From Fascination to Certainty: Creation Science

Let it not be said that evangelicals hate science.

Well, perhaps some of them do, but most of the conservative evangelical groups I study would contest that allegation. Indeed, those perhaps most often labeled as anti-science--young-earth creationists--generally profess a sincere love for science. A quick examination of young-earth creationist media and books provides some degree of confirmation for this.

Take, for example, the Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution series. These three films operate like simple nature documentaries. A host, David Hames, sets up a series of mini-lessons on various "incredible creatures" narrated by one Dr. Jobe Martin. Dr. Martin, who identifies himself both as a trained dentist and a former evolutionist, describes some of the features that make this or that particular incredible creatures so, well, incredible. The bombardier beetle, for example, gets its name from a peculiar defense mechanism: when threatened, the beetle simultaneously releases two chemicals which explode when mixed, making a series of pops. Here's Dr. Martin himself to explain:



The rest of the film (and, I presume, its two sequels) proceeds similarly. Describe some fascinating feature of an animal and express incredulity that such a brilliant mechanism could possibly have come about via evolution.

Now, Dr. Martin's reasoning could be faulted on several counts, but it's clear that he and the film as a whole know have a fairly accurate, even sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms over which he marvels. He does not, in other words, lie about how the beetle's defense works (or about the surprisingly complicated processes involved in a giraffe's drinking water). Indeed, I get the strong sense that Dr. Martin, the host, the filmmakers, and their audience (conservative church groups and home schools) are honestly fascinated by such wonders of nature. But for the "how could this possibly be evolved?" skepticism, these films don't differ that much from standard Animal Planet fare (well, cheap Animal Planet fare).

A surprising amount of current creationist discourse similarly consists of marveling at nature--how this or that animal behaves, how the earth moves around the sun, how big the galaxy is, etc. Creationists (and for this blog entry I mean young-earth creationists) defend their love of science via reference to the mass of facts and tidbits they collect and enjoy. In their view, the wonders of nature operate as proof of God's greatness. How could they not be scientists?

And, so far as that goes, who can blame them? Young-earth creationists are hardly alone in finding spiritual inspiration in nature. I remember how once when I was working at a summer camp in the mountains outside of Sante Fe, I climbed up a mountaintop that overlooked the camp valley. It was a clear night with a full moon--bright as you could want--and dazzling. In the quiet, cool evening, with a million tiny suns above me, I sang "How Great Thou Art."

Where I and others differ from the anti-evolutionists, however, is in the young-earth creationists' insistence that such fascination with nature is itself science. Well--they mean not fascination so much as investigation, and then not just any kind of investigation but a particular mode of investigation. For creationists, science involves the observation and analysis of apparent facts of nature. Anything beyond the plain-facts approach ("here's what the bombardier beetle does and how it does it") reeks of pseudoscientific guessing. The theory of evolution, they argue, isn't science but an unobservable "guess" that contaminates scientists' ideally pure investigation of the plain facts of nature (in living animals, in fossils, in geology, etc.).

Scholars like George Marsden have pointed to turn-of-the-(19th) century evangelicalism's tacit reliance on a particular philosophy of science, the Scottish School of Common Sense. From this tradition, evangelicals and fundamentalists derived the idea that properly scientific investigation consists of induction, examining readily available facts and cautiously drawing general conclusions from those specifics. Deductive reasoning--starting with a general hypothesis and searching for specific confirmations of that hypothesis--is epistemologically invalid. It fails to give certain truth. Only induction--examining the simple, plain-sense facts readily available to the senses--can generate reliable truths.

Marsden goes on to demonstrate how this inductive philosophy of science bolstered the late-19th-century Princeton school of Biblical inerrancy. You approach the specific facts clearly presented in the Bible and use them as the foundation on which to gradually, carefully build theological truths. To read the Bible by the light of hypothesis (say, the hypothesis of Isiah's multiple authorship) is to traffic in uncertainty.

That anti-evolutionist creationists read nature and the Bible similarly isn't surprising. Both are, in creationist theology, revelations from God. The Bible is the Special Revelation; nature is the General Revelation. Of course, since God is complete and without contradiction or change, the general and the special revelations must match each other. And, in the creationist approach, both do so--provided that you deal with both scientifically, i.e., inductively.

More tomorrow,

JF