Eugenie Scott - Reason And Creationism

it's just wonderful to be here in Australia it's a country I love to visit every opportunity so I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to present here another theme for the conference is a celebration of reason and creationism is what I usually talk about so I thought I would try to combine reason and creationism two terms that most of us here would think would sit rather uncomfortably next to each other the dictionary defines reason as the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions judgments or inferences and sound judgments good sense well as to sound judgment reason and creationism don't seem to have a lot to do with each other the inferences creationists make about the empirical world seem greatly inferior to those made by scientists and I'm going to talk about that a little bit today but first just so you know what I'm talking about when I use the word creationism let me explain the rest of the talk will make a lot more sense how special creationism is a Christian view that sees God creating things in essentially their present form whether stars and galaxies or planets or plants and animals people whatever you are created in your present form it is a point of view that is completely incompatible with evolution unlike many other Christian views there's two kinds of special creationism young earth creationism is the most familiar these are individuals who believe that the earth is very young and that the creation took place over six 24-hour days there also are old earth creationists who have a slightly different perspective they do accept geology physics and chemistry but they choke on biology they accept that the earth is in the universe is old but most of them are actually progressive creationists who believe that God created sequentially through time and that is a way that they maintain the special creation view but still accept a fair amount of modern science now the intelligent design folks overlap they make so few fact claims they really can't be put into one camp or another but where if you consider the concept of irreducible complexity it really is a special creation concept and I don't have time to go into that but mostly what I'm going to be talking about today is young earth creationism and intelligent design and I'm going to use geology as my example now the Grand Canyon is truly a wonder of the world it's over 300 miles long there are about 5,000 feet of sediments it's layered like a cake with the bottom layers being a little bit cockeyed they're an easy drive from Grand Canyon is a place called Zion Canyon which has a more sediment packed upon those 5,000 feet of Grand Canyon sediment this is called the Grand Staircase of the Colorado Plateau and an easy ride from Zion is Bryce Canyon where you have additional sediments piled on top of those and further up the Colorado Plateau there are more sediments so we're really talking about a lot of rock in the central and western part of the United States now to explain Grand Canyon sand dirt science accepts the inference is made by Nicholas steno back in the 1600 about literally the lay of the land he had three insights that have shaped geological sciences ever since the principle of horizontality that geological layers form horizontally so if you see layers tipped like in the bottom of Grand Canyon that occurred after they were laid gives you an idea that the earth has had a history which was extremely important to help us understand the history of the planet and ultimately the history of biological organisms on the planet itself the principle of lateral continuity that layers will extend in a horizontal fashion until they run into something that stops them something solid and perhaps from the standpoint of biological evolution the principle is superposition the layers on the bottom are older than the layers on the top these seem like very simple observations or inferences really but they were extremely important to to the development of what became david geological sciences now creationists accept these three steno principles at more or less but they neglect to apply them when the implications of these principles fly against their ideology such as the literal truth of the bible to young earth creationists the best way to refute evolution is to remove the possibility of enough time for evolution to take place and because the entire bible has to be literally true Noah's Flood must be an historical offence the consequence of this for geology is that all sedimentary deposits have to be catastrophic alida posited by Noah's Flood including Grand Canyon so the Colorado Plateau and the view of creationists all 5,000 feet of it of the Grand Canyon sediments and then of course several thousand feet thereafter had to be laid down by the receding flood waters the basement rocks of Grand Canyon the schist sand Granite's the tilted part that actually is creation week that's pre flood the early flood laid down Grand Canyon which is the right hand column there and then you get into sayonara and post flood it all is taking place within a period of a year now one feature it's it's too bad I don't have time to talk about continental zip because that's another fun feature of continental drift is is really accelerated in creation science as well as deposition one feature of Grand Canyon that's very difficult for creationists to explain is the Coconino sandstone which is this beautiful big white layer in some cases thousands of feet thick it's Aeolian it's Wendling it's a big huge sand dune that extends across a large portion of the american of the North American continent in Grand Canyon the Coconino sandstone is sandwiched in between two layers of rock which are - all evidence water lane so you have a water lane a layer this is not easy to say a wind lane layer and another water lane layer above it this is hard to do within a period of a few months now creationists have to have Grand Canyon deposited catastrophic ly though so they've had to deal with the improbability sorry of this water boy that was pretty quick let's go back they have to deal with the improbability of this some water wind water kind of layer and interestingly enough they have tried to do some research to try to demonstrate why the Coconino could be water lane instead of wind lling and this is kind of an interesting thing there are tetrapod footprints found in the Coconino and this of course also complicates the problem because you have a water Lane layer you have the Coconino and these little varmints scamper across leaving the footprints