Ken Ham, head of the evangelistic organization Answers in Genesis and the force behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Park, is a low-hanging fruit. Indeed, it might be said that he’s a strawberry, a fruit that hangs so low that it’s almost on the ground. I shan’t spend much time on him, but thought that, for the record, I’d put up a note about his recent attack on Richard Dawkins posted on Ham’s Defending the Faith site: “Richard Dawkins and Mr. Deity.”
You may remember the comedy video I posted showing God (played by Mr. Deity, played by Brian Dalton) encountering Richard Dawkins. In it, Dawkins accuses God of many things, including indolence for using the wasteful and imperfect process of evolution to create species—species ridden with poor “design” like the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe. Dawkins accuses God of being “redundant” and having been made “completely unnecessary” by the advances of science. (I’m chuffed that Ham doesn’t link directly to the video on YouTube, but to my own piece on it. He reads me!)
Well, Ham doesn’t like that video, of course, for, as an evangelical and fundamentalist Christian, he’s a big fan of God. I want to highlight just two points that Ham thinks are flawed in Dawkins’s arguments. Ham’s words are indented.
1. Dawkins relies on evolution, which is a “historical” science that can’t be observed, and hence can’t be verified. This is an argument that is being increasingly used by creationists, as it resonates with people who don’t know much about science:
[Dawkins] adds, “And what’s more, we have science now, making you completely unnecessary.” By “science” he, of course, means evolution, which is historical science. This kind of science deals with the past and is therefore not directly observable, testable, or repeatable. Now, to prove his point that science has made God unnecessary he says, “Do you know that we just used science to do something truly amazing and quite difficult? We landed a probe on a comet.” Here he has done what so many secularists do. He’s used a bait-and-switch. He says that “science” (unobservable historical science) has made God redundant, but then he uses an example from “science” (observable, testable, repeatable operational science) to prove his point! But historical science and observational science are not the same thing!
Do I really need to refute this? I shall do so, and let me count the ways.
This argument, also made by Ray Comfort, is just dumb. For of course many scientific contentions and hypotheses are “historical,” yet that doesn’t make them any less scientific. For if historical contentions can be tested, or can make predictions that can be examined, then they fall under the rubric of real science. For evolution, these include the prediction that humans evolved in Africa (first made by Darwin in 1871, not verified until the 1920s); that birds evolved from dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling animals (predicted ages ago, verified in the last 30 years); that the first “real” organisms were simple ones, and only later did more complex ones evolve (the first organisms we see in the fossil record, about 3.5 billion years ago, are cyanobacteria), and so on.
Evolution is further “scientific” in that it alone, among all competing theories (especially Ham’s creationism), is able to make sense of previously puzzling data. (I call this “making sense” notion “retrodictions”.) Such retrodictions include the explanation of biogeographic patterns like the absence of endemic mammals on oceanic islands, of vestigial organs like the tiny, useless hindlimbs on early fossil whales, and of embryological observations like the transitory hindlimb buds in dolphins. I discuss all of this in WEIT, so I won’t reprise it here.
The point is that if a hypothesis can be tested and supported using historical data, and competing hypothesis rejected, then that is a scientific endeavor. If Ham were right, and historical sciences weren’t “observable and testable,” cosmology would be down the tubes as well. How do we know the Big Bang occurred? We can detect its remnants: an expanding universe and the background radiation that is its echo. How do we know how stars “evolve” over time? By observing stars in all stages of production and death, and putting these frames together into a cinematic depiction of the life of a star. If ham were right, geologists would be out of business too.
Further, evolution is not completely a “historical” science, for it also makes predictions about things we can see with our own eyes. For instance, we now have dozens of examples of natural selection in real time, and we have also seen speciation, in the form of new polyploid plant species occurring within a generation (this is again in WEIT). We can observe mutations occurring and see that they are random.
And there are other historical sciences. All we know about ancient Rome comes from history. Would Ham say that our knowledge of classical Rome is deeply flawed or illusory, or that in fact ancient Rome really was built in a day, by God, and the whole series of emperors was a fabrication? And what about history itself? It’s a historical “science,” so maybe Julius Caesar and Napoleon didn’t really exist. After all, all we have of them is the written record. Nobody alive can say he or she actually met them!
