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CHAPTER TWO

The Basics

What is “basic” to the understanding of creationism and evolution? This chapter discusses some of the categories of knowledge and belief, and examines areas of knowledge and information.

A. HOW DO I KNOW ANYTHING?

I suggest seven ways of knowing, not all of which are equally dependable. Examining these ways can be critical in deciding the logic or correctness of a conclusion.

1. Experience is intended to cover the effects of a lifetime of living in the world and learning that if we're hungry and cry, mother will give us milk; if we stand in the rain, we're likely to get wet. Every time we throw our toy out of the crib, it falls on the floor and we begin to learn about gravity and balance. Through the use of induction (reasoning from specific facts to general rules), we begin to formulate laws that seem to us to govern events in our world. Our experiences are formed through our perceptual senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Unfortunately, our perceptions are fallible. The philosopher René Descartes argued that our observations may be due to a dream, a deceiving God, or a deceiving daemon. Philosophers belonging to the branch of philosophy known as skepticism point out that we cannot be sure that we are not a disembodied “brain in a vat” and that all our observations are merely illusions being fed to us. (Think of the movie The Matrix). Various justifications have been proposed for thinking that our experiences are reliable. One answer to the problem is the formation of a suitable track record of memories that makes it reasonable to attribute reliability to our perceptions and gives us some hope that our observations correspond to reality!

2. Observation is like experience but more structured. You perform experiments with proper controls. You time how long it takes to get to work by different routes and then use the one that gets you to work the quickest—unless, of course, you dislike work. You alter the spices in a recipe to see if the resulting pancakes taste better or worse. Scientists continually use this method to learn about the material world, and for them it is the definitive way of knowing that some belief (knowledge) is correct. There is no higher authority to which a scientist can appeal. It is the most important source of information for scientists, because it is verifiable by additional and repeated observations. One does need to be careful, though, because things are not always what they superficially seem. Moreover, as someone once said, “If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it.” This important humorous saying indicates that it is possible to be led astray by believing something so strongly that you are led to see things that are not there, or to fail to see things that are.

3. Logic is the mathematical subject that assures that the reasoning process is valid, with erroneous reasoning revealed as such. But logic doesn't prove anything even if the logic is valid, because the correctness of the conclusion still depends upon the correctness of the assumptions. All knowledge can be put through the tests of logic, logic having nothing to do with the philosophy one may be examining. It can test for logical (in)consistency. Thus both creationism and science (and other systems of belief) strive to make their knowledge system as logical, as internally consistent, as possible. It is the second most important way of knowing for the scientist, but logically it is important for the creationist as well.

4. Authority is learning from the learned, the most bountiful source of knowledge that we have. We learn first from our parents, then from teachers and playmates, and then from employers. We also learn from books, newspapers, magazines, television, and games. Not all authorities are equally good, and a good authority in one field may be limited in another field. If you have a theological question, you'll probably do better to ask a rabbi (priest, imam, etc.) than a scientist. But if you have a scientific question, the scientist is probably a better choice than the rabbi (or priest or imam). And even in their own fields scientists are not all equally knowledgeable. As the Romans put it: caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.

For the literal creationist, on matters of evolution there is no higher authority to which one can appeal than the first two chapters of Genesis, literally interpreted. On this the creationists insist. It should come as no surprise, then, that, as things now stand, the differences between evolutionists and the strict creationists are irresolvable. They could be resolvable only if one of the two groups changed their criteria for truth to that of the other, or if they separated the areas addressed between them. Specifically, the evolutionists would agree that they have no authority in the realm of the theological, and the creationists would agree they have no authority in the realm of the material world. One should recognize that authority comes in different flavors. It is important that one recognize the difference between an authority that talks a lot about what is true, and one that presents experimental evidence in favor of a proposition being true (or not).

5. Intuition is the sudden appearance of an idea that feels correct to you although you can't say why or how it came into your head. It is a frequent source of knowledge, although its probability of being correct may be very low. “I don't know whether this organism (Archaeopteryx) is a bird or a mammal, but I feel that it is a bird.” Scientists frequently have these feelings, and those who have the best intuition tend to be the more successful scientists. Intuition tends to be most valuable when it is about a topic of which the one doing the intuiting has much experience. Note how weak the prediction is. Intuition is of little value in an intellectual argument, but it may be of great value in suggesting a fruitful line of research.

