Scientific Creationism in the Courts

Scientific Creationism is one of the most controversial and highly visible alleged examples of pseudoscience. I've found that there's a lot of confusion about exactly what's at issue in the public debates. Many who rely on the brief reports in newspapers and weekly news magazines come away with the impression that the key question is, Should religion be treated with respect in the public schools? Many more seem to believe that Scientific Creationism is simply the view that God, as conceived of in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, created and designed the universe with all its natural laws (maybe by causing the Big Bang). But neither of those perceptions is correct, and you can't figure out what's going on without getting beyond the usual news reports. We can move in the right direction by first considering one of the Scientific Creationists' political successes and the court case it engendered.

In 1981, some Scientific Creationists were able to persuade the Arkansas state legislature to pass a law that required the teaching of Scientific Creationism in public school science courses alongside evolutionary theory. Soon after the law (Act 590, aka "The Creation Science Law") was passed, a suit was filed against the State of Arkansas in federal court (McLean v Arkansas), alleging that the law violated the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. The ensuing trial took many weeks and involved the testimony of many expert witnesses. After considering all the testimony, Judge William Overton issued a long, detailed opinion in which he explained his ruling against the State of Arkansas. Among several different sorts of reasons for his ruling was his finding that Scientific Creationism is not science but religion masquerading as science. In coming to the latter conclusion, Judge Overton was heavily influenced by the testimony of two witnesses: Langdon Gilkey, a Protestant theologian at the University of Chicago, and Michael Ruse, a historian and philosopher of biology then at the University of Guelph, Canada. Let's see what they had to say.

"At the Interface of Inquiry and Belief," an article that Gilkey wrote to present the essentials of his testimony, very helpfully summarizes the main precepts of Scientific Creationism as they were specified in the Arkansas law, under the guidance of authoritative Scientific Creationists.

Before considering Gilkey's reasons for thinking Scientific Creationism pseudoscientific, let's look a bit more closely at its four essentials as specified here. We're offered an explanation of the origin and order of the universe and of life on Earth. The theory says first that the universe was created suddenly out of nothing. This kind of creation is not the kind that we have in mind when we talk, for example, of an artist's creating a piece of sculpture. There, preexisting material is given a new form. The creation of the universe is unlike that, according to Scientific Creationism, since there was no preexisting material to which form was then given. Second, the theory says, all the kinds of living things that there ever have been on Earth were present, together, at or near the Earth's beginning, and furthermore, there has been no significant change in the kinds of living things since then (except that some have 'emptied out' through extinction). So the creator of the universe conceived and implemented an 'organization chart' for life at the outset and has not changed its basic structure since then. This, of course, implies that dinosaurs, bacteria, plants, jelly fish, rabbits, dodos, apes, and human beings all coexisted on Earth since the beginning, though the dinosaurs and dodos are no longer around. It also implies that genuinely new kinds of organisms did not develop during Earth's history. Third, the theory says that the fossil record is stratified in the way we now find it because a great cataclysm killed off many living things and, when flood waters receded, their remains were deposited in layers. Finally, although there is some disagreement among the relevant Scientific Creationist authorities, the theory is committed to an estimate for the age of the universe and Earth of less than 20,000 years.

It is very important to keep in mind that it is these four essentials that define the core of Scientific Creationism. So the theory is far more specific than the assertion that God created and designed the universe. (You're welcome to continue to use the term "creationism," as many do, to express the less specific assertion, but please keep it in mind that I'll be using "Scientific Creationism" to mean any view with these four essentials as its core.) Of course, any explanation of life in the universe will have to be far more specific than "God created and designed the universe" if it's to do any real explaining at all, a point we'll return to later. It's equally clear that a good explanation will need to provide far more detail than is offered in these four essentials. There must be more to Scientific Creationism than its bare essentials if it is to compete with modern evolutionary theory, and, not surprisingly, there is a lot more to be said about it, as we'll also see later.

