Fossils are the remains or traces of creatures that lived in the past, which turned to stone after their death and have been preserved within rocks. Tens of thousands of different kinds of fossils have been discovered …
Two dramatically opposed views on how fossils came into being and what they tell us. The former is a fairly orthodox view that might be given by a mainstream geologist or paleontologist. The latter might be presented by a New Earth creationist, who holds that the biblical account of the creation of the universe given in the Book of Genesis is literally true. Neither has much sympathy for the other’s way of looking at things: the creationist believes that the orthodox scientist is radically mistaken in many crucial respects, most notably in accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection; the orthodox scientist thinks that the creationist is driven by religious zeal, perhaps politically motivated, and certainly deluded if they think they are engaged in a serious scientific enterprise. For creationism, according to the mainstream scientific view, is nonsense dressed up as science—or “pseudoscience.”
The sequential chronology underlying evolution requires that there are never any geological “reversals” (fossils turning up in the wrong rock strata). This is an entirely testable and readily falsifiable hypothesis: we only need to find a single dinosaur fossil in the same rock as a human fossil or artifact and evolution is blown clean out of the water. In fact, amongst all the millions of fossil specimens that have been unearthed, not a single reversal has ever been found: massive confirmation of the theory. For the creationist, this same evidence is enormously awkward. Amongst the many desperate attempts to explain away the evidence, one suggestion is a “hydraulic sorting action,” in which different body density, shape, size, etc. are supposed to cause differential rates of sinking and hence to sort animals into different layers. Another idea is that the smarter animals were better able to escape to higher ground and hence avoid drowning for longer. If you are in a geological hole …
Science matters What precisely is science? Clearly we need an answer to that question if we are to tell impostors from the real thing. In any case the question matters—the pretensions of science are enormous and can scarcely be exaggerated. Human life has been transformed beyond recognition in the space of just a few hundred years: devastating diseases have been eradicated; journeys that would have taken weeks can be completed in hours; humans have landed on the Moon; the subatomic structure of matter has been revealed. These and a myriad other astonishing achievements are credited to science. The transformative power of science is so vast that merely the claim that something is “scientific” is often intended to discourage critical analysis or appraisal. But not all the developments of mainstream science are beyond criticism, while some claims from the fringes of science—or from pseudoscience beyond them—can be meretricious, self-serving or downright dangerous. So the ability to recognize the real thing is crucial.
The hypothetical method The usual conception is that the “scientific method” is hypothetical: it starts from data obtained by observation and other means and then moves to theory, attempting to frame hypotheses that explain the data in question. A successful hypothesis is one that stands up to further testing and generates predictions that would not otherwise have been anticipated. The movement is thus from empirical observation to generalization, and if the generalization is good and survives prolonged examination, it may eventually be accepted as a universal “law of nature” that is expected to hold true in similar circumstances, irrespective of time and place. The difficulty for this conception of science, recognized over 250 years ago by David Hume, is the so-called “problem of induction” (see Forms of argument).
An important response to the problem of induction was given by the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper. In essence he accepted that the problem could not be resolved but chose to sidestep it. Instead, he suggested no theory should ever be considered proved, no matter how much evidence there is to support it; rather, we accept a theory until it has been falsified (or disproved). So while a million and one observations of white sheep cannot confirm the general hypothesis that all sheep are white, a single observation of a black sheep is sufficient to falsify it.
Falsifiability was also, in Popper’s view, the criterion by which to distinguish true science from its imitators. A “contentful” scientific theory takes risks, making bold predictions that can be tested and shown to be wrong; a pseudo-science, by contrast, plays safe and keeps things vague in the hope of evading exposure. Falsificationism is still influential today, though many would not accept its exclusion of induction from scientific methodology or the rather simplistic relationship it assumes between scientific theories and the (supposedly neutral or objective) evidence on which they are based.
Underdetermination of theory by evidence Another way of making essentially the same point is to say that a scientific theory is always “underdetermined” by the available evidence: the evidence alone is never sufficient to allow us to definitively choose one theory over another. Indeed, in principle any number of alternative theories can always be made to explain or “fit” a given set of data. The question then is whether the various qualifications and ad hoc additions needed in order to shore up a theory are more than it can stand. This process of adjustment and refinement is a proper part of the methodology of science, but if the weight of evidence counting against a theory is too great, there may be no (rational) alternative but to reject it.
The problem for creationism is that there is a veritable tsunami of evidence counting against it. To take just two examples:
Creationism also introduces a whole raft of problems of its own. For instance, a massive water source would be required to achieve a global inundation, and no suggestion to date (icy comet strike, vapor canopy over the atmosphere, subterranean deposit, etc.) has been remotely plausible. It is often said against creationism is that it doesn’t take risks—it doesn’t make the bold and falsifiable claims characteristic of true science. It would perhaps be fairer to say that it makes some fantastically risky claims that are unsupported by evidence of any kind.
the condensed idea
Evidence falsifying hypotheses
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.350BC | Forms of argument |
| c.AD1300 | Occam’s razor |
| 1670 | Faith and reason |
| 1739 | Science and pseudoscience |
| 1962 | Paradigm shifts |