Way of the Mind

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:

1. God created the species as they are, less than 10,000 years ago (young earth creationism);
2. God created the species as they are, millions of years ago (old earth creationism);
3. God created life and directed evolution, starting millions of years ago (theistic evolution);
4. 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. ):

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:

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):

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.