Hokum-Balderdash Assay

As a college student some 15 years ago Lauren Becker worked during summers as a ranger in a state park in the Bible Belt. During the guided tours she would take the hikers down to the base of a 256-foot waterfall--the main attraction of the park. She would then tell them, among other things, that the rocks they were standing on are 300 million years old.

Although Lauren had heard that there were people who believed the earth is only 6,000 years old, she'd never actually met any. It was during her stint at the park that she finally came face-to-face with young earth creationists. And not a few of them. For instance, whenever she would talk of the age of the rocks, some mothers would try to prevent their children from hearing about the facts. During one hike a man actually argued that the rocks were only a few thousand years old and the only reason we think they're millions of years old is that the Devil made them look that way to make humans turn away from God!

You can listen to Lauren Becker's story by downloading the December 30 2005 Point of Inquiry podcast. It is a most enjoyable piece and I highly recommend it. (The MP3 file is around 38Mb. Becker's segment is around 10 minutes long, while the entire podcast runs 55 minutes.)

Here are excerpts:

A 300-million-year old rock is the answer resulting from decades of observation, research, field study, laboratory testing, comparative studies, and critical thinking. A 6,000-year old rock is the answer because God said so.

...

The lack of a deity is not an opening for chaos; it is a call for responsibility.... Our species has continuously found meaning, purpose, and comfort in the idea of God or gods. Unfortunately, if we want to know what is actually going on--and our survival depends on understanding reality--religion is utterly bereft of explanatory power....

The discovery that a rock is 300 million years old is the result of lots of questions by lots of people who devise lots of different ways to ask the earth about itself. Much to our delight she is talking. Science is how we listen and the scientific method is how we understand what she says. To deny that a rock is 300 million years old is to deny the process that got us to that understanding. Since this process of inquiry is our best tool for succeeding in the world its denial is a grave threat to our future prosperity. Far from making us stronger faith cripples us because it takes away our greatest advantage--our ability to question, to learn, to adapt, and therefore to live.

(Lauren Becker is a Point of Inquiry contributor and Assistant Public Relations Director for CSICOP.)


Science leads to reliable knowledge because it does not claim to possess absolute knowledge of the world, is based on systematic observation of the world and rigorous testing of claims/hypotheses, and is self-correcting. Unlike religion, science does not delude itself about the understanding it gleans and possesses. This is one of its greatest strength. This is one reason it has been so successful.

On the other hand, rather than being founded on the principle of tentativeness of understanding¹, the search for better and more detailed understanding, and self-correction, most religions are absolutist and dogmatic in character. And as for their supernatural beliefs/explanations, they are untestable. Hence, they can only remain unverified and unverifiable extraordinary claims. Moreover, since the supernatural by definition is not constrained by natural laws people can make the most ludicrious of appeals to the supernatural, people can attribute anything that they cannot understand (even things that they believe are impossible in this world) to the supernatural and make the supernatural cause practically anything they fancy (An aside: Can deities make a round square? Or create married bachelors? Or commit suicide? Can a deity create entities that supersede itself in all aspects, thus creating beings greater than itself? If not then what does omnipotence mean exactly? If God is constrained by, for instance, logic, then there are limitations to a deity's powers. But what then are the implications of the existence of such restrictions?).

If an explanation is valid/correct, then it has the power to predict. Scientific explanations provide deterministic and stochastic predictions. Indeed scientific theories would be useless (and untestable) if they had no predictive power. Supernatural explanations, on the other hand, cannot be tested and don't predict anything. Becker rightly declares that supernaturalism is "bereft of explanatory power." Pat Robertson can declare that if the Christian deity gets pissed with some person--as in Ariel Sharon--then He will in his infiinte wisdom gift him with a stroke or heart attack. Problem is, how can you predict (and test) this if we have no way of knowing God's emotional state or whether the supernatural exists in the first place? What use is the explanation that person K was cured because supplications had been answered by the supernatural, when failure to get well despite a barrage of prayers are explained away with the rationalization that God sometimes refuses to accede to our prayers because he knows what's best? With all bases covered the claim that prayer works is nonfalsifiable.

One of the worst and yet common pitfalls in supernaturalistic thinking is that of producing ad hoc explanations--rationalizations that cannot be tested/falsified. Thus, during the short-lived elation over the supposed survival of 12 American miners a number of people attributed their survival to the supernatural. How did they know that? They didn't; they merely believed. For in order to know one must have good evidence/reasons to support one's belief. I am actually tempted to go all the way and declare that all supernatural explanations are ad hoc explanations.

In the world we live in supernaturalistic explanations are completely devoid of utility in understanding and predicting processes and events. They are merely superstitious beliefs or palliatives that provide a false sense of understanding--and it is false because those who propose and believe them have no way of confirming whether these explanations are in fact right or wrong.

Notes:

1. Michael Ruse, "Creation-Science Is Not Science," Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, ed. Martin Curd & J.A. Cover, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998, p. 40