and then that's sealed in by a water lane this is tough so for creationists because Coconino has to be laid down by water rather than air they've been trying to persuade the scientific community of this for a number of years and they actually have done some real research Leonard brand has conducted experiments with reptiles and water tank to try to demonstrate that the kinds and shapes of the footprints that you find in Coconino could have been laid down by small tetrapods four-legged land vertebrates that were sort of try swimming you know knocking into the surface or the you know close to the ground of the as the water as the floodwaters raised and he's published several papers on this in scientific journals but of course it's only in the creationist journals that he mentions the implications that the water that laid down the allegedly lay down the Coconino was the water of Noah's Flood there's a number of reasons why that is not very likely and why he has not persuaded other geologists that the Coconino is water lean there's a trackways that indicate galloping which would be very hard to do under water there's also small arthropods like scorpions and spiders which are not going to be leaving tracks under water so there's just a lot of evidence out there that is being ignored by the young earth creationists in promoting this idea of a water lane Coconino now uncharacteristic of fluid Lane strata whether water or wind is cross-bedding where sediment forms layers on the least side of the dune and geologists have ways of discriminating between water lane and wind lane cross beds and the conclusion of standard geology is that the Coconino clearly is Aeolian in terms of many many features of these cross-bedding I'm getting encouraged here to hang on oh that's entertaining well let's see what we can do here well something about um hey tech guys can you come here for just a second please never mind I think I figured it out never mind I got it thank you I got a a challenge to the Aeolian deposition I didn't do that based on the characteristics of the grains of sand of the Coconino cross beds cast doubts on the usual explanation and this research was presented in a poster at the 2012 tan Geological Society of American meetings by students from Cedarville college which is a Christian college in Ohio and the kids you know did all the right work they took in sections of the sandstone they examined the grains laborious ly counted grains from each slide counting them evaluating them for characteristics of size shape and sorting very standard procedures for data collection and analysis and their paper was accepted at GSA and perfectly normal and if you look at conclusion number three the sand might have been deposited in water which would be something of a surprising conclusion for standard geology now geologists haven't been convinced by the student work or brands work or anybody else again there's a great deal of information out there that is not compatible with the idea of a water lean deposit all of the other evidence indicates and a Olien deposit and so that is why geologists consider it the biggest problem done with the science done by creation science proponents is that they fail to consider the refuting data the refuting studies that studies that refute their particular inferences they seek out only the data that is compatible with their view which is why even though what they do looks like science it isn't actually a legitimate form of science but ironically the science done by creation science proponents actually has more to offer than the supposedly more sophisticated intelligent design science so to speak the efforts of ID proponents to present their case has been puny indeed the very few published articles claim to support ID actually only attempt to disprove some aspect of evolution particularly the mechanism of natural selection and producing adaptive complexity their ID papers claim the improbability of some combination of mutations occurring to produce an enzyme system for example thus the feature has be explained by intelligence and of course the intelligence is always God although the fact claims of creation science proponents are wrong they actually make fat claims that potentially can be disproved and our disproved they actually are trying to do some science and even if they leave out some steps I think they actually do better science than the intelligent design proponents intelligent design is stripped of fact claims and de Ville devolves to evolution can't do the job so if creation science is wrong in the world words of Wolfgang Pauli intelligent design is not even wrong I thought it might be interesting since we're talking about reason in this first sense is a process of forming conclusions judge ins judgments or inferences to compare evolution creation science and intelligent design on the story of the past what is the historical narrative of these three views what is the pattern that they see in the past what is the process that they use to explain the historical narrative and for evolution the historical narrative of course is common ancestry the pattern is a branching tree of life and the process is natural selection genetics evo-devo lots of other speciation lots of other mechanisms that bring about this branching tree of life creation science has an historical narrative it's special creation god specially created things in their present form that is a historical narrative it happens to not be compatible with the vast majority of observations but at least it's a fact claim that you can test the pattern and creation science is variation within kinds the created kinds of the Bible and the process is God's intervention followed by micro evolution so God creates the kinds and then they can you can have variation and evolution within the kind you simply cannot have a evolution from one kind to the other so it is an internally coherent system it just happens to be wrong intelligent design has no historical narrative you will search the intelligent design literature for years and never find them saying anything about what happened what did God do and when did he do it isn't there there is no pattern in the intelligent design perspective of the past they never say anything about what happened in the past what is the shape of the history of life if life had a history at all and the process you have to merely infer and the processes God intervenes to create things like irreducibly complex structure and then you can have micro evolution it's basically a special creation point of view but in terms of