Creationism and Intelligent Design

Creationism is the view that the Earth and the rest of the universe were created at the same time some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. The currently-accepted age of the Earth as determined by science (by the radiometric dating of rocks) is 4.5 billion years and for the universe (by calculating backwards from its observed rate of expansion) is 13.7 billion years. (Sometimes, you will find hear that the aforementioned Creationists are Young Earth Creationists, distinct from Old Earth Creationists who accept that it is much older. If those Old Earth Creationists accept that the age is to be determined by science, then, clearly, they differ not at all with the scientific view. Indeed, they may be scientists. They are distinguished by the claim that the universe was created by an Intelligent Designer and stand distinct from those other scientists who reject an Intelligent Designer. We’ll understand Creationism to be Young Earth Creationism henceforth.)

There is only one reason to believe in Creationism and this is that one holds to a literal reading of the Bible. (Or, in principle, another holy book with a similar time-line.) That one should not take one’s history or indeed science directly from the Bible has been advised by theologians across the ages, right back to the dawn of Christianity. It is true that many past theologians would have accepted such a recent origin for the Earth but only through lack of evidence. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the age of the Earth was consistently pushed back by scientific discoveries made by people who saw no conflict between them and their faith.

Yet in the 20th century, in America, the most advanced nation on Earth, there are many people – and people with influence – who cleave to Young Earth Creationism and display a truly remarkable distrust of science: both its methods and its results. In particular, they don’t believe that life has evolved by natural means but was specially created, much in accordance with the story presented in the first book of Genesis. (There’s actually a different story presented in the second book which should raise suspicions but let’s not get sidetracked.) It is hard to resist the view that these people viewed science through the distorting lens created by rejecting evolution: we were created by God and the story is told in a book that indicates a young universe, hence every last bit of physics, chemistry, biology, geology and astronomy has to respect this. If it means that we can’t accept carbon-dating or plate tectonics or the fixed speed of light, then so be it.

That we begin the 21st century with such view neither extinct nor confined to the uncivilised fringes is baffling and amusing but also worrying. In the last ten years, there have been disputes over whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution in biology classes. The most famous case Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District saw expert witness and textbook writer Kenneth Miller have to defend evolution as not just a theory. He has written an excellent book on the case which I strongly recommend. More recently, Dr. Don McLeroy has somehow managed to make himself chairman of the Texas State Board of Education and he's pushing for Creationism to be included in biology textbooks. Texas is important in the U.S. textbook world as it has the largest number of students and textbook writers write to what Texas wants. The other states buy the textbooks that result. And even more recently, Louisiana has had to oppose ‘Creationism creep’ into its textbooks. In Kentucky, there is a giant theme-park style Creation Museum with a Noah’s Ark Park to be built in the same state.

Today’s sophisticated creationists reject that label in favour of Intelligent Design (ID). Roughly, the claim is that whilst natural processes may explain some of the complexity and diversity of life we see, there are some things that cannot be explained by evolution. Evolution works by ‘tinkering’. Things change in tiny ways and natural selection eliminates those whose tiny changes do not benefit them. There is a gradual progression from ancestors to descendants. Yet there are some biological entities that are irreducibly complex. In order to exist and function as they do, all the parts had to be in place at the same time. In the same way, for a chain to exist suspended between two points, all the links must exist and be interlocked. If any one link did not exist, there would be no chain.

Evolutionists have been quick to point out the flaws. The essential mistake is to assume that if a biological entity X exists to perform a function Y and has many parts each of which is necessary, then it could not have evolved from a simple entity X* which performed a different and perhaps related (but perhaps not) function. And it is not merely that that is possible: there are examples of such ‘predecessor entities’.

In these two videos (Part I and Part II), there’s a (overly) quick and light-hearted debunking of favourite Creationist arguments. In these two videos (Part I and Part II), you’ll find more on ID and why their arguments don't work. The links are to pages on one of the excellent science columns in the Guardian newspaper. Looking through, I also found this video that reports a delightful evolutionary explanation of why snails have shells that twist anti-clockwise.