Why does Gilkey think that this theory (or theory-essence) is pseudoscientific? Here are some of his reasons:

Gilkey even says that it is a rule of scientific method that "no supra-natural causes may be included in a theory" (68). So it looks like Gilkey's fundamental criticism is:

There is one distinction here that is doing the hard work: the difference between natural causes, on the one hand, and supernatural causes, on the other. So we're entitled to press for clarity in the meaning of "supernatural." Literally, the word means "above, or beyond, what is natural." Unfortunately, the word "natural" has been stretched out of shape through abuse by advertisers. We are exhorted to buy a diverse array of products because they are somehow 'natural': there are natural breakfast cereals, natural lawn care products, natural shoes. (Of course, the advertisers would prefer that you forget about all the bad things that are natural. No one ever says, "Buy new, improved Bubonic Plague Crunchies - they're as natural as disease!") Here, however, the most natural way to understand "natural" is as the adjective form of "nature," conceived of as the proper subject of scientific studies; so natural is short for "whatever is the proper domain of science." But if we plug in the relevant definition, we get

or, more simply:

a criticism of truly stupefying uselessness. Although I hesitate to attribute this to Gilkey, I have some reason to do so. I was in the audience at a talk Gilkey gave around the time he was testifying in the Arkansas trial. The talk included the remarks I've quoted. During the question period, one of my best students, James Holman, asked Gilkey what he meant by "supernatural." I was very proud of Jim - he had, I thought, zeroed in on the crucial point. How did Gilkey respond? He replied that it was perfectly obvious, and so known to intelligent and educated people, what the distinction between natural and supernatural was; next question, please. But if it was so obvious, why didn't he just say what it was, and enlighten my student (and the rest of the unintelligent or uneducated people in the audience)? It's hard to resist the suspicion that he didn't have a good answer. There are, I think, just two other meanings that are faithful to what Gilkey said, and neither yields a good criticism.

In one of his remarks, Gilkey seems to imply that any explanation of the ultimate origins of the universe is bound to transcend the boundaries of science by invoking supernatural causes. Maybe he means to suggest that "supernatural" means "any attempt to explain the ultimate origins of the universe." If that is what he means, then his criticism is in trouble, because there is a very old and recently quite successful branch of physics - cosmology - that tries to explain the ultimate origins of the universe. In a justly well-known popularization entitled The First Three Minutes, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the work of contemporary cosmologists as they attempt to understand why the Big Bang itself occurred. More recently, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose have presented their views on these matters for a nonscientist audience. No physicist is arrogant enough to think that she has all the answers yet, and, like a lot of other theories in the history of physics, the Big Bang theory might turn out to be wrong, but that's beside the point. The point is that the pursuit of such questions of ultimate origins is already a part of science.

Can we save Gilkey's criticism in another way? He does also suggest that the super-natural may involve explanation in term of purposes and intentions, and "transcendent, unique, unrepeatable, in-principle-uncontrollable, action." So maybe "supernatural" means "any attempt to explain in terms of a purposive, intentional action (that is unique, etc.)." But why should adverting to such causes make an explanation or theory unscientific? Biology is full of explanations that talk of the goals, purposes and functions of living things and their parts. Social sciences - e.g., psychology - need to talk of these things simply to state, no less to explain, the relevant facts about human minds. Nor should it matter that the purposes in questions are somehow extraordinary. Biologists and psychologists have shown an interest in abnormal - subnormal and supernormal - functioning both for its own sake and as a way of defining the range of normal functioning. At the very least, we're owed a good argument as to why a psychology of superhuman minds is beyond the reach of any possible science. (Maybe it already exists - maybe it's part of some theology.)

Gilkey is too intelligent and well-educated to charge Scientific Creationism with pseudoscientific status merely because it is inspired by certain religious views. That would be as bad as dismissing chemistry because of its origins in magic, superstition, or alchemy. And even if the content of Scientific Creationism does overlap with the religious beliefs of some, why would that alone make it pseudoscientific? It wouldn't. It might, for example, still be open to the usual sorts of challenges and tests to which other scientific theories are subject.

I don't think Gilkey has given us a good reason for thinking that Scientific Creationism isn't scientific.

Ruse takes a different approach. He claims that something must have several features - necessary conditions - if it is to be science, and he says what he thinks they are. He then argues that Scientific Creationism lacks all of these features and concludes that it's mere pseudoscience. So he seems to think of science as a rather exclusive club, with very strict membership requirements - if something fails to meet even one of them, it's blackballed. (He also claims that he's not giving necessary conditions, but we won't trouble him about his inconsistency. Besides, his argument clearly requires that the conditions he suggests be necessary.) The form of his argument is therefore:

Ruse's ABCs of Science

If something is science, then it must have A, B, and C.

