My Comments on the Text

“Refuting Evolution” (RE) has been written as a response to the National Academy of Sciences publication “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science,” which I have not read. RE is published by a creationist organization called Answers in Genesis based in Australia. The author apparently has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry having been trained as a spectroscopist.

The first chapter of RE goes through the usual exercise of pointing out that Doctor So&so and So&so, Ph.D are scientists who believe in the Biblical literalist view of creation and whining about how put upon by the scientific establishment creationists are. Although I’ve never met one, I believe that there people who work in science (as distinctly different from engineering and technology) who subscribe to Biblical literalism. I don’t think there are many such in the scientific community any more than there are many Biblical literalists in the world wide Christian community (there is certainly a larger fraction in the US Christian community for reasons addressed by Karen Armstrong in her recent book). Regarding Doctor So&so and So&so, Ph.D., as a holder of a Ph.D. in physics and having been an insider in the academic world I guess that I’m not impressed that So&so has a doctorate in such&such. I’m more impressed by reasoning ability, level of knowledge, inquisitiveness, and intellectual integrity than I am by degrees and titles. I’ve known more than one person trained in science who did not really understand what science is about.

Chapters 2-6 of RE go through the usual litany of complaints about evolutionary biology. Since this isn’t my field, not that I’m ignorant of it, I won’t comment on it. Considering that the remainder of the book, which deals with physical and chemical science and which is my area of expertise, is dominated by incorrect “facts” and fallacious arguments, I’m dubious of what is said in the biological chapters.

Chapter 7 is entitled “Astronomy”. The first discussion concerns the “Big-Bang” model of the beginning of our observable universe. The creationist author appears to accept the big-bang description because the implication is that the universe had a beginning and, hence, a creator of space, matter, and time. If the big-bang represents t = 0 then the assumption is made that there was no t < 0, i.e. it makes no sense to talk about a pre-big-bang since time is created with space. That is actually incorrect. General relativity as formulated by Einstein is a classical theory without any quantum effects. It, hence, has its limitations as t ® 0 and as R ® 0. It is widely thought, however, that a quantum theory of gravity would eliminate the big-bang singularity allowing discussion of the pre-big-bang question. Certainly if the radius of curvature of the universe is such that it is gravitationally closed then an oscillating universe (perhaps as described in Poul Anderson’s SF novel “Tau Zero”) is a possibility. Once Mr. Sarfati, the author of RE, has embraced the big-bang he is then obligated to hang his hat on a theoretical cosmology due to a Dr. Humphreys that manages to allow the formation of the universe in the Biblical time frame. The one paragraph description of this theory is non-sense and, based on a later claim by the author of this theory, I suspect that the entire theory is non-sense. People have been obtaining bogus solutions to the equations of general relativity for nearly a century. I suspect that this is another case of the same. Biological evolution aside, one has to work hard to compress the 13 billion year time scale of the universe into seven 24 hour days followed by 6000 years. I’ll give my opinion later about why people are willing to sacrifice their intellectual integrity in order to make claims such as these.

Continuing in Chapter 7 of RE, the author makes some vague comments about why galaxies shouldn’t exist. I presume he is referring to the widely repeated comment that the universe is amazingly uniform. Although the universe has several scales of inhomogenieties it is indeed uniform over all to about a part in 100,000. On the other hand, the picture resulting from the measurements and the models hangs together well and doesn’t preclude the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Mr. Sarfati then goes on (page 94) to claim that stellar formation wouldn’t occur because gas clouds can’t collapse spontaneously. The argument is vague but I gather that it’s related to the argument stated on the same page that a gas cloud requires molecules to radiate away enough energy for the cloud to cool as gravity collapses it. This argument is completely wrong. Depending on the temperature and density of the cloud the cooling mechanisms of bremsstrahlung, radiative recombination, and radiative association are sufficient to cool the cloud under all conditions. At later times when molecules are present, as David Bates and I have shown (Astrophysical Journal, 1986), the rates of these processes are enhanced by factors of tens and hundreds due to certain molecular properties.

On page 96 in the astronomy chapter the author makes the claim, in the context of the “mystery” of the angular momentum of the solar system, that “our sun spins very slowly, while the planets move very rapidly around the sun”. This is completely incorrect. The sun rotates in an average of 28 days (it is slower near the poles but may be much faster below the surface) whereas the planetary orbital sidereal periods range from 116 days to 248 years. Following this gaffe the remainder of the chapter descends into a defense of Christian scholars over the centuries against the claim that they believed the earth to be flat. That’s an academic quiddity that has nothing to do with the science questions under discussion.

