I'm attempting to write an essay on the nature of science and the flaws of 'creation science'. A brief intro/overview of my initial thoughts are given in this small draft for a beginning to the essay. This topic doesn't have to be focused on 'the paper' but the discussion of the nature of science, creation science, and the methodology to sound scientific inquiry. Basically just looking for comments, suggestions, or disagreements for that which I have done here:
Creation Science and the Methodology of Scientific Inquiry
Chris Grose
In the attempts to reconstruct the history of the earth, life, and the cosmos there is the requirement of fundamental principles to the methodology of scientific inquiry. Science is often misrepresented in meaning. Science is not merely a synonym for 'knowledge' but involves the interpretation of data and detailed observation in order to explain the natural world. The important factor of potential falsifiability has become the pinnacle requirement in order to call an inquiry scientific. The development of a scientific hypothesis requires that there be the potential for physical observation or modeling of the relevant dynamic processes to falsify itself.
That science merely involves observation, measurement, and experimentation undermines the ability for scientific inquiry to reconstruct a model of history. Just because there has been no documentation of a historical event does not mean that we cannot hypothesize that an event has taken place and perform a detailed analysis to potentially falsify its occurrence.
I would have to argue that there should be no such thing as 'creation science'. Creation science was developed to counter the growing acceptance of an old age for the earth and the development of evolutionary theory. Since 'creation science' is believed to be the alternative science, the new buzz-word of 'evolution science' has been forwarded as the opposition. The problem is that neither of these terms imply an alteration in the methodology of scientific inquiry--or at least they should not. It would be ridiculous to alter the meaning of science, the requirements for deeming something as scientific, or especially to add a required presupposition(such as an old/young earth, or in this case, creation and evolution). In all respects to the advancement of science, I must confess, you either have science, or you don't--"creation science" and "evolution science" by this reasoning and in the authors opinion, should be discredited and are pseudo-sciences.
Indeed, you can develop competing alternatives to the origins and evolution of the earth, life, and the cosmos but no scientific inquiry should ever be performed with required presupposition before it can be rightly deemed 'scientific'. Getting rid of the term 'creation science' or rendering it pseudo-science will not be detrimental to the potentially young earth because the young earth does not have to be based on scientific inquiries with the creation presupposition. The creation should not be presupposed, but inferred from the data. The young earth is potentially falsifiable by many means, and the implications thereof are important to consider. If the earth is very young it can be logically inferred that there must have been some point of initial creation. That the earth and the life on it is young it would be implausible--for obvious reasons--to say that its development and origin ex nihilo would have been entirely naturalistic.
Catastrophic geology is currently under considerable development and is a good example in which we can apply the current authors thoughts on science and creation science--the presuppositions of the latter most particularly. When we look at the geologic record we should not turn to the presuppositions of creation science before we interpret the data. If it is discovered that there is an inconsistency with any presupposition of creation science we need to accept it as scientifically valid and hope that further research will reveal the veracity of an event.
| Table 1. Some examples of the presuppositions of creation science |
| Young Earth (6,000 - 10,000 years old) | Global Flood 4,500 - 5,500 years ago |
| radioisotopic dates not reliable | All land dwelling, air breathing life not on the ark died |
| No "Big Bang" | lasted ~1 year |
| Life created after their kinds | 40 days rain |
| life spans were very long pre-flood | After 150 days, dry land appears |
| all of that seen in geology cannot be older than 10,000 | 2 - 7 of every kind survived the flood on board the ark |
| Aspects of the universe were created in the order given in Genesis | landmasses rose and sank during the flood |
| "days" in genesis do not represent periods of time | fountains of the great deep broke upen |
| various languages created after the tower of Babel was built | all sediments containing metazoan life layed down during the flood |
Some examples of the presuppositions of creation science are given in Table 1. Should we perform our scientific inquiries with the requirement that all of these be absolutely true, and if the data indicate otherwise, it should be rejected? Many young earth creationists would readily say yes to that question. However, when we do this we are rejecting the scientific method and are deceiving ourselves. We should not perform research inquiries--instead what we should do is hope that these tenents of creation science can be concluded from the research, without exception.
[Formatted and prettified table. TC, while linefeeds are not significant in HTML, they are very significant in a message - each linefeed gets translated to
. --Admin]
[This message has been edited by Admin, 08-19-2003]
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