Blocked from Facebook – ICR Removes Another Form of Peer-Review

Hi Trevor, I once again find myself agreeing with you (this is getting to be a habit;-), and I think you make a very good point in your first paragraph. I seriously doubt that any Creationists who hold themselves to a high scientific standard will easily convince the scientific community to take them seriously.

A number of factors contribute to this.

One factor is that the creationist community has created an all but separate system of institutions, conferences and journals, involving minimal interaction with what I guess I can call “mainstream” scientific entities. This seems to be continuous with the Evangelical tendency to withdraw and create “alternate” educational institutions (a pattern that seems to have largely started in the 1920s). These institutions, conferences and journals seem to be in many ways modeled on those that are found in mainstream science (the effort to incorporate peer review is one such example). I don’t think this “withdrawing from the world”/alternate system approach to scientific practice will ever be well seen by scientists. One of the reasons for this is that it is interpreted (with some truth) as a way of protecting creation science from the scrutiny and criticism of the larger and less sympathetic scientific world, keeping it all in the family, so any creation scientist is seen as not just an outsider, but as one who has deliberately isolated him/herself from the standards of critical scrutiny that are supposed to be a part of the scientific vocation. This isn’t quite fair in my opinion, since any creationist who is sticking to high standards and trying to interact with mainstream scientists is obviously trying to buck this isolationist trend, but whether fair or no, they will likely be tarred with the same brush.

Another factor is that there are unfortunately so few creation scientists who are seriously adhering to scientific standards that are the ideal and more often than not the practice of the scientific community (though from what I can tell, there are a few who do so fairly consistently, Todd Wood being one). I’m not sure that many creationists see it this way, but I have confirmed this to my own satisfaction, mostly by looking up the references in creationist papers and discovering that they have muddled or badly misrepresented (I usually have no idea whether this is intentional or not) their sources, something that would be extremely damaging to their careers/reputations as mainstream scientists. Again, there are one or two in whom I have enough confidence that I see no reason to even check their sources, but this isn’t the case for very many. It therefore happens that the efforts of those who apply a high standard to their own work will be seen against the backdrop of those creationists who do not apparently have the same scruples. Once again, they will be tarred with the same brush almost no matter how good their intentions, which is, of course, not quite fair, but not surprising either.

The third factor is historical; to be short, most scientists are of the opinion that creationism had its chance (and was in fact the prevailing paradigm for a long time) and that it was debated and tested out of the arena in the 1800s. Whatever the merits of this view, and it is obviously far too simplistic, it is certainly the case that creationism is seen as being a badly out of date view that has resisted accepting a long established and generally agreed upon verdict.

All of these factors amount to perceptions, and it is these perceptions that will continue to make it difficult for creationists to make any inroads, especially if only a few are making the effort.

On the bright side, for at least a couple of those creation scientists who do hold themselves to a high standard and are consistently self-critical, I have often seen mainstream scientists respond in a way that I would call usually mystified, but mostly positive. I am convinced that if more creationists upheld this standard, being scrupulous with their references, resisting overstating their conclusions, being upfront about difficulties connected to their position, critiquing each other fairly but rigorously, opening themselves to mainstream critique, attending scientific conferences etc, there would be a move among scientists toward at least interacting with them more freely, and in my view, this would be a step in the right direction. I hate to say it, but I think that the only way this will come about is if those creationists who stick to high scientific standards are not afraid to call out those who do not. That could get ugly, but it might be necessary.

You are right; the proof of concept is there, but more need to be on board, and their work is cut out for them.

Thoughts?

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Ha! You’re right, this is bad form. I’ll try to disagree with something below;-)

I think this Evangelical tendency to withdraw and create alternate intellectual and institutional worlds, whatever it comes from, is self-perpetuating. The more we do it, the more we are marginalized, and the more we end up having to cultivate this alternate system as a result. I’ve seen a number of historians point to the media scorn in the wake of the Scopes trial as a strong causal factor, with many Evangelicals realizing that they were no longer nearly as culturally influential as they once were and with some conferences in the later 1920s leading to a concerted effort to set up these alternate institutions in order to defend against increasing secularization. Either way, you are right; it is both the result and the cause of the divide, and I can’t see this changing as this alternate system becomes more concrete and entrenched in the Evangelical community.

For the history part, I was obviously trading mostly in perceptions. I think there needs to be some nuance in looking at historical progress of any kind. In this case, I agree that there was a very strong anti-supernatural push, something that has been softened somewhat by many thinkers ever since positivism lost its foothold. It was definitely very strong in the later 19th century when a Laplacian view was dominant, being sold as the only legitimate scientific and rational choice, but there is no longer any scientific warrant for this dogmatism, and I think most philosophers of science realize it, taking naturalism as an unverifiable philosophical assumption and justifying it based on the fact that scientific progress has continued to be highly successful along a purely natural trajectory (which is not in itself all that bad as a justification).

