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Is Creationism Science? The Debate Heats Up in Texas
January 24, 2008 |
Posted by michaelp · Filed Under Creation/Evolution
I have never taken a course from the Institute for Creation Research so I don’t know whether what they teach is Science or Religion. Anyhow, I thought that this article from the Dallas Morning News was interesting. Notice especially Kent Davey suprising statement at the end.
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Last month, a state advisory group gave the Institute for Creation Research preliminary approval to offer an online master’s degree in science education. Since then, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board – which has the final say – has received more than 200 e-mails on the subject.
The coordinating board provided 286 pages of e-mails in response to an open-records request from The Dallas Morning News. Many of the notes are from Texas. But others come from all corners of the U.S. and the world – from Florida to the Philippines, Nevada to Nigeria.
The letters show how heated the debate has become, as Texas and other states try to figure out the best way to teach students science.
“The latest round of so-called creation science truly scares me and all of my colleagues here at UT Southwestern Medical Center,” wrote Alfred Gilman, dean of UT Southwestern’s medical school and a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. “Approval of this sort of nonsense as science in Texas will have a significant negative impact on our ability to attract the best minds to the state.
“How can Texas simultaneously launch a war on cancer and approve educational platforms that submit that the universe is 10,000 years old?”
Just as many people, if not more, wrote to defend the institute’s proposal.
Kent Davey, senior research scientist at UT-Austin’s Center for Electromechanics, asked that the institute be given a fair review. “I am persuaded that the creation worldview has a firm place in science,” he wrote.
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Are we sure we want to open this debate up on the blog? LOL
I wouldn’t deny that it is science. After all, ICR has lots of professional scientists with real degrees doing real scientific investigations. The problem however, is that the way the scientific data is presented is fundamentally dishonest. If you only heard the summary of the RATE conference, you’d think that ICR had somehow “proved” a young earth. However, the data from their research, if anything, demonstrated that their “young earth” hypothesis was incorrect.
But sadly, the RATE project is being advertised as a “success for Creation Science” even though it failed to demonstrate its hypothesis. Failure isn’t a bad thing; a dishonest portrayal of that failure is. Good science encounters failure all the time. Scientists with integrity admit when this happens and move on. When Christians (whether scientists or not) start acting like corrupt corporate PR departments, when debacles are marketed as success, when creative interpretations of the facts show more influence from Dilbert than the Bible, it can only bring shame to the body of Christ.
Steve, your comment that “Failure isn’t a bad thing; a dishonest portrayal of that failure is” is probably the most profound and honest thing I’ve heard on this topic in a long, long time. Unfortunately, that kind of thing reflects poorly on all of Christianity though.
I wonder what he meant by “creation worldview”?
Other than that, I agree entirely with Steve.
Science is being willing to go where the evidence leads. ICR and groups like Answers in Genesis admit right up front that they START with some presuppositions regarding a particular view of Scripture, etc, that they will not back off from, which means they would not back off from it even if the evidence pointed squarely in the other direction. So, really, they are not reviewing the evidence to see what it says, but sifting through the evidence for the bits that they can argue support their existing position. This is apologetics, not science.
Unfortunately, in doing so, they do not present the evidence fairly and honestly. If they were willing to say the following, I would be entirely satisfied (even though I would still disagree with their ultimate position):
“We have reviewed the evidence as objectively as we can and we acknowledge that, absent our particular reading of Scripture, the evidence for an old earth and for evolution would be very convincing. However, since we firmly hold to our particular reading of Scripture, we believe that certain alternative explanations for the evidence are more likely, and that some of the evidence presented for evolution must just be incorrect. So, we will move forward to provide those alternate explanations and explain why we think the evidence presented for evolution could, indeed, be incorrect.”
This would be an entirely accurate and honest statement of what they do. But, they do not do this. They present their position AS IF it really was the most persuasive evidence even if taken objectively.
That is why some have called it “lying for Jesus”.
As someone with degrees in biology and biochemistry, I can honestly say that science led me to Old Earth Creasionism, not the Bible. I’m quite happy that I can dovetail the two without much difficulty. The fact that YEC requires general revelation to be misleading would be