Chapter 8 has to do with the age of the earth and with The Flood, which has to be taken literally and incorporated into the creationist Weltanschauung. It discusses critiques of dating methods involving radioactive decay. Moving beyond mistakes in procedure or in assumption of sample origin that people have made when dating samples, it is indeed true that the key assumption in such dating is that the radioactive half-lives have remained constant over time. This is clearly a critical assumption. There is no evidence that it is a bad assumption. Mr. Sarfati invokes Dr. Humphreys again to get around this with the suggestion that “decay rates were faster during creation week, and have remained constant since then”! Let’s face it, this isn’t science and those who claim it is are only fooling themselves and a few other rubes out there. You can only do science when you have rules. If you dispose of the rules and arbitrarily and capriciously do whatever you want in order to satisfy some constraint imposed by some external ideology or dogma, then you become a charlatan and cease being a scientist.

Chapter 8 ends with some inconsistencies that are said to support the claim of a young earth. The calculation of the rate of helium loss from the atmosphere is incorrect; the statement about the radii of supernova remnants neglects to note that they cool and, at some time and radius, cease to be visible; and the statement about the recession of the moon from the earth is based on faulty arithmetic yielding a value that is a factor of 10 too small. The latter also overlooks the actual state of affairs: the moon isn’t truly a satellite of the earth from a dynamical point of view but, rather, co-orbits the sun with the earth (it’s a binary planetary system); this may make a difference in how the time dependence of the recession rate is calculated. Ignorance and the extrapolations there from know no limits. This book contains so many errors that one should doubt pretty much anything that its author states.

Chapter 9 deals with what has become known as “Intelligent Design”, which is the most recent concept that creationists hang their hats upon. The basis of the argument is, in a nutshell, that because people design and create things that we recognize as being obviously designed and created as opposed to random and spontaneous assemblages, it then follows that we should recognize other things, namely life, the universe, and everything, as obviously having been created by some greater Designer. This is clearly anthropomorphic and does not feign to be humble. Whereas creationists used to incorrectly embrace the thermodynamic concept of entropy now they look for salvation in information theory in support of intelligent design. Entropy and information are, in fact, the same concept and have the same mathematical description. The crux of the problem has to do with how order arises out of chaos. Creationists claim that it takes a designer and a guiding hand to accomplish this. Four centuries of science have shown that what it takes are rules by which nature works. If a creator or designer formulated those rules, so be it. That has nothing to do with science. Our major problem as scientists is that we don’t know all the rules. It is a goal of science to discover those rules. As I’ll mention below, whether or not this can be accomplished is a separate issue. Beyond marveling at the indeed marvelous complexity and variety of the universe this chapter does not add anything of substance to the discussion.

My General Comments

It seems clear that the point of creationism is to find a special place in the universe for the human life form. It appears to be a deeply rooted need for Christian fundamentalists. That this doesn’t seem to be important to most of the world’s population who, for the most part, subscribe to other non-Biblical religions some having a god or gods, some not, but none having a personal god, doesn’t appear to have any impact upon the creationists and Biblical literalists. It’s clear as well that creationists find science to be a threat and that rather than merely eschew it, which would seem the most logical strategy, they try to manipulate it to their ends, thereby violating all the precepts of science. I think this is salesmanship and nothing more. People like things “scientific” and “creation science” is a way for Biblical literalist creationists to sell their wares. It’s no different from the selling of crystals, magnetic belts, and other pseudoscientific rigmarole by the New Age segment of society.

The bottom line of “Refuting Evolution” and other such tracts is that a designer/engineer/creator god made everything and it’s all documented in Genesis. Since Christianity is a New Testament religion Genesis is one of the few Old Testament books that they have use for and we’ve seen the use to which it’s put. On the whole this dogma would be harmless except for its intersection with politics. The claim has been made that the members of the Kansas State Board of Education were sent “Refuting Evolution” prior to their infamous recent decision concerning the teaching of evolution. Perhaps this is mostly harmless as well. After all, the depth of understanding of science by public school students and, in my experience, teachers as well is so shallow that missing out on a most likely erroneous description of evolution may make little difference. Those truly interested in science will pursue it anyway regardless of what the KSBE says or does. But what follows after we chase legitimate science out of public education? Will we have pogroms against scientists who do not swear an oath to the prevailing dogma? We’ve seen that kind of thing on other occasions throughout history in the US and in the world. Kneeling in the pond at Auschwitz Jacob Bronowski said “Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”

Monotheistic religions are not known for their tolerance. I do not fear the impact of religion on science but I do fear its impact on my other freedoms. I must agree with Steven Weinberg that “One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.” Like Weinberg I believe that we should not retreat from this accomplishment. My own thoughts about religion pretty much follow those of Zarathustra: “Ah, ye brethren, that god whom I created was human work and human madness, like all gods.”

