Absolutists with high blood pressure should not read this!

It Ain’t Science!
By: Joseph Walther


Warning, this column contains some highly reactionary terms, particularly for members of both the God and Non-God groups. The mere sight of some of these terms has caused some uncontrollably severe reactions. In some cases, people begin to babble incoherently. In others, the blood vessels located in the temple and forehead areas just burst from pent-up frustration. In the most serious of reactions, some members of both groups just start foaming at the mouth. If you include yourself among the clueless, proceed with extreme caution.

The News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware published an article entitled; “Local creation scientists bring passion to evolution debate” this past Saturday, January 8, 2005. On Sunday, January 9, 2005, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette® published another article entitled “Intelligent design: Is it just creationism lite?”. Both articles pertained to the ongoing battle between the God and Non-God folks. Both articles were informative and neither one took a stand.

The News Journal article related the attempts of a retired chemist by the name of Dr. Harry Wolfe, to reconcile his evangelical Christian beliefs with evolution. Harry believes that God created the world in six 24-hour days and that the Earth is no more than 20,000 years old. Harry sums up the motivation behind his conversion by saying, “The more I thought about the details of evolution and how one species led to another, the more I thought there is no way it could have occurred.”

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette® article was similar in concept but far more alarming in content and reasoning. Among other things, the school board in a York County Dover Area School District instructed its teachers to discuss intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a ninth-grade biology course. The board reasoned that Darwin’s theory is both controversial and incomplete.

I want to make a distinction between creationism and intelligent design. They are not the same. Creationism is a belief in the Old Testament and the Book of Genesis as both a religious theology and a scientific and historical record of the origins of the universe and human civilization as created by God. Intelligent design leaves God out of the picture and bases its core believe around a contention that neither natural selection nor macro-evolutionary biology adequately explains sub-cellular development. Proponents of intelligent design believe that life reaches a point of “irreducible complexity”. Once reached, nature cannot reduce it further without destroying it. Therefore, there must be an intelligent designer.

Harry Wolfe of Newark, Delaware holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry. He is not stupid. I readily concede that his theory could be correct. I make the concession because I do not know if there is a God. What bothers me, though, is that Harry could be wrong. Yet, I see no hint of willingness on his part to make such a concession. Harry, a trained scientist himself, violates the most fundamental tenets of legitimate science. He did not form any sort of hypothesis test for his theory.

The group from Pittsburg, as well as Harry Wolfe, confuses theory with facts. Such people use the two terms interchangeably. This is a mistake because they are not the same thing.

Facts are things that happen, nature’s reality as it were. Theories attempt to explain facts. Legitimate scientists take consistent facts and form testable hypotheses. A hypothesis that substantially and consistently supports the facts becomes a theory. As the body and diversity of the facts explained becomes ever larger, scientists label the theory “robust”. If we can use that theory consistently in the prediction of new outcomes, scientists label it as “reliable”. A scientific theory stands until proven wrong using the same scientific reasoning in its development. No one EVER proves a theory correct!

In light of the above, Darwin’s Theory has done quite well since its publication over 150 years ago. If anything, the theory has been refined beyond anything Darwin could have imagined. While it has not answered many questions, it has withstood the ultimate test in time and countless scientific experiments.

Creation theory is NOT science. Intelligent design is NOT science. Are these worthy of study? Yes, they certainly are, but NOT in science courses. I suspect that the use of different terminology when describing religious absolutism has an ulterior motive. That motive is to get religion into the public school system. There is nothing wrong with this, either, as long as administrators do not reduce it to dogmatic indoctrination. A course in Comparative Religions IS appropriate; a biology course is NOT!

Legitimate science consists of numerous questions. We may never find the answers for many of them. Religious indoctrination however, consists of many unquestioned answers. We are not supposed to question those answers under any circumstances. I prefer the former predicament.

Science takes no stand relative to God’s existence. Attempts to disguise religious absolutism as science for the purposes of indoctrination, stinks. Adding the term “science” does not legitimize it. We can spray a turd with lots of perfume to make it smell better. When we step on it, though, it still smells like a turd. It ain’t Science!

Joe Walther is a freelance writer. You may contact him by clicking on CONTACT ME above or by email at Joe_Walther@comcast.net