science it is much less acceptable interestingly enough then is our poor old creation science but there's another way so evolution clearly wins in the definition of reason that I began with but there's another way of looking at reason and creationism that uses the word reason in another sense reason can also be defined as the basis or cause of something is when we speak of the reason for doing something a reason can be a statement explaining a belief or action a view these this way of course creationists have reasons for their beliefs but the beliefs partly but the reasons really have much to do with other kinds of reasons the kind reflecting empirical evidence in science so let's take a look at reason and creationism from this direction what is the reason creationists are so opposed to evolution well for creation science proponents the first reason concerns the fear of the loss of salvation the fear of the loss of eternal life the cartoon reflects the view of these Christians that unless Genesis is literally true then there was no sin of Adam thus there's no need for Jesus to die for our sins thus there's no basis for Christianity if Jesus didn't die for our sins then there's no possibility of being reunited with God in the afterlife and being reunited of course with your loved ones and that is very important to many people a second reason is morality the Bible is the source of everything good whereas without the Bible you have only social disintegration as in these true pillars from Answers in Genesis now remember this is a religious tradition that we the idea that you can be good without God I don't know about you but I haven't killed anyone in weeks well what about the intelligent design guys generally they aren't biblical literalists they don't base their Christianity in Genesis the reason the intelligent design proponents reject evolution has more to do with an animosity toward the philosophical materialism they believe permeates modern culture it's a culture war perspective and they are the good guys defending society and a Christian worldview against materialist philosophy to do this they need to change how science is done let me explain you see from the very genesis of the primary intelligent design promoting institution the center for science and culture which is associated with a Discovery Institute in Seattle originally the Center for science and culture was the Center for renewal of science and culture which itself gives you a hint at their orientation of themselves as culture warriors in the Discovery Institute Journal in 1996 Bruce Chapman president of the DI wrote quote for over a century Western science has been influenced by the idea that God is either dead or irrelevant to foundations recently awarded Discovery Institute nearly a million dollars in grants to examine and confront this materialistic bias in science law and the humanities the grants will be used to establish the Center for the renewal of science and culture led by Stephen Meyer here which will award research fellowships to scholars hold conferences and disseminate research findings among opinion makers and the general public the more you read about the program and there will be about six books to read from in the center in the next four years the more you will realize the radical assault it makes on the tired and depressing materialist culture and politics of our times as well as the science behind them then when you start to ponder what the sussan when you start to ponder what society and politics might become under a sounder scientific dispensation you will become truly inspired I'd love to have time just to deconstruct the scientific dispensations sensation being a term from Christian apologetics but there's no time to continue Chapman goes on accordingly our Center for the renewal of science and culture seeks to show that science supports the concept of design and meaning in the universe and that design points to a knowable moral order in their newsletter let me just pull this up for you the center seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies and this paragraph here the center explores how new developments in biology physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have reopened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature now what is this scientific materialism this is a curious phrase you don't usually hear this phrase in common everyday parlance and in newsletters for the general public it has to do with two ways that the term materialism or naturalism is used we talk in science about methodological materialism or methodological naturalism this is a practice that scientists have where we restrict ourselves to explaining the natural world using natural causes and the reason for that is that science is about testing explanations and the common way that one tests explanations is that you hold constant variables that you're not as interested in and then you can see what's happening and see whether your explanation works the only variables you can hold constant are natural variables so science restricts itself to natural causes whether or not the scientist is a believer or a non-believer we all do science the same way there also is something called philosophical materialism which is the philosophy held by I assume most of us in this room and my own personal philosophy as well philosophical materialism goes beyond saying you can explain the natural world through matter and energy through material causes to say that that's all there is there is only matter energy and their interaction the universe consists only of material factors there is no God there no supernatural just we're stuck with matter and energy these two are not the same but the intelligent design proponents regularly conflate them as a way of attacking science let me just look at this logically for you for a moment I assume that is perfectly reasonable that all philosophical materialists are methodological materialist it would be very difficult to imagine a philosophical material who did not accept the idea that the natural world can be explained through natural causes this seems pretty easy but if indeed all philosophical materialists are methodological materialists that does not mean that all methodological materialists are philosophical materialism all m's are not peace ok this is a logical error now it might be empirically true you can have something be logically wrong but empirically true of them and think about it does make sense if philosophical and methodological material has both occupied the same space so to speak then it