The Three Failures of Creationism. Walter Fitch
as unsupportable in its extreme form by those same opponents.
The principal goal is to establish what science is and how biological evolution is a scientific study, no matter what errors may be present at our current level of understanding of evolution. This is true even if Darwinian evolution itself should be proven wrong. In contrast, creationism, intelligent design, and irreducible complexity are not scientific, even if their conclusions (such as that God made the universe in six literal days about six thousand years ago) were shown to be all correct. It is my hope to represent the creationist viewpoints as those of people with different criteria for resolving important questions. Nevertheless, I hope that if people can understand what evolutionists do and how and why, they will understand that creationism is rarely if ever scientific. Biological evolution is almost always scientific, and thus the reader will understand why evolutionists oppose the teaching of this theological view as part of any science course.
I try to present both sides fairly in describing what strict creationists believe. In evaluating those beliefs, however, I shall rigorously apply scientific and theological methods as appropriate. For example, a creationist may say he believes that the Bible is the word of God and therefore cannot be wrong, that the Bible says the world was created in six days, and that he therefore believes that the world was created in six days. His logical argument in itself is quite valid (and we will elaborate further on chains of logic later in this chapter). Consider the following syllogisms. (A syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.)
| Syllogism 1 | ||
| Premise 1: | The Bible (Old and New Testaments) is the Word of God. | |
| Premise 2: | The Word of God cannot be wrong. | |
| Conclusion 1: | The Bible cannot be wrong. |
| Syllogism 2 | ||
| Conclusion 1: | The Bible cannot be wrong. | |
| Premise 3: | The Bible says the world was created in six days. | |
| Conclusion 2: | The world was created in six days. |
Note that Conclusion 1 is also the first premise of the second syllogism. But both of these premises are theo-logical, not materio- logical. They are theo-logical because the premises themselves are about God and God's Bible. This difference is crucial in that the starting premises of the creationist are not the same as those of the evolutionist. Hence differing conclusions should be expected, even though our rules of logic are (or certainly should be) identical. The problem of logic is sufficiently important that the majority of this chapter is devoted to logic for those who might enjoy a minimal refresher course on the subject of how we decide which conclusions are logically admissible and which are not.
Critics of evolution often claim that it cannot be correct because it occurs via random genetic mutations, and random processes cannot create order. It is true that mutations are random, because they are not directed by a force that guarantees that, given the ancestral form, the nature of the character can be predicted. But mutations are only half the story. Environmental pressures are directive, and this leads to what is termed natural selection. Biological evolution is the study of the origins of the diverse nature of living things. It was inspired greatly by Charles Darwin, who, in 1859, proposed a theory for the origin and diversity of the living world. It was, and still is, called natural selection, and it postulated that sources of variation (later to be called mutations) occurred in nature. Some variants/mutants were harmful and were weeded out. A much smaller number of mutants were beneficial and spread through the population. The mechanism of evolution was that more offspring were produced than the habitat could support, and thus many members of a population would not produce successful, reproductively viable offspring. Those that did, did so because of the favorable effects of the useful mutations. Note that the creation of the mutations is a random process, but selection of mutants with a beneficial effect is directional. It was natural to portray the history of life as a genealogy in a branching tree that showed who came from whom and approximately when.
Many devout Christians (and other religious people) find no conflict at all between natural selection and their religion. Evolution, they assert, is simply “the way that God did it.” Nevertheless, many evolutionists' statements directly contradict a literal interpretation of some of the statements given in the initial chapters of the book of Genesis. For those who can interpret Genesis in a somewhat moralistic, figurative, poetic, or metaphorical rather than a literal fashion, there is no problem. But many people, including “young-Earth” creationists, cannot accept this. Thus, although most creationists are Christian, most Christians are not creationist in the narrow, literalist sense used here. But they could well be creationist in a broader sense—believing, for example, that God started the universe but may subsequently have left it alone to evolve according to His rules. I necessarily differ only from the strict creationists—the literalists.
The controversy between creationists and evolutionists often involves logical failures. For that reason, we begin with a section on logical reasoning and its limitations. Logical failures will continue to be noted.
Logic is the study of the meaning of words and the inferences that are and are not allowable, given some data or reasoning. Rhetoric, on the other hand, although it considers the meaning of words and logic, is not so much interested in what conclusions are true as in what the persuasive effect of the words and gestures may be on you—the reader or listener. The object of rhetorical material is to convince you of something, whether true or not. (“Buy my product,” “My client is innocent,” “My religion is the only true religion,” etc.) Logic will be considered first, then rhetoric.
A. SYLLOGISMS
The study of logic is quite ancient (Aristotle, 384-322 B.C.), but today logic is dominated by truth tables. A truth table is a set of rows and columns showing true/false values for logical propositions and their components. The true/false values are usually shown, in Boolean algebra style, as “1” for true and “0” for false. Perhaps, for an introduction, it is easier to learn a little about syllogisms. A syllogism is an argument. Any one argument is a collection of three statements (sometimes more) of which the first two statements are called the premises (assumptions or givens; we restrict ourselves to three-statement arguments) and the third statement is the “therefore,” or “conclusion.” The process is of the following form:
| Premise 1: | If Socrates was a man, and, | |
| Premise 2: | If all men are mortal, | |
| Conclusion: | Then Socrates was mortal. |
The first two statements are the assumptions being made, and, if they are true, the conclusion in the third line, correctly formed, must also be valid and true. The three lines can be considered more generally as:
| Premise 1: | A (Socrates) then B (man). | OR | If A is true, then B is true. | ||
| Premise 2: | If B (man) then C (mortal). | If B is true, then C is true. | |||
| Conclusion: | If A (Socrates) then C (mortal). | If A is true, then C is true |
You will be challenged later to transform an argument into syllogistic form to see if the argument is valid. It is not as easy as one might think. To aid you in achieving success in that effort, some valuable bits of knowledge are presented.
Note that every ordinary syllogism has exactly three different terms or statements: A, B, and C. Each term is used exactly twice. Term A is the subject of premise 1, and B is its predicate or result. B in turn is the subject of premise 2, with C as the predicate. The conclusion eliminates term B, and jumps directly from subject A to predicate C. The order of the two premises is not critical, but the flow of meaning is more natural, and the argument is easier to understand, if the term that occurs in both premises (B in this example) is the predicate of the first premise and the subject of the second. Thus:
| Premise 1: | Socrates was a man. | |
| Premise 2: | All men are mortal. | |
| Conclusion: | Therefore, Socrates was mortal. |
Or: A implies B; B