MOST DEBATE on the issue of whether evolution ought to be taught in the classroom tends to focus on the presumed invalidity of evolution. It's referred to as "only a theory," and proponents of teaching creationism take great pleasure in pointing out various deficiencies in the thesis. In a strange case of the pot calling the kettle black, creationists never seem to realize that their own theory has almost no scientific backing at all. Of course, they put forward all kinds of evidence for creationism. They do not, however, realize that no amount of evidence can prove the creationist thesis, because the concept of creationism is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of scientific proof. Creationism is not science, nor can it be thought of as such.
Some people try to frame creationism as a theory of intelligent design. That's fine -- the concept of intelligent design is not in conflict with the concept of evolution. It's not science either. Proving the thesis of intelligent design would require us to ascribe motives and existence to an entity of which we can have no experience.
We have no evidence from which we can prove that God created the universe as it is because he intended life to come into existence. In order to design the universe intelligently, God would have to exist and design it before it came into being -- and therefore do so outside of its laws. We can't make any scientific claim to understand how that prior state worked, because we have neither temporal nor spatial access to it. Anything we say will only be unprovable speculation.
That doesn't just mean that we can't be scientifically certain about God's intentions. It means we can't scientifically say anything about them at all, even on the subject of whether or not they existed. Any discussion of intelligent design therefore does not belong in a science class -- such speculations lie entirely beyond the scope of the subject.
But most people aren't talking about intelligent design when they're talking about creationism in the classroom. Rather, they believe students should be taught "creation science," which states that the creation of life and the world proceeded as recounted in the Bible. They even offer "proof" that the process occurred in that manner. This, however, is ludicrous because the central thesis of creationism denies the possibility of scientific proof.
Scientific evaluation of the past relies fundamentally on the assumption that the laws of nature were the same then as they are now. This assumption is critically important because we have no way to evaluate evidence from the past if relations between matter and energy were at the time substantially different. For example, a scientist can't learn anything from a ballistics test on a murder weapon if the laws of physics that govern the velocity and spin of the bullet changed between the time the murder was committed and the time the weapon was tested.
Now, this assumption may or may not be correct. It may be that the natural laws of the universe are in slow, constant flux, so that they change over immense periods of time.
Regardless of the assumption's validity, it's the only way we can make any kind of evaluation of the past from the present. If they changed, we simply have no way to tell what the natural laws might have been in the past. And we have no way to analyze evidence created under circumstances that are completely alien to us. If entropy, which essentially governs all chemical reactions, behaved differently in the past, we could not explain in terms of anything we have now how matter behaved then. So if the natural laws changed, then we couldn't prove any explanation of events in the past.
Unfortunately, creationism defines itself by violating this assumption. Any creationist theory requires that, at some point in the past, the natural laws that now govern the universe were at least ignored, and probably thrown out the window entirely. God stretched forth his hand and violated every physical law on the books by creating something out of nothing, order from chaos, and life from rocks, dirt, and perhaps a rib or two.
But once we accept that this happened, we can't admit any evidence on its behalf, because we have lost our ability to evaluate it. We know that the assumption was violated, and so we can't apply our rules of science to it. No proof can ever be adequate to confirm the creationist thesis because the thesis itself denies the validity of any proof. If we attempt to describe the creationist process, therefore, we end up with pure speculation.
The bottom line is that if we accept that a creationist process occurred, we no longer can prove how it did so. We have no way to show that it is any more probable that the universe was created by God's saying "let there be light" than by the confluence of Apsu and Tiamat, or from mud under Turtle's fingernails, or out of the body of Phan-Ku. There's just no way to evaluate any evidence for any creation myth.
The debate over the teaching of evolution in the classroom generally has accepted that creationism, if taught, ought be taught in a science class. This, however, makes no sense. Creationism is not science, nor can its proofs claim to be scientific. The fundamental incompatibility between the creationist thesis and the concept of scientific proof means that creationism should not be taught in science classrooms.
(Sparky Clarkson's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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