A little while ago, and for no apparent reason (I’m like that 
), I thought about an Internet poll I’ve seen some time ago, which asked people what they thought was more likely about the development of life on Earth. If I remember correctly, the options were something like this:
- God created the species as they are, less than 10,000 years ago (young earth creationism);
- God created the species as they are, millions of years ago (old earth creationism);
- God created life and directed evolution, starting millions of years ago (theistic evolution);
- Life evolved without action from a god (natural evolution).
And it got me thinking…
We can think of the several hypotheses as a series of switches. God (as in “interfering”, not as in “existing”)? Yes or no. Old Earth? Yes or no. Evolution? Yes or no. With these switches, here are the 8 possible combinations (with 0 for “no” and 1 for “yes” — yes, I’m a computer geek. ):
| God? | Old Earth? | Evolution? |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
This is the initial premise. But we can quickly remove a few contradictory combinations. For instance, no God and no evolution means that nothing accounts for the life we have in the world today. In other words, we can’t have a “0″ for both God and evolution. Evolution but no old earth is also impossible: nobody — scientists or creationists — claims that species could have evolved in just a couple of millennia, and both sides agree that man already existed 6,000 years ago. In binary terms, evolution requires an old earth (not the other way around, though).
So, the cut-down table (now with labels for each combination) amounts to this:
| God? | Old Earth? | Evolution? | |
| A | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| B | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| C | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| D | 1 | 1 | 1 |
What more can we say about them? Well, for a start: evidence contradicts B and C, so they cannot be true. There is lots of evidence for both evolution and an old earth, and both are accepted by science — not dogmatically, not on authority, but because that’s where the evidence leads. The only reason people still claim B or C is this: it’s what the holy books claim. If you believe they are inerrant, then any evidence to the contrary must be ignored, like covering your ears with your hands and crying “la la la, I can’t hear you”. Of course, such a position is irrational, dishonest, and stupid. Creationism (old earth or young earth) is the denial of reality; it’s not a scientific hypothesis with any merit, because no evidence supports it, and a lot of evidence contradicts it. I can respect people who are honestly mistaken, but not those who lie to themselves, who deny reality, just because it’s somehow uncomfortable or contradicts dogma.
So, if we care the least bit about reality, we must remove any combination with Old Earth=0 or Evolution=0. Therefore, the only remaining combinations are these (keeping the labels from the previous table):
| God? | Old Earth? | Evolution? | |
| A | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| D | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Now, D is obviously theistic evolution, that is, evolution directed by God. This is undisprovable, because it doesn’t contradict the evidence (but, then again, Last Thursdayism, the theory that the universe was created last Thursday, but with everyone having memories of a fictional time before that, and with the world having been created to appear much older, is also undisprovable). There is, however, no evidence for it, either.
A is not necessarily atheistic naturalism; as I said before, “God” here means intervention by God, not just existence. A can be naturalism, but it can also be Deism. Again, it can’t be disproved, and, again, there is no evidence of “no (intervening) God”. The main difference between A and D is that D adds another agent, which is not required, as A has the exact same evidence for and against it, and explains everything just as well. If both explanations are equally satisfactory and substantiated, but one of them has an extra entity, then Occam’s Razor tells us that the other one — with the least number of entities — is the most likely one. Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, and the extra entity is unnecessary.
From this, we arrive at A as the most likely hypothesis. All available evidence agrees with it, and it is the simpler (in terms of number of entities) explanation.
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Nice!
One thing I think is worth noting. I do not like how you set this up in a binomial sense about the origin of like: wither God or evolution. I believe that, even if Evolution was Proven fully and undeniably incorrect it still wouldn’t add evidence to the Creation hypothesis. It would just show that we currently don’t know. Therefore an option like 0 1 0 should still be allowed in principle.
Also, it seems a bit pointless to say “and since we all know evolution is true…B and C are wrong”. I mean, for anyone who DIDN’T already agree with you, I don’t think that would help. It is like if you read a creationist blog and they wrote “and since it is commonly accepted by those in our field that the Bible is true, then we know old earth and evolution hypothesis’s are incorrect”.
