How Science Works — Objecting to Evolution

How Science Works — Objecting to Evolution January 26, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-01-24 at 11.13.53 AMHow does science really work? Is it a game played behind closed doors by a special clan of credentialed folks who have created a society in which no one can criticize their central ideas? Or is it a game played on the open market for all to see? That is the question Denis Alexander is posing in his chapter called “Objection to Evolution” in the book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?

Regardless of what many say in public or behind pulpits or on blogs, Alexander’s faith in the integrity of the scientific field is firm. Here are some important words from Alexander, words I have found confirmed every time I have talked to a scientist:

Science thrives in open societies where dissent and discussion are encouraged, but tends to shrivel or perhaps never gets going properly in the first place where the opposite is the case (154).

How do we know science is done in an open society? What experiences do we have of scientists changing their minds on the basis of evidence?

I have sometimes been told by critics outside the scientific community that there would never be any hope of publishing data that looked likely to subvert evolutionary theory, because evolution for biologists is a ‘holy cow’ that must be protected at all costs. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case. It is every biologist s dream to make discoveries that would upset some cherished theory (154).

Precisely, and the same game is played in Biblical studies. Scholars really do study hard; they really do work within the field and alongside others; they really do know what evidence and hypothesis and verification is all about; and they really do like to offer a proposal that will change the field.

Sadly, many church people don’t believe this about science, in spite of trusting science in other fields or for other topics, and such people sometimes make claims counter to what Alexander is saying, what he knows from experience, and which scientists too will confirm. Thus, he opines:

One of the deep mysteries of life – far more mysterious than the origins of the Ediacaran fauna – is why people spend their time going round churches telling people that they don’t believe evolutionary theory. If people wish to challenge a theory then that is an excellent and honourable path to follow in the best of scientific traditions. But there are
 well-established ways of carrying out a scientific critique and these involve the tough course of becoming a member of the scientific research community, and then finding and publishing results in peer-reviewed journals that may challenge a particular theory. That is how theory testing is done, and it is the only way that will win the respect of the scientific community. Public votes, popular articles, political pressures, campaigns or even sermons by famous preachers will have no effect on scientific opinion because that is not how science is done. So really serious objections to evolution, if there are any, have to be presented the tough but proper way, by publication of solid results in reputable scientific journals.

Here is a typical claim that believes it is countering evolution:

Evolution is a chance process and this is incompatible with the God of the Bible bringing about his purposeful plan of creation.

Alexander’s response, and this is important:

It is intriguing that this question comes up so often because, taken as a whole, evolution is in no sense a chance process. Atheistic biologists like Richard Dawkins and Christian evolutionary biologists like Simon Conway Morris equally conclude that the evolutionary process is not a matter of chance. The point is sometimes missed that one of Dawkins s urns in writing his book The Blind Watchmaker, as he states in the preface, is ‘to destroy this eagerly believed myth that Darwinism is a theory of “chance” (156).

So if we look at the overall process of evolution, it is very far indeed from any notion of ‘metaphysical chance’. It is stringently regulated series of events in which food chains are built up in precisely defined ecological niches. The process has occurred in particular environments characterised by parameters such as cold and heat, light and darkness, wetness and dryness, with the constraints of gravity playing a key role in defining animal and plant sizes and shapes. There are good reasons why elephants don’t fly. And there are good reasons why the eye has evolved not once but many times during the process of evolution…. Therefore evolutionary mechanisms are nothing like the processes that we normally think of as ‘random’ in any ultimate sense (159).

The physical properties of the universe were defined in the very first few femtoseconds after the big bang, and the process of evolution depends utterly on that particular set of properties. Without them we would not be here (159).

So as Christians we can perceive the evolutionary process simply as the way that God has chosen to bring biological diversity into being, including us. That is the way things are and our task as scientists is to describe the way things are – what God has done in bringing this vast array of biological diversity into being (159).

 


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