Scientific Creationism doesn't have A.

Scientific Creationism doesn't have B.

Scientific Creationism doesn't have C.

Therefore, Scientific Creationism is not science.

Logically, this is overkill: the first premise and one of the other premises would yield the conclusion. But, to his credit, Ruse was trying to be thorough and to hit Scientific Creationism at what he saw as its weakest points.

What, according to Ruse, are the ABCs of science? He says that (A) scientific knowledge is guided by natural law, and scientific explanations are based on natural law; (B) scientific explanations are testable and so falsifiable; and (C) scientific theories are tentatively, non-dogmatically held and revisable in response to additional relevant evidence. Scientific Creationism, Ruse says, has none of these three features and so is mere pseudoscience, because its explanations are not guided by natural law; it is not testable and so not falsifiable; and it is dogmatically held and not revisable in the face of new evidence.

Let's look at this attempt to deal a triple blow to Scientific Creationism (which influenced Judge Overton's decision so heavily).

Take (A) first. As many have pointed out, and as Larry Laudan remarks, scientists have long understood the difference between establishing the existence of phenomena and explaining them by natural laws. To give two examples: Darwin established the existence of natural selection about fifty years before the discovery of the laws of heredity which help to explain it; even if there had been no such laws, Darwin's discovery would still have been scientific. The phenomenon of radioactivity was discovered near the turn of the century by a French physicist, Becquerel. It was not until over 30 years later that a partial explanation based on laws was discovered, and it took twice that long for a more nearly complete explanation based on laws. Nevertheless, those who discovered and investigated the various forms of radioactivity during that time were advancing science, and some of them received well-deserved Nobel Prizes for their work. So A is not a requirement for being science.

Next, consider (B), the claim that being testable, and so falsifiable, is a requirement for science. The first thing we need to do is to get clear on why being falsifiable is thought to be necessary. At first hearing, it may sound like a horrible defect rather than a virtue for scientific explanations to have. Notice that what's being required here is not that the explanation be shown false (falsified), but that it have the potential for being shown false (falsifiable). Even a true statement may have that potential. Consider, for example, the statement that you are reading this now. Although it is clearly true, we all know perfectly well what kind of procedure we would have to follow to test it, what kind of evidence would count against it. Perhaps the best way to see the virtue of falsifiability is to look at a case where it is missing, and to see also that something's gone very wrong in that case. So consider the bizarre assertion: "The universe was created 5 minutes ago, complete with (deceptive) memories, fossil records, distribution of light particles throughout, etc." No sane person believes this. But suppose you were challenged to prove that it was false by citing some evidence against it. There really isn't any evidence that you could bring to bear against it because the statement itself dismisses any evidence that seems to count against it as merely deceptive. So it is not falsifiable. Of course, by the same token, there is no possible evidence that could be given in its favor. Hence it is not testable - neither falsifiable nor verifiable. And that, of course, is precisely what is wrong with it: no possible piece of evidence could tend to confirm or to refute it. Despite seeming to take a quite definite stand on how things actually are, it is instead a rather empty hypothesis. Turning things around, we can see that being falsifiable is the least we should expect of a hypothesis. Let's agree with Ruse that falsifiability and testability - some conceivable sort of openness to experimental test - are, at a minimum, to be required of scientific explanations.

[There is yet another qualification that we must add. This requirement, if it is to have any plausibility, must be applied to whole theories, not to the individual statements they may make. Consider, for example, the statement that there are electrons in a particular orbital of an atom–a statement of atomic theory, which includes many other hypotheses and explanations about the structure of atoms, the forces that operate in them, the meanings of the terms in the theory, and so on. Since the meaning of the individual statement's terms is fixed in part by all the other parts of the theory, it is the theory that gets tested, and not just isolated statements of it. None of this is made clear by Ruse, or by Judge Overton. Both talk as if it is the isolated statements of Scientific Creationism that must in and of themselves be falsifiable and testable.]