would be true but we know empirically that's not true we know many methodological materialists who are believers they are not philosophical materialists like you and I Gregor Mendel on up so to speak but this is exactly the error that the intelligent design proponents make and it is a very strong motivator for their attack upon science in Philip Johnson's book the wedge of truth he talks about how the materialism of society is held up by the materialism of science in other words scientific materialism as described and as you heard in the Discovery Institute literature the scientific materialism is under is undergirded by evolution as the in is this very very important scientific idea that is very important to society it has great implications for philosophy for mood as we've been talking about in this in this conference of ours I don't think I need to explain that any further evolution is the science that deals most closely with the critical issues of who we are where we came from and where our responsibility lies the wedge strategy that he outlined in this book is an attack upon evolution because the view is that if you can destroy evolution then that provides no no foundation if you will for scientific materialism then you can attack the material basis of science you can argue as the intelligent design folks did during the Dover trial and elsewhere in their literature that we have to open up science to let in the occasional miracle that in the occasional hand of God in origin Sciences they call it so if you can destroy scientific materialism this of course will destroy societal materialism and leave it open to what in their terms a proper Christian theism so attacking evolution as a means of attacking science as a means of constructing a proper Christian theism now as it happens the intelligent design proponents have not had much luck persuading the scientific community to abandon methodological naturalism it works really well we're going to stick with it considering the large amount of understanding of the natural world amassed through restricting ourselves to natural causes and the lack of any improvement in that understanding derived from intelligent design we have no reason to abandon the procedures that have paid off so will changing the way we do science to make room for intelligence is a really bad idea still if we are looking for reasons why creation science and intelligent design proponents object to evolution the reasons exist and though they are different in intelligent design versus creation science to be successful in dealing with the challenge the creationists of any stripe pose to science education and to the public understanding of science we need to know what the reasons are in order to determine the most effective ways to deal with them now unfortunately this is a brief half hour talk I've probably gotten there already so I can't go into those details but if I can only direct you to NCSE comm if you go to this news alerts button you can get a free Friday electronic newsletter that my colleague Glenn branch produces it's very very informative very depressing all the things that are going on in the creationism controversy the news button will take you to this page where you can find out what's going on you can I encourage you to sort for the state of Tennessee in the state pull down menu we've had quite an adventure there recently and we are rather depressed about the outcome you can sort by here as well and we are a membership organization so do consider joining us and thank you so much for inviting me to participate in the conference I appreciate Thank You genie scoffs oh we do have some time for questions though Eugenie would you're not getting away that easy I'm happy I just thought that was such a nice thank you Eugenie Scott and off you go oh I was thanking you for the throw come anyway all right if there are any questions please find people with the blue t-shirts and microphones there's one over here yes hi you Judy I'm a huge fan first of all I had to say that but what do you think about religious scientists that although they're not creationists and sometimes they're really good advocates against creationism they they make their own sort of mistakes in that I was thinking of Kenneth R Miller in his book finding Darwin's God in about page 234 or something he goes and says you know well God may intervene at the quantum level you know and and I think that's quite disingenuous because you know he's making a claim that is just basically based on faith okay um I think a nice thing about finding Darwin's God Ken Miller's book is that he separates off his science and if you read the first four or five or six I forget how many chapters he just absolutely lays waste to creation science and intelligent design it's one of the best scientific put-downs areas and then he says and now I'm gonna talk about my personal religious beliefs and then he goes on to other stuff I don't care so much about his personal religious beliefs I'll let other Christians and atheists debate that I don't care what I care about is he's he does a really really good job on the science and that's the bottom line for me I'll take allies forever I'll get them this question up here man in the gray shirt thank you other religions there's duh where's this person thank you thank you thank you you enjoyed the term well other religions talk about how the world came into being what efforts are being made in those countries to sort of forensic LIGO through the proofs and alternatives they put forward for the reasons why well the countries in which the predominant religion is one of the middle-eastern monotheism's judaism christianity or islam which is a very large portion of the planet those countries regularly have difficulty with evolution because of course they're all based upon the same ultimate revealed truth in hindu countries shinto other world religions in buddhism it's not a big deal you know they don't care and so the teaching of evolution isn't a big deal we interestingly enough though in many parts of Europe and as I learned when I went to Great Britain over the last two three years teachers are reporting a lot more pushback from students Islamic students who really don't want to hear about evolution and one of the difficulties that we're finding in Great Britain Charles Darwin's hometown so to speak is that even though the teachers are not anti evolution they don't have any you know they don't reject the idea of evolution they really don't understand the science very well so when they get the Harun Yahya or other kinds of