In the final analysis people do need to believe in something. Religion fills that need in many. It allows some people to feel that they’re special. If gives some people the feeling that they are part of some master plan (Umberto Eco has observed in “Foucault’s Pendulum” that people will do anything for a plan). It allows people the comfort of believing that death isn’t really the end of the road. People like to engage in wishful thinking; that they can, for example, spend more than they make ad infinitum without consequence. Religion becomes in some ways a form of institutionalized wishful thinking. Religion comes bearing an “easy truth”: life, the universe, and everything, made simple. In a group of N scientists one can probably find N different beliefs and N different reasons for those beliefs. I suspect that most scientists do not believe in any final, irrefutable certainty and that their beliefs are based on the notion that there are no “easy truths”. Anyone who makes such claims, whether based on the Bible (either or both testaments), the Torah, the Koran, or any other human work, is suspect. Yet, rather than not believing in anything we indeed believe in something much greater, much more vast than a human like god that can be discussed in a human like manner.

In order to work in science, as in any discipline and in life in general, there must be some rules based on assumptions or axioms, the latter being the more correct word. They are fairly simple. First, we must believe that there is enough comprehensible about the universe to our minds to make it worth our while to try learn something about it.

Second, we must have faith that the universe isn’t a shell game; that is, that there is some order to it. Einstein expressed this faith thus: “God is subtle, but not malicious”. Most of us, Einstein included, take “God” as broadly meaning nature. So far this seems to be the case although, at times, every discipline of science has despaired that this axiom has had to be abandoned. This orderliness of nature can be observed and measured over nearly 30 orders of magnitude (10³⁰) in distance from atomic dimensions to the farthest quasi-stellar object at the limits of the observed universe and 4 billion years back in time on earth and 13 billion years back in time at the farthest reaches of the universe. The laws of physics have not changed and the physical constants have not changed. It is this second axiom that makes the notion of “creation science” an oxymoron.

Finally, we must have a methodology for performing investigations of nature subject to the principle that measurements are repeatable anywhere, at anytime, and by anyone who chooses to do so. As boring as it may be to most students, this is the scientific method. Similarly, scientific theories must have measurable consequences that can be confirmed. These rules governing experiments, interpretation of observations, and theory are what separate science from the realm of mere speculation and fantasy. Any large physics library has a “crackpot physics” shelf containing numerous self-published books that it has received from people who ignore or who feel that they can work outside of these rules. Although all the hypotheses in science that have led to great leaps forward in understanding have been works of individual creativity and inspiration, science, as a discipline, is a community activity. Those who work outside the rules also work outside the community - and end up on the crackpot shelf. Those who are in the community and break the rules (as we’ve seen in recent years in medical research or in the case of the promoters of “cold fusion”) are expelled from the community.

Observe that the discussion above does not preclude the existence of a biblical, Islamic, or any other god. But as an explanation of natural phenomena, that is, the domain of science, the concept adds nothing. As an answer to questions involving “Why?”, it adds nothing either. It just moves the discussion a level back. One must remember that just because one can pose a question in a human language it does not follow that the question has a meaningful answer. There is an entire sub-field of logic that deals with such issues. To quote Wittgenstein, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”

Science is about doubt. Most of those of us who practice science don’t believe in easy truths. There are no made simples, whether in science or in life. We relish life and being human and belonging to the human community. The love of learning is as much a part of our daily lives as eating and breathing. The fascination with the natural world and our ability to understand even a small part of it drives us in our work. Life is important to us. It’s not that we believe in nothing, we believe in everything. Mostly we believe in making the greatest use of those mental abilities that separate humans from every other species on this planet.

Being a scientist is not easy. To do it well one must be a scientist and think like a scientist all the time, not just 9am to 5pm, and one must do it for a lifetime, not just for a few years until something better comes along. One must be intellectually honest in practicing science. A major deficiency of creationists is that they manipulate facts to fit theories rather than theories to fit facts which, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, is a “capital mistake.” Science is a process not a collection of facts bound in leather and sitting on a shelf somewhere. Science is never finished. There is no end. Alan Turing speculated that no intelligent machine could understand things that are more complex than it itself is. I see this all the time when I design neural network algorithms for fitting what are called response hypersurfaces. The network always has to be more complex than the hyperfunction that it’s modeling. It may be that science is limited by the complexity of our own minds relative to the complexity of the universe that we’re trying to understand. If so, unless our own intellectual capacity evolves to a higher degree of complexity, we’ll eventually reach an insurmountable barrier to our understanding and progress will end. Until we reach that point, however, science is the greatest intellectual adventure available to us.

Some References

Reviews of Modern Physics Centenary Issue (March 1999) – contains the most recent summary of the states of astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and, indeed, all of physics; it’s available from the American Physical Society (www.aps.org) and the American Institute of Physics (www.aip.org).

Robert Cahn, “The 18 arbitrary parameters of the standard model in your everyday life,” Reviews of Modern Physics vol 68 (July 1996).

Freeman Dyson, “Time without end: physics and biology in an open universe,” Reviews of Modern Physics vol 51 (July 1979).

MJ Aitken, “Archaeological dating using physical phenomena,” Reports on Progress in Physics vol 62 (September 1999).

J Mould, et al., “The calibration of the extragalactic distance scale: methods and problems,” Reports on Progress in Physics vol 63 (May 2000).