But even if individual statements are considered, it seems clear that Scientific Creationism meets rather than fails this requirement. It makes lots of falsifiable, testable claims, as its proponents quite rightly insist. For example, there is the claim that no matter on Earth is more than 20,000 years old, and the claim that there has been no change in the kinds of living things since Earth came into existence. Surely, we can think of procedures for testing both of these claims, and many others made by Scientific Creationism. In fact, such procedures have been thought of and used! It may be that the Scientific Creationists themselves have not undertaken to test these claims, but there's no rule that says a theorist must test her own theories; others are allowed to help out, and, as a practical matter, a division of labor between theoreticians and experimentalists is often necessary.

Finally, let's look at (C), the charge that Scientific Creationism is held dogmatically, and not tentatively, by its proponents, and that Scientific Creationism is not open to revision in the face of new evidence. There are at least two reasons that this charge is wrong. First, the psychological attitude of a scientist toward a theory is wholly irrelevant to the theory's status as science. A twentieth-century physicist may be wholly dogmatic about the law of the conservation of energy; that doesn't make the law nonscientific. It might show some flaw in his character or cognitive faculties, but it would not suddenly render thermodynamics pseudoscientific bunk. Similarly, even if Scientific Creationists were utterly dogmatic about Scientific Creationism, that alone would not show that the view is not science. Second, the historical fact is that Scientific Creationists can and do change their minds from time to time. Twentieth-century Scientific Creationists differ from their nineteenth-century counterparts. As Stephen Jay Gould notes, they have modified their views about the amount of variability allowed at the level of species change. And more recently, they have changed their minds about a fossil record that they thought provided support for their view. So they do show some willingness to revise theoretical principles and to reconsider evidence. Perhaps they are less willing than some scientists to do so, but the difference is one of degree, and Ruse's argument allows no room for such subtleties.

Ruse's reasoning was understood and accepted by Judge Overton, and it was the main argument given by the judge for overturning the Arkansas Creation Science law. We have seen that the argument is not a good one. In fact, it's awful. Ruse's charges against Scientific Creationism are either false or irrelevant.

A few years after Arkansas passed its Creation Science Law, Louisiana passed a somewhat similar law. It, too, was challenged in court, but this time, the challenge reached the US Supreme Court, which, following reasoning much like Judge Overton's (and indeed making specific reference to it), found that Scientific Creationism is religion masquerading as science and so has no place in the public school science classroom (Edwards v. Aguillard 1987).

To the extent that Ruse's and Gilkey's criticisms support these judicial decisions, this is cause for great sadness. A badly distorted view of science has been incorporated into our constitutional tradition, and since religion is in part defined by contrast to science, these distortions also affect the way our legal system deals with religion. What an awful mess.

When we discussed astrology, phrenology, and parapsychology, we found no good reason to dismiss them as pseudoscience. But that did not imply that what they had to say was true, or even likely to be true. The same holds for our discussion of Scientific Creationism: the failures of Gilkey's and Ruse's arguments do not in the least tend to show the truth or likelihood of Scientific Creationism. Just because one route (to the conclusion that Scientific Creationism is false or unlikely) is blocked does not mean that all routes to that conclusion are blocked; there may be many other routes open. We should also remember, however, that there are much worse things for a theory to be than merely false; after all, Newtonian mechanics has that defect, and it's still a shining example of scientific theorizing near its best.

Scientific Creationists themselves insist that their view be judged by the same standards on which their supposed chief competitor, the modern theory of evolution, is judged. They also argue that, according to those standards, evolutionary theory itself is seriously deficient. What, according to Scientific Creationists, is wrong with evolutionary theory? Because this question has been dealt with so effectively in the writings on this debate, I'm going to skip over all but one of their criticisms. Although I believe that it's been shown that Creationist criticisms fail to kill or even injure evolutionary theory, it doesn't really matter whether I'm right or wrong about this. Whether Creationists have failed or succeeded in their criticisms of evolutionary theory tells us nothing about how Scientific Creationism, the theory itself, fares when judged on its own merits, according to the proper criteria for evaluating explanations. We owe it to ourselves as well as the Scientific Creationists to judge their theory as they insist.

Additional Sources

2000 David F. Austin

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