6. Revelation is God speaking to you, telling you what to believe or do, or what is true. For scientists it is their experiments or observations that are revealing, rather than God. The scientist's attitude is often one of “If God tells you something, that is revelation. When you tell me what God said, that is hearsay.”

7. Faith is the knowing of something for which none of the above applies: “There is no logical reason why I believe this, but I am certain that it is true.” The philosopher Sren Kierkegaard was of the opinion that there are always gaps in what we can determine by observation and logic. When so-called expert witnesses are called into the courtroom, they may disagree as to what the facts are. Many experiments have been performed to demonstrate that eyewitnesses can often disagree as to the details of an event that they all witnessed. A famous experiment invited observers to watch a video and count the number of times a basketball is passed back and forth. During the video a person wearing a gorilla suit strolls onto the court, but the vast majority of observers are so intent on counting the number of passes that they fail to notice the gorilla! The shortcomings of observation and logic led Kierkegaard to state that embracing a faith such as Christianity requires a “leap of faith.” But even Kierkegaard noted that this leap is taken with “fear and trembling”—that is, we can never be certain that our faith will lead us in the proper direction.

Each of these ways of knowing can sometimes serve a useful purpose, but for the scientist as a scientist, only careful, controlled observations can decide between two contradictory materialist views. The paradigm is to discover what contradictory predictions the two views make and how to discover data and perform experiments that will give results that determine which of the opposing views, if not both, is clearly incorrect. A scientist's explanation must function; that is, it must permit control over some observed condition of the material world. A creationist's explanation for the same observations need only be asserted.

B. FOUR AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

1. Theology (metaphysics), as used here, is the study of gods and their activities, which leads to questions such as “How many gods are there?” and “Are any of them male?” and “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

2. Ethics is a system of moral principles to guide human conduct. It deals with an individual's standard of conduct or a body of rules pertaining to social obligations and duties. The word ethics comes from the Greek thikos, meaning “personal disposition.” Much has been written concerning which principles a person should use to guide his or her personal conduct. It has been claimed that the theory of evolution destroys faith in the Bible as an authority for moral guidance, and hence is an attack on morality and ethics. Although the theory of evolution differs from literal interpretations of the Bible on factual questions such as the age of the Earth, evolution says nothing about what moral codes we should follow. On this matter, evolution is currently silent or neutral. In addition, moral codes can change over time and are derived from a number of sources other than the Christian Bible. Confucius devised a system of ethical precepts based upon the practice of jen (sympathy or human-heartedness) centuries before Christ. In ancient Greece, idealists such as Plato held that there is an absolute good to which human conduct aspires. Ethical systems have been ascribed to divine will, but also to an innate sense (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and to human experience (John Stuart Mill and John Locke). David Hume made contributions on the nature and necessity of a humanly inspired morality. Immanuel Kant sought to set up an ethical system independent of theology, and spoke of the categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.” Philosophers such as G. E. Moore have postulated an immediate awareness of the morally good.

Science does not pretend to answer moral questions. But science has wrongly been cited as a justification for moral and ethical views, which is a misuse of the theory of evolution. As Fran de Waal has rather cynically observed: “Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.”

The theory of evolution has frequently been cited by various people to support their economic and political goals. I will refer to this group, loosely, under the rubric of “social Darwinists.” This is a loose and imprecise term, because the goals and positions of those who have been called, or called themselves, social Darwinists have differed greatly. In this work, I refer to “social Darwinists” as those who profess to determine an ethical ought from an empirical is—that is, those who claim to know which ethical path is best for society from contemplating nature and the theory of evolution. Such social Darwinists profess to “help nature along” by speeding up the time needed for “progress.” They have professed to know which economic system is best with the “certainty of the principle of gravitation” (David Ricardo). They have professed to know which people in society ought exclusively to reproduce (Francis Galton, Harry Laughlin, Margaret Sanger) and which races are superior.

Accordingly, they have advocated the sterilization of the unfit, opposed state aid to the poor and state support of education, and advocated permitting unrestrained business and commerce. Such beliefs have used evolution and nature to justify racism, colonialism, slavery, and Nazism. Sir Francis Galton wrote, “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.” This citation of nature's actions as a basis for our own is an excellent example of the naturalistic fallacy, which we covered earlier. It is also an abuse of analogy arguments. Moreover, even if one wants to improve the human condition, nothing in the theory of evolution indicates that it would be helpful to turn the strong against the weak.