Very recently there was a staged debate between Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Ken Ham, the Genesis Guy (founder of the Creation Museum). The question posed was the limited question of the earth's history --- the Bible's version of a 6000-year history vs. Evolution's version of millions of years. Ham suggested that there are really several "sciences" and that his "Historical Science" based on the Bible deserves as much respect as so-called "Observational Science" favored by Nye. Ham claims that his Historical Science "works at least as well" as Observational Science. It is very interesting that Ham put it this way because his claim follows straight down the avenues of American Pragmatism, especially the version popularized by William James. Meaning and truth follow because something works for us.
What concerns me is what it is, in Ham's mind, that works for him and his followers. I will illustrate, below, something the works pretty well for observational science.
The general idea that trees have rings of annual growth works for us because we can cut a cross section from a tree and both show and count the rings. We can also demonstrate that rings increase in size or decrease in size in concert with the annual amount of precipitation. This gives the pattern of rings a unique "finger print" belonging to the weather history in the area where the tree grew. This works for us because we can compare trees that grew in the same region and whose histories are known. If one tree was cut down years earlier than another, we can still match the finger prints for the years that they overlapped. In this way, scientists have been able to map trees backward in time, producing a weather history through ring patterns. The bristlecone pines of the White Mountains are of special interest here because they are very slow growing and very old. Dendrochronologists have reconstructed ring sequences that go back 10,000 years and several living trees are on record as being very old indeed --- a 5,000 year old bristle cone pine and a 9,550 year old Norway spruce in Sweden. Dendrochronology also works for us as a comparison to radio-carbon dating for similar time periods. The two procedures compare very well; that is, they reinforce each others results.
This is what observational scientists mean when they say that science works for them. Not only can we show things to one another but we can write about our observations in journals which can be read by others around the world (no matter what their religious beliefs are) and they can make similar observations of their own. The scientific community is a world community that shares observation of the natural world. It does not depend upon any particular object of reverence or a religious icon.
What Mr. Ham needs to do now is to actually tell us what it is that works for him in his historical vision guided by the Bible. One of the first things we can say is that Ham's community is not a world community but only a segment of the Christian community. Furthermore, it seems to me that what works for this community is a kind of self-satisfied commitment of faith to a particular religious icon.
I want to go back to the title of this blog --- Is there really a religion vs. science debate? I don't want to put down the self-satisfaction of Ham's Christian community and I don't particularly want to elevate the satisfactions of observational scientists like dendrochronologists. What seems obvious to me, in fact, is that there is no debate and there is no possibility of a debate because there is no common ground. Both of these are what Wittgenstein called language-games and they have very different rules and goals for playing them.
It is fair, it seems to me, for each group to get into the other's language-game and ask critical questions that aim at clarification. If Ham's intention is to understand the Bible literally and if we ignore, for now, the fact that the Bible has been translated out of its original language and gone through many different editions, it is still fair to ask, it seems to me, how we can calculate the age of our earth when Genesis admits that the order of creation doesn't admit the tools for defining 'years' for several days. At the same time, it is fair for Creationists to get as deeply into observational science as they can and ask whether God can fairly be excluded from a scientific account of the universe. These are interesting questions, it seems to me, but they do not stand as a "debate" in which either side might be construed as winning.
I always thought the dialectic was that some religious people said "you can't explain x without God" and the scientific people said "no, look, here's an explanation."
ReplyDeleteSometimes the scientific people don't have an explanation, but the religious people are on shaky ground if they rely on that, because if you base your faith on what you can't explain _now_ you're just waiting to get undercut later when some clever person comes along and provides the explanation. Christ is supposed to be a firm foundation, not one waiting for the next development in biochemistry for its validation.
A little bit of intellectual humility makes the problems vanish though.
Science can't refute religious claims either. If "it's a miracle" is legal, then things just worked the way they do now for a while, but before that, they didn't. The story in Genesis that's in the most jeopardy from science is actually not the seven days of creation nor Adam and Eve in the Garden, but Noah's flood, since that's the one that isn't just a matter of one-off miracles, but seems to occur just before historical time, and ought to have left some kind of trace.
Even so a mildly creative person devoted to both the Bible and science can find ways they _could_ have fit together - and that plus some intellectual humility arguably ought to be all they need.
I'm inclined to agree with you that there's not a real debate here. But one thing we learn from sociology and history, and the Bible, is that people like to fight, whether or not there's a good reason.
- S