I like how you showed a systematic approach to solving problems with multiple possibilities, but just don’t know if this explanation solved too much.
Ross: I didn’t understand your first paragraph. Could you explain what you meant, please? I didn’t say that it was either God *or* evolution; combination D includes both. If that wasn’t what you meant, I apologize.
Anyway, posts like this are more a way for me to put my thoughts in writing (and discuss the topics with readers, like we’re doing now) than a way to “convert” theists. To me, anyone who doesn’t accept evolution, and still doesn’t when confronted with evidence for it, is beyond anything I, or anyone, can ever say or do, anyway.
Evolution is as proven as gravity. There is no “controversy” in science: biologists may argue about how it works, but they’re not arguing whether it does. A person can initially believe in God (also called “magic”) as the only explanation they’ve heard or can come up with, but when presented with evidence that it occurred naturally (and you don’t have to be a biologist to be able to find it), one has to either accept it, or irrationally deny it, because the first “magical” explanation sounds simpler and more definite, or the second makes one uncomfortable, or one believes that when a book written by primitive desert shepherds differs from reality, it is reality that is in error. Again, one can’t argue with someone like that; they have already found The Answer ™, and will close their eyes to anything else, including anything they see in front of them. It’s like a flat-earther not believing the earth was round even when going into space and seeing it from there.
My process in this post, in a nutshell, was this: list all the combinations, eliminate the logically contradictory ones (which, much like square circles, are impossible and don’t make sense), eliminate the ones with contradicting evidence, and then analyze the remaining two. Of course, one could argue that evidence doesn’t matter… or that it was put there “to test our faith“…
My first paragraph meant this:
You seem to say there are 2 ways life could originate: evolution or creationism. Therefore evidence against one of them is evidence for the other. This is not the case though, as it is possible both evolution and creationism could be wrong. In that case, we could have no God, Old Earth, or evolution, as there could be a different theory that requires none of these.
I am just saying you shouldn’t assume there are only 2 options, as there are obviously many more.
Ah, you mean aliens (panspermia) or something like that? Yes, you’re right — though we could call that “non-supernatural creationism”, in a way.
Yes, I could have listed that as another hypothesis, but, in practical effect, it’s just another version of “God”, with exactly the same results. If the aliens just left the “seeds of life” here and then life evolved naturally, it’s possible, but it’s a different subject — it’s related to abiogenesis, not evolution. They couldn’t have created us just like we are by advanced technology (creationism), since there is tons of evidence for evolution. For them to be directing evolution “from the shadows” (”theistic” evolution), well, it’s possible, it doesn’t contradict the evidence, but it has one more agent than the remaining (equally coherent with the evidence) explanation, making that agent unnecessary…
You probably already know this perfectly well, since you seem to be playing devil’s advocate here (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but to others that may be reading this: evolution is a fact. When people say “it’s just a theory”, it’s because they’re not aware (or deliberately confuse the terms) that the word “theory” means something completely different, in scientific language, than “a wild fancy”, like something you came up with last dinner after a few drinks.
Gravity, too, is a theory, but everyone accepts it as fact. But if the major holy books said that objects fell to the ground because they were pushed by invisible angels, and that the orbits of the planets were maintained by no force other than God’s will, I’m sure that a significant percentage of the world’s population would be claiming, today, that “oh, gravity is just a theory”.
I was more thinking along these lines: what if there is another scientific theory that could explain life. A mechanism other than natural selection. For instance, what if the Lamarckian idea of acquired traits was correct, for instance. Just an example of course.
I mean, naturally I am aware that evolution is true, I just don’t like the idea of believing it must be evolution or creationism. Creationists use this idea all the time, and then conclude that if they can prove evolution false then they necessarily prove creationism true. But if evolution was shown to be false, then it by no means means creationism (any form of it, aliens, God, etc.) is now proven as true. Since there is still no evidence for creationism, we would then just have to say we currently do not know how life came about and that creationism is just one possibility- one that is just as unsupported as it is now.
