WHEN SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE

My wife Bridget and I run a newsite called “The Local Area Watch”.  We provide news and commentary on matters in the Grand Rapids area that the local mainstream media ignores.  A few weeks ago we reported that the Michigan state board of education made a ruling that public schools must not only teach Darwinism in biology classes but that they must teach it as the scientific theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other explanations of how life evolved on Earth.

Young Earthers, Darwinists, and Lysenkoists

We objected to the state school board decision.  We did not oppose their restriction of biology curriculum to established scientific knowledge.  In fact, that makes sense.  There are a lot of strange ideas out there about evolution, starting with the “young Earth” creationists who misread the sacred writings of Genesis as a science text.  They confuse the infallibility of Scripture with literalism and end up with ideas about the paleontology of our planet that are flatly contradicted by the facts of geology and astronomy.  This sort of creationism is not science and has no place in biology instruction.

By the same token, neither does Darwinism.  The state school board’s ukase that Darwinism is not only science, but so well established as science that it constitutes the theory of evolution, is a profound error – and not an innocent one at that.  Their decision was explicitly designed to preclude any mention of Intelligent Design as a possible explanation for the origin and evolution of life.  No doubt the political motivation for this was a weak-kneed reaction to the notorious Kitzmiller decision late last year when a federal judge in Pennsylvania outlawed the instruction of Intelligent Design in public schools.  Whatever one thinks of the merits of Intelligent Design, the ruling should concern all friends of liberty.  First, the judge abused his federal authority to interfere with what is properly a local matter.  Second, his mandate as to what the government will permit to be discussed as science in the public square, in this case a public school classroom, stinks of Lysenkoism.  So, the Michigan state board of education pre-emptively surrendered to the federal judiciary and enshrined Darwinism as the one and only scientific explanation of evolution.

An Epistemology of Science

However, Darwinism doesn’t hack it as science – at least not as a scientific theory of evolution.  Scientific knowledge consists of facts and explanations of the facts.  Those explanations are constrained to what is quantifiable, which distinguishes scientific knowledge from aesthetic knowledge.  (For more on that, click here and here.)  Furthermore, not all scientific explanations are equal.  They are categorized by level of certainty, namely:  Theory, hypothesis, conjecture, and speculation.  A theory is the most certain explanation science has for a given set of facts.  It is an explanation verified by irrefutable observation (of which, experimentation is a highly controlled form of observation).  Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a good example.

A hypothesis is a proposed theory for which verification is, in principle, possible but not yet accomplished.  The Big Bang explanation for our universe is a hypothesis in this sense.  Astronomers and physicists have yet to make all of the necessary observations to verify the Big Bang, but have a clear idea of the further observations required to elevate it to a theory.  Then there is conjecture.  This is an explanation based upon some evidence that can be expressed in terms of falsifiable statements, but lacks any clear means of verifying those statements.  So-called string theory is conjecture.  It offers a fascinating account of what the basic constituents of the universe may be, but there is presently no practical way of testing it.  Finally, there is speculation, which puts forth an explanation uncontradicted by fact but lacking any evidence.  The multiverse concept is an example of speculation about the origin of our universe.

Evolution is Science, Darwinism is Not

So, how does Darwinism fit into this scheme?  Obviously it is not a set of facts.  It is an explanation of facts, specifically the fossil record and the biology of life now present on Earth.  That brings us to what sort of explanation Darwinism is for these facts.  First we need to define evolution.  It is the hypothesis that explains the fossil record and the present forms of life as an unbroken chain of generations which over time changed from simple single-celled creatures into the complex flora and fauna that now populate the biosphere.  Thus, evolution is, in a phrase, common descent with modification.  It is contrasted with serial independent origins of life in which no common ancestor exists for all creatures, past and present, on Earth.  Charles Darwin was one of the first to put forth evolution as an explanation for the fossil record and the present forms of life.  While a sound hypothesis, evolution does not rank as a theory because of the lack of sufficient observation, in either the fossil record or present forms of life, to verify that one species can evolve into another.

