they must be.

Yet the history of science and “the Church” (beginning and focusing primarily on the Catholic church) has been nothing if not a perceptual and actual competition.

Ideas matter. That is one lesson to take to heart here.

An important idea to remember is that science can only give us theories. It can never, definitionally, give us faith. Like we are doing in my advanced data analysis class this semester, as scientists (even social scientists) the best we can do is “reject the null hypothesis.” We develop and support theories about things, but we never “prove” anything with complete certainly. We increase the probability that a given theory is valid, because it has held up to the tests we have put it through to date, but we can never be completely certain it is valid.

Yet when it comes to the THEORY of evolution, much of the scientific community as well as the public at large seems to make a leap of faith, forgetting that evolution is merely a scientific theory, and instead promoting it to the level of faith / truth / dogma. Evolution is just a theory! Does it mean God cannot have created the world, if an evolutionary process was at work? Certainly not. But these seems to be a basic article of faith among many scientists and others involved in the creationism vs. evolution debate.

How do we acquire faith and have certainly in absolute, transcendent truth? That is a topic for another post. For now, I will leave it at this: in reading the above article and others related to the evolution versus creation debate, remember that the core function of the scientific method is to disprove hypotheses and on that basis create and support theories. Science can never give Truth. It only shows what is likely.

Many evolutionists who appear as dogmatic as tele-evangelists should keep this in mind.

On this day..

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