The fact is that there is no distinction between historical science and real-time experimental science: both are based on observation, prediction, and testability. There is only science, which I construe broadly as the use of experiment, observation, reason, and testability to find out the best explanations for natural phenomena. The methods of “historical” and “experimental” science may differ, but the principles are the same. Archaeology and history can be a form of science, as can auto mechanics and plumbing (TRIGGER WARNING: Massimo Pigliucci disagrees). Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, by drawing a false distinction between “historical” and “observational” science, and implying that only the latter is “real science”, are simply confusing people—deliberately. They know better, but have to lie for Jesus.
2. Dawkins can’t explain physical laws, which must therefore be due to God. This is again and increasingly common argument for God, and is effective because its refutation requires that people not only pay attention to physics, but be satisfied with answers like “we don’t know the answer yet; and maybe we never will.”
Actually, it’s only because God exists and because His Word is true that we can even land a probe on a comet. [Dawkins argued that this is one of the great achievements of science.] You see, the universe is governed by laws of nature. But in a random, material universe that supposedly arose naturalistically, where do set, immaterial laws of nature come from? And what makes these laws operate the same way tomorrow as they do today? There are no real answers to these questions in an atheistic worldview. But there is a Creator, and He set the laws of nature in place at the beginning. And we can trust that these laws will work the same tomorrow as they did today because our unchanging God upholds and sustains the universe (Hebrews 1:3).
Oh dear—this again? My responses are brief. First, how does Ham show that the laws of nature come from God? Where is his evidence for the deity, and the fact that deity created the laws? Second, why is a lawless universe the default state if there is no God? Why isn’t a universe with laws the default state? Third, we don’t know where the laws come from, but some physicists like the late Victor Stenger have argued that many of them come from the assumption of observer invariance. Alternatively, they may stem from a deeper principle that we don’t yet understand (of course Ham would respond that that Deeper Principle comes from God). Or the laws of nature may vary among different universes if we have a multiverse.
Of course the universe could not exist if there were no “laws of nature,” so our very existence requires them. That doesn’t answer the question of why we have them—a question answered just as well with “I don’t know” as with “God made them,” for both are statements of ignorance—but it does explain why we observe laws. In the Albatross I also broach what I will call the “weak anthropic principle from bodies”: that living creatures, at least the type that we see, couldn’t exist without physical law. If the “laws of nature” were to vary wildly and erratically, we wouldn’t be able to evolve (environments would change unpredictably from one generation to the next), nor would our bodies be able to operate (things like kidney function, nerve function, and blood circulation all depend on “laws” that are constant).
As physicist Sean Carroll has emphasized, in the end we might have to be satisfied with the answer “because that’s the way things are” to the question, “Why do we have the laws of nature that we do, instead of another set of laws?” But that’s no worse an answer than “God did it,” which is like saying “Fred did it.” As Sam Harris said in his blurb for the Albatross, “the honest doubts of science are better—and more noble—than the false certainties of religion.”
I note finally that religionists of Ham’s stripe don’t really believe in invariant laws of nature, for they also believe in miracles, which means that God can break the “laws” any time He wants. And God presumably does that quite often—every time He intervenes in the cosmos, whether to answer prayers, cure the ill, or send someone’s soul to Heaven or Hell.
There’s one paragraph in Ham’s diatribe that is quite telling, for it shows why he and many other Americans are Biblical literalists:
Dawkins’ comments should stand as a warning to those who compromise with man’s ideas of evolution and millions of years. They are opening the door to compromising with the rest of God’s Word. After all, if you can’t trust God’s Word in the very beginning, then where do you stop doubting? If we can’t trust God’s words in Genesis, then why should we trust God’s Word in the Gospels?
This “slippery slope” argument for Biblical inerrancy shows why it’s virtually useless to try to convince these people of the truth of evolution. For if evolution goes, so go the tenets of Christianity. Try fighting that, accommodationists!
And there’s one bit of unintended humor in Ham’s screed:
We can trust God’s Word because it was written by a God who never lies (Titus 1:2), and it’s confirmed by what we see in the world.
Here’s Titus 1:2 from the King James Bible: “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.”
In other words, we know that God doesn’t lie because the Bible tells us so. But of course the Bible lies, for it makes many assertions (and not just about creation) that aren’t true: that there was a historical Exodus of Jews out of Egypt, that there was a census of Caesar Augustus, and so on. Nowhere in the Bible does it say “this book is true,” and even if it did it we wouldn’t be forced to believe it. It’s as if one wrote a work of fiction that contained these words “Paul Bunyan cannot lie”; would we then have to take everything he said as really, historically, true?
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UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between called attention to a cartoon on his her website, Evolving Perspectives, that’s relevant to today’s post:
