"There is grandeur in this view of life...."

Now I know it must seem sometimes that I have something against religion. I haven't but when the most powerful nation in the world, in control of at least half of the nuclear weaponry on the planet, lurches blindly and so far into Christian fundamentalism, it worries me. It worries me a lot.

I read something the other day which made me think. A bit of Creation 'Science'.

Richard Dawkins has spent most of his adult life (after the 'Blind Watchmaker') railing against creationist science, sometimes obliquely and sometimes, as in the 'God Delusion' quite openly. Has any of it worked? Judging by what I read, nope!

I must point out here that I do not have a problem with creationism itself. I believe it misguided but I'm as entitled to my opinion as creationists are. What I have a serious problem with is the attempt to dress it up as science. To do so merely demonstrates the fundamental misunderstanding (or deception, but let's be generous here) that these creation 'scientists' have about the scientific method.

Religion has been under attack, so certain fundamentalists think, from science for over three centuries. Poor Galileo Galilei, what infamy is laid at your door! The only way therefore, they think, to counter this attack is to use science itself to provide alternatives to the arguments. So far, all fine and dandy. However, they don't! They use a semblance, a simulacrum of the scientific method, which, if you're not careful, will easily dupe you into believing that this is, in some way, valid science. You see, what creation scientists attempt to do is to provide proof that 'modern' theory is false, and that God exists, using 'science'. They start from the assumption that Genesis is largely true in so far as it relates to the earth, man etc and work backwards from that.

I could do exactly the same thing with Tolkien's creation myth. Perhaps I will one day, if I ever have the time.

What they don't realise, or choose to ignore, is that the scientific method actually 'proves' nothing whatsoever and, more importantly, seeks to prove nothing. Its purpose is to do the exact opposite! Its purpose is to disprove hypotheses! You cannot prove that God exists using science, only disprove his existence! Fortunately, with a few exceptions, Dawkins being the primary, science does not see that a matter of faith is a good subject for a scientific enquiry. It is not amenable to a decent, practical experiment nor even to a rational argument leading to a tentative hypothesis.

No physicist worthy of the name will try to tell you that quantum mechanics is true, that the up quark exists, absolutely. What they will tell you is that the late nineteenth century, point particle model of the atom as 'planetary system' has to be wrong because it fails to explain a whole host of things from black body radiation to beta decay. These things can be explained with quantum theory. That doesn't make quantum theory true, just better at explaining things. It's the same with relativity. It isn't true in any absolute sense, just an awful lot better at explaining gravity in the presence of very massive bodies than Newtonian mechanics is. Relativity isn't true but Newtonian mechanics is, in a very specific sense, false, or, at best, simplistic!

Now the primary target for a lot of creation 'science' is evolution, mainly, I think because physics and chemistry are too 'hard', too much knowledge is required to start with. However, even here, they get massively confused. No one can deny evolution occurs, however dense you are. An example. (Oh, and just so we're clear here, evolution is change, it is not 'advancement'. There is a tendency towards increasing complexity over time but only because complexity has a tendency to beget complexity. Evolution is not a steadily ascending ladder. It's a myriad of lurches, up, down, sideways, in design space, in which some things work and others don't. What works, survives. What doesn't, doesn't!)

There is a bacterium, staphylococcus aureus, very common, about one in three of you are infected. In the years after the second world war, it was effectively killed, when it was necessary because your immune systems couldn't keep it in check for some reason, with antibiotics, penicillin, aureomycin, ampicillin et al. Fifty years on, what rampages through the wards of UK hospitals? What killed Rory Gallagher? Depardieu's son? MRSA! Methicillin (or multi) resistant staphylococcus aureus. The bacterium evolves! It changes! What killed it yesterday, will not kill it today! That cannot be denied by any sane, vaguely observant individual. No-one can deny what is before their eyes. Unless you want to deny reality itself! Or does God constantly create anew? An ever increasing number of slightly different staphs coming off the assembly line?

What creation scientists actually need to argue against is the believed mechanism by which a thing evolves. And why some creatures do and others don't seem to, or at least very much. But then that's all a bit more tricky, isn't it?

The theory of evolution by natural selection is probably, relativity and quantum mechanics notwithstanding, the best theory man has devised. As a way of explaining the diversity of life and its (importantly) continuing diversification, it has no serious rival. Those creatures which by a quirk of fate and genetics are equipped best to deal with current circumstances will survive, if in competition with others for finite resources, and will pass on that genetic equipment to their descendants. If the equipment fails because circumstances change or because the equipment becomes faulty, those descendants will also, ultimately, fail!

The basic genetics are well understood but it is difficult to test specifics, for example, why are leopard spots the shape they are? Why do giraffes have long necks? There is insufficient time available to us to run the experiment. However experiments are conducted with rapidly breeding insects, drosophilia, fruit flies, and random mutations do occur and some would seem to be advantageous. But we can also ask other questions.

Why are sunflower heads constructed in spirals? Because the genetics that makes them uses a Fibonacci sequence when making cells, causing a spiral. Why do animals; fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals all have the same basic body plan? Fluke? A lack of imagination on the part of the 'intelligent designer? Or a common ancestor? Tinkering with complex embryos at very early stages of development to generate a new blueprint is apt to go awry so other potentially successful 'plans' are never found once complexity sets in. Just a few when the organism is much less complex, when happy monsters are far likely, hence: radially symmetrical; laterally symmetrical; segmentation, building bodies joining identical bits together;colonies.

Why do the bones of the mammalian inner ear appear to be scaled down reptilian jawbones that mammals do not have? Coincidence? Or descent with modification? Why are humans born so early in their development and are then at the mercy of the vagaries of nature for much longer than other mammals? Divine whim? Or the fact that if they were born when they 'should be', according to normal mammal practice, their heads wouldn't pass through the pelvic opening because their brains are too big? Any baby that hung around for more than 9 months wouldn't get out and more importantly the mother would die. No more of that particular genetic quirk then.

Now you may not, may not want to, 'believe' that this a damn good hypothesis, but it has so far stood up to everything the scientific method can throw at it; from the peacock's tail to the development of altruism in humans, these things do have a 'Darwinian' explanation. They can be explained by natural selection. No one says it is the 'truth' just a good way of explaining things consistently. We can see that organisms procreate, we are living proof. We can see that offspring are like but not identical to their parents. We can see that sometimes a small difference in the genetic makeup can affect survival rates, even if the experiment is somewhat artificial and not one we intended to conduct (see MRSA above). If someone ever comes up with a serious scientific rival, we'll look at it. Does it explain things as well as or better than the neo-Darwinist synthesis? If better, then neo-Darwinism will go the same way as Ptolemy's astronomy.

Please, if you are going to replace evolution by natural selection with divine creation and call it science, give us something we can test, give us at least a stab at objective knowledge, give us a rational argument, not some blind obedience to a book cobbled together from who knows what sources. Give us just one tiny experiment we can conduct to attempt to disprove your account. If you cannot, if you do not, you do not have the right, cannot have the right, to call it science!

And ay, there's the rub!

The trouble is, if enough people think, are misled into believing, it is science and not faith then may the tooth fairy help us all! Faith has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else. Allied with pseudo-science who can know what might be in store? Well, actually, we do know. It's called the second world war. The holocaust. The gulag. The Ukrainian famine.

Footnote:
Thank you, Charles Darwin, for the title today.