Therefore evolution, properly understood, is not controversial.  It is solid science, and there is no good reason why common descent with modification should not be taught in a biology class.  However, Darwin and his successors have made additional claims about evolution to bolster an a priori philosophical naturalism that precludes all supernatural explanation for the existence of life and its multitude of forms over the ages.  By smuggling into these claims a naturalistic metaphysical assumption, the Darwinists depart from science with their account of evolution.  Thus, the restricted claims of evolution keep it within the scope of science, whereas the broad claims of Darwinism boot it into the precincts of philosophy.  To wit, the claims of Darwinism are:  [1] The chemical origin of life (i.e., non-life begat life), [2] generation of all life from that first life down to the present (i.e., common descent), [3] modification of the forms of life during that descent (i.e., speciation), and [4] natural selection as the mechanism of speciation (i.e., survival of the fittest through random mutations).  Evolutionary biologists hotly dispute the details of speciation and natural selection, but these four claims remain the basic principles of Darwinism.

Darwinism is Philosophy

Together these claims go beyond the hypothesis of common descent with modification to state how that occurred.  To that extent, the first claim, the chemical origin of life, is gratuitous.  Furthermore, it is rank speculation for which absolutely no evidence exists and increasingly severe challenges against it do, such as William Dembski’s concept of specified complexity and Michael Behe’s application of that to microbiology called irreducible complexity.  This claim is a part of Darwinism only because of the Darwinists’ prior commitment to philosophical naturalism.  At this point, nothing is known in terms of science about the origin of life, other than it appears to have happened only once, to make the subject part of a public school biology curriculum.

The second and third claims of Darwinism are sound as science for the reasons stated previously.  The problem comes not when Darwinists simply state that common descent and speciation happened, as evidenced by the fossil record and the present forms of life on Earth, but go further afield to state how it happened.  That brings us to the fourth claim of Darwinism, natural selection or any of the permutations of that concept that have developed over the years.  Fundamentally Darwinists claim that speciation was driven by blind forces acting upon random mutations in one generation of life to the next to eliminate some mutated creatures and to favor the survival of others.  In terms of philosophical naturalism, that is an appealing explanation for the mechanism of evolution.  However, in terms of science, it is nothing but a conjecture.  Evidence does exist that is consistent with natural selection.  We observe small-scale changes in real time in species that currently exist.  But we have no scientific basis for extrapolating these observations as proof that small-scale changes result in large-scale speciation.  There is a complete disconnect between the observation of molecular biological phenomena in present species that account for small-scale changes (i.e., microevolution) and the observation in the fossil record of large-scale changes in anatomy marking the extinction of old species and the advent of new ones (i.e., macroevolution).  In short, we cannot verify natural selection by scaling up changes in the chemistry of life into changes of anatomy that define new species.

When Science is Not Science

Consequently, the Michigan state board of education was flat-out wrong to dictate that all biology instruction in public schools must teach natural selection (and its variants) as the one and only mechanism of evolution.  Science has not established it as such.  Natural selection, along with other competing explanations including Intelligent Design, is only conjecture.  It is certainly not the theory of evolution, which itself is only a hypothesis explaining the fossil record.  To demand that the key claim of Darwinism, natural selection, be taught as the truth is to demand acceptance of the metaphysical assumption underlying it.  That assumption is naturalism, which by definition precludes the supernatural from any explanation of our universe, the existence of life, and the nature of man as a rational being.  This, of course, is squarely at odds with orthodox Christian and Jewish belief (and that of other religions too).

The government assaults religion when it mandates instruction in naturalistic beliefs as the truth.  It does so perniciously when it allows naturalistic beliefs to masquerade as the objective knowledge of science.  It erodes our liberty with a perverse establishment of an anti-religion by prohibiting any discussion in the public square of the classroom that is contrary to naturalistic beliefs.  Such is the rotten fruit of science that is not science.