Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism

Assertion: Supernaturalistic hypothesis can be scientific.

Analysis

(i) Although many scientists speak as though science cannot comment one way or another upon any supernaturalistic hypotheses, I do not agree entirely, and I think most scientists actually would agree with at least part of my explanation why.

First of all, many supernaturalistic hypotheses are falsifiable, because they entail observable consequences that can be checked. For instance, the hypothesis that God created the world 6,000 years ago entails the hypothesis that the world is 6,000 years old. Since the latter hypothesis is falsifiable, the former is, as well. In fact, the latter hypothesis has been falsified, so science has thus falsified young-earth creationism, as well as every other wider hypothesis that entails a young earth.

A trickier question is whether it is in principle possible for science to find evidence for a supernaturalistic hypothesis. It is, for instance, unclear whether evidence that the earth is 6,000 years old would constitute any evidence that God, specifically, created the world 6,000 years ago. We cannot say that evidence that confirms a hypothesis also confirms any wider hypothesis that entails the first one, because there is an infinite number of such wider hypotheses. The question really comes down to whether or not we can treat God the same way as we do a theoretical entity like an electron, but the legitimacy of a theoretical entity seems to be a matter of degree rather than a matter of kind.

Trying to figure out exactly what legitimizes a theoretical entity will lead us into a thicket in philosophy of science that is best avoided, so I will limit my comments to a few points. First, where I agree with the standard picture is that most supernaturalistic hypotheses are too vague to admit of any kind of test either way. For instance, the general hypotheses that there is a god of some sort or that life has a transcendent meaning, both are outside of the domain of science, since no testable predictions at all can be drawn from them. It is quite true that science cannot address hypotheses like these, and I imagine the scientists who talk as though there is a sharp line between science and supernaturalism have such general hypotheses in mind. Where science and religion start banging heads together is when religion issues pronouncements about things in the natural world that scientists actually can look at. But it is not at all clear to me that if one constrains a supernatural entity sufficiently so that one can specify precisely what one would expect to see if the entity existed, that such an entity could not have a role equivalent to that of any other theoretical entity. Of course, with sufficient constraints, we might actually think we have shunted the entity over from the supernaturalistic into the naturalistic domain, but I think that is just a matter of semantics, since the important thing is which hypotheses are admissible into science, not what those hypotheses are called.

I think the history of science bears out my view, since, for instance, scientists in the time of Darwin came to reject creationism not because it was supernaturalistic, but rather because they thought, correctly, that evolution did a much better job of explaining the data. Modern science has a presumption of naturalism not because it innately excludes anything supernatural from consideration, but because supernaturalistic hypotheses have not stood the test of time, while naturalistic ones have done well.

(ii) All of the comments above are meant to suggest that many supernaturalistic hypothesis can in principle be addressed by science. None of this says whether something like creationism is in practice at all scientific. The difficulty is that the thesis of creationism is so malleable in the hands of its proponents, that creationism ends up not making any predictions at all. Any time they are faced with data that should disconfirm creationism, creationists make ad hoc appeals to the inscrutable will of God to square their hypotheses after the fact with that data (e.g. when they claim that wide confirmation for evolutionary phylogenies by neutral molecular evidence has no impact on creationism because maybe God wanted to create things with those kinds of correspondences for some unknown reason). For that matter, their hypotheses often are so vague as to be devoid of any real content in the first place (e.g. when they say that scientists cannot explain how the universe came into existence, but they can: God did it somehow). This kind of behavior strips creationism of any remote analogy to science. Again, the specific hypotheses advanced by creationists often are testable, and have in fact been shown to be false; it is the behavior of creationists when presented with the disconfirming data that reveals that their practice is not science.

Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism
Copyright © 1997, 2012, Mark I. Vuletic. All rights reserved.