Pedro said: “nobody — scientists or creationists — claims that species could have evolved in just a couple of millennia”
Actually, that’s simply not true.
Some young-earth creationists who claim that the story of Noah’s flood is true *do* hold to a variety of super-evolution, in order to account for the fact that there are a lot more species of animal on earth than could possibly have fitted on the ark, let alone their food and so forth. The idea is that the “kinds” of animal on the ark represent some higher order of grouping than our current species, and that all the animals we see now evolved (possibly directed by god) in a *very* short space of time. (Yes, many of these people at the same time hold that old-earth long-time-span evolution is impossible.)
Okay, it’s an intensely stupid belief for a whole variety of reasons, but it exists:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5mPPnN1c0jk&feature=PlayList&p=DD39BC2D9A7F95C7&index=8 (cdk007)
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=12&t=513&m=1
If you haven’t seen any of cdk007’s videos, take a look some of the others.
Lesson learned: If there is a stupid belief imaginable in principle, someone out there believes it in practice.
Ross, you took the words right out of my mouth.
Thanks, efrique.
While we’re on the subject of applying logic to Creationism/Evolution, I’d be interested to hear your perspective on applying logic to the Theory of Evolution itself. By this, I mean examining the prerequisite necessities for evolution to occur in the first place, with each step building on the previous. As a scientist, I have no problem accepting natural selection and deviations arising within a species-group due to climatic variability over time, etc., however, I do have a problem with accepting macroevolution/speciation, which is primarily attributed to genetic mutations (which, as science has established, more often have a detrimental or neutral result to the host organism than a positive one) or genetic drift. I have found very sparse “evidence” of beneficial positive mutations; if I remember correctly, sickle cell anemia and beneficial mutations on the cellular level (e.g. increased tolerance to toxin-loads, etc) are the most common examples of beneficial mutation. Stepping further back in the chain of logical steps, I have problems accepting abiogenesis (i.e. the creation and survival of highly complex DNA code out of non-living elements), accepting the formation of our planet and universe (with all of its properties and elements) out of a super-compressed mass of hydrogen, etc. Leading theoretical physicists are still trying to reconcile the difficulties in modeling a universe in which both Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics are simultaneously in operation (actually, there was front page news on CNN yesterday about this, discussing the new CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland). At present, all of the big bang models are failures in one way or another; a fact which is readily admitted by leading physicists. I see these steps as logical necessities before one can accept that the theory of evolution is without major rational fault. These are rather large gaps in the logical sequence. Most evolutionists will claim that evolution theory simply does not deal with these questions, which I find to be preposterous from a logical standpoint. There are many other problems I have with evolution theory (e.g. accounting for self-similar geometry in nature, the paradox of historical linguistic/cultural sophistication, other logical explanations for homonid fossils, the seemingly mystical force which has driven evolution to this point and resulted in what we see today, the moral consequences of wide-spread acceptance of godless evolution (e.g. strong arguments for eugenics arising), etc). Anyway, I think you get my point. I consider myself to have an exceptionally open mind on this subject; whereas most people tend to be hyperbolically polarized toward one opinion or the other, I belief this is completely irrational. We need more level-headed rational discussion which extrapolates on the logical inconsistencies of evolution theory, so that A) these inconsistencies are more well-known and can be well-studied, and B) scientists start thinking more “outside the box” rather than just following what they just assume to be true. I firmly believe that 99% of the people who believe the theory of evolution to be true cannot adequately explain the basis of the theory — people just blindly follow what they were taught in school, assuming that their teachers know best. A similar phenomenon occurs in acceptance of religious/metaphysical teachings. Anyway, that’s the short version; if anyone made it through my blathering, I’d welcome any feedback. Cheers!
Zchild, Cheers my friend, well said!
Pedro, wonderful article, I enjoyed it. One thing though, about Occam’s Razor. How can you know, I see a lot of aetheists bring out “the razor” as though it is fact and always true. It also seems that the all other things being equal portion of the razor is often conveniently ignored.