When it comes to creationism having lost the debate, I think this only becomes less easy to sustain when one zooms in on of the anti-supernatural rhetoric that was popular in the 19th century. Where this bias is highlighted, one gets the impression that this philosophical agenda was fueling the push for natural hypotheses at the expense of supernatural views for each phenomenon.

However, I wouldn’t agree that this should be our main focus in assessing this history. I think Martin J. S. Rudwick in his Bursting the Limits of Time and Worlds Before Adam makes it clear that scientific hypotheses of this kind, however motivated, were constantly being brought to the crucible of the actual data that was being collected. It was constantly being asked; does the hypothesis on this side of the debate explain this feature or not? He certainly discusses the undertow of political, religious and philosophical commitments (on both sides), but it seems that at each step, the hypotheses were forced to grapple with geological data, with the young earth view progressively losing ground wherever it simply couldn’t explain a feature that was elegantly and simply explained by an old earth model involving known and observable natural causes. In many cases, features were thought to be utterly inexplicable on anything but a very long timescale involving the apparent effects of many long term processes (river formation, erosion, forest growth, sedimentation etc) successively superposed each on the last one, such that the overall impression was of an extremely long history, though there was little sense of exactly how long all of this would have taken. These explanations slowly convinced the vast majority of the qualified observers, both those with a strong anti-religious bias who wanted to be convinced from the get go, and those who had no apparent interest either way. Most theologians at that time allowed for a great deal of flexibility when it comes to how creation events actually took place and in what time-frame, so for the most part, the agreement with an old earth paradigm was not usually religiously driven either way (although deism seems to have played into it around the time of Hutton and Buffon). My impression of the progress of biology from Darwin on is similar; all sorts of biases and preconceptions fed into the process (Biology and Ideology from Descarts to Darwin is an interesting book on that), but it was the explanatory power of his theory for dealing with enormously diverse sets of constantly incoming data that ultimately had most biologists, regardless of their background, lining up on roughly the same side, while bickering about mechanism all the while. Impressions can be a funny thing, and I’m always opening to changing an impression like this if there is new information, but I can say that I think it unlikely that I would ever see that same history and conclude that it was ultimately only ideology and bias that called the shots and brought us to where we are today. I may be underestimating the ideological bias in how the debate played out, but from what I can see it looms much larger in media debates and non-scientific literature than in the actual scientific debates and papers.

The response I’ve seen is “sure, but the game was rigged in only allowing natural explanations”. I understand this argument, but I think it comes down to parsimony; if known natural causes adequately explain a natural phenomenon, I think we are missing the warrant for invoking any other cause, let alone supernatural causes of which we do not yet have any scientifically verified examples. And the natural causes that have been invoked to date do not strike me as a stretch at all. I also notice that almost every time a supernatural cause has been used as a placeholder for explaining a phenomenon, it has ultimately been displaced by a natural cause when more information was available, so when it comes to some unexplained occurrence in the natural world, my bet tends to be on the natural cause, all things being equal. I think that the whole picture certainly (and almost by definition) requires a supernatural cause, and yes, I think the universe is a “put up job”, and I have no problem in principle with supernatural explanations for anything, but I tend to think that the natural explanations for features of the natural world have been highly successful. If I thought the natural explanations looked contrived and desperate, or the evidence looked too “intentional”, I would certainly consider entertaining something beyond the causes that we know, including the supernatural.

Whatever you happen to think of that, I think we can’t say something as sweeping as “creationists claims were never directly address empirically”. I think that the actual content of the late 18th and early to mid-19th century debates (not the public but the scientific debates) stand against that view, at least when it comes to geology and biology. From what I can see, they were addressed empirically in great detail, but I’d be interested in hearing from you what contemporary claims were bypassed in your view. Modern creationist claims, where they differ from 18th and 19th Century claims, were of course not addressed, but my understanding is that they have been addressed since (though new ones keep cropping up, so I suppose this isn’t always true)

I think the influence of the anti-supernaturalist position was strong, and I’m trying to see where it was decisive, but I don’t get that impression in following the progress of the debates. To sum it up; it was never philosophy debates that were going on in the great scientific societies, it was almost always debates about features of the natural world and what best explains those features, and the final physical causes that were ultimately agreed upon never look like desperate gambits for avoiding obvious conclusions of supernatural intervention. They usually ended up looking like the most reasonable hypothesis that explained the most observations in the most parsimonious way, and very often, there is simply no competing mechanism, creationist or otherwise, to muddy this outcome.

I’m curious about what leads us to different readings of this history. It’s probably a matter of different sources.

I appreciate your agreement with some of the tasks that the creationist community has ahead of it if it wants to be taken more seriously by the scientific world. I would definitely read their material with more interest and I think it would be the same for many others, if I felt that they were better policing the quality of their work. I don’t really expect you to agree with much of the above, but hopefully we’re on the same page for this one! There are not many of you pushing in that direction, but I’ve been very happy to see that you are one of them and I wish I saw more of that.

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