Islamic anti evolution materials they don't know how to deal with them so there's this unfortunate tendency just as the last in the United States for some of the British teachers to just say well you know don't worry about that where we have so much to cover this semester we're probably not going to get to evolution so there's the same kind of self-censorship the teacher just skips evolution which is taking place elsewhere they and then in the you it states as well so it's become more of a worldwide problem i'll we have a question down here i met in the yellow shirt yes oh is that a volunteer nope Madame black shirt still early days with reference to the Dover trial it seems that intelligent design is founded on willful dishonesty for legal benefit if we do come across people who promote intelligent design should we have a little bit of faith I suppose that they're not just being dishonest that they actually believe these things I mean I know it's been called creationism in a cheap suit before cheap tuxedo everything classically but that's the one yeah um you know I get asked periodically well do they really believe this stuff and I have no reason to doubt that they are you know that they that they firmly believe the intelligent design views of the creation science views or the old earth views I I don't think there's any doubt in their mind the confirmation bias and the other sorts of psychological behaviors that we all fall prey to you tend to listen to what reinforces your point of view and that is something that we who are aware of it should be struggling against but it's a very easy pattern to fall into so it's very easy to skip all the information on the grain size of Coconino sandstone if what you want to show is that this is a water lay narrow layer so I I don't think I don't think that the vast majority of people who all these views are disingenuous or lying to it deliberately lying to us I think they get things wrong a lot but that's not the same thing as deliberately lying we have time for one more question up there in the black t-shirt I'm getting better at this I'm finding her to where the people are way too hi hi okay um as we know science works on a peer review basis so do you think that organizers of scientific conferences and journal and let us have a responsibility for the fact that creation science and pseudoscience has managed to sneak its way into mainstream scientific journals and do you think that's a problem with a peer-review system that needs to be fixed I would say that the number of creations I don't know of any creation science are promoting articles that have gotten through the peer review process and I actually did a study on that back in the 1980s but and I don't think there's been any improvement there's been a couple of articles that have claimed to be support for idea that have gotten into the the journals and almost immediately have been shown to have just been bad decisions in the peer review process because they were very shoddy science but let me let me say let me also point out that in the academic world there is a sliding scale so to speak of scrutiny the the lowest the lowest common denominators so to speak are the scientific conferences that if you belong to the Association you have a right to attend that associations meeting and you have a right to submit a an abstract to present a paper or a poster at that meeting now I used to be a president of a professional society and physical anthropologist and so I'm very well aware of this process someone submits an abstract it goes to an abstract review committee which reviews it for you know do you do you meet the criteria for an abstract as we have set up this is the due process involved if you do you can give your paper so at the physical anthropology meetings we've had papers presented by people who really believe there is a Bigfoot okay now I assure you the rest of the physical anthropologists are not really convinced by this information but the the meeting should be a place for letting a thousand flowers bloom so to speak people ought to be able to free if they can write a coherent abstract and you know whatever the criteria are for the abstract for that particular professional meeting if they can meet those standards if for a APA it's basically do you have a conclusion I mean that that's not a it's not a high bar we should have a lot of ideas popping up at the scientific conferences because that's where you can really butt heads you can really talk about things in the hallways talk about things in the before the poster ask questions during the podium presentation and you can really get get your ideas out some of these crazy ideas that seem crazy now may really work and may help us understand nature better and but the only way we're gonna find out is if we test them and if we have that exchange among scientists now to get an article published in a peer-reviewed journal is a higher bar you have to you actually here can it's not just having conclusions you actually have to have a methodology that leads to the conclusions that you're presenting and there's a lot of other things as well yeah so it's perfectly reasonable to have this this layered series of levels of scrutiny and I'm all for letting the creation of students at Cedarville college or any other creationists come to the geology meetings the biology meetings the physical anthropology meetings and present their points of view if they have followed the rules you know for getting an abstract submitted and accepted and then we'll tell them why they're wrong and that's the place to do it not in the high school classroom and not at the school board level if the intelligent design folks that the creation science folks want to convince a high school student that God pooped everything into existence and that evolution is crappy science that's free speech go for it but don't do it you know don't fight your culture wars on the back of the high school students convinced the scientific community and then it's gonna trickle down to the high school just like all other scientific ideas but what they're doing is they're doing an end run around the normal process because what they have is essentially a political position not a scientific one now please Thank You Jeanie Scott's you you

Channel: Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc

Views: 38,814

Rating: 4.719512 out of 5

Keywords: AFA, GAC, Global Atheist Convention, 2012GAC, Atheist Foundation, atheist, Eugenie Scott

Id: 5lvsE_ZYcP8

Length: 37min 20sec (2240 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2012