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On the Integrity of Science: A Response to Bill Dembski

May 11, 2011 by Karl W. Giberson

Continued from Page 3

To evaluate the significance of anomalies requires subtle judgments by experts. Only someone who can actually perform gravitational calculations can adequately appreciate the significance of how Newton's theory predicts that the planets travel in elliptical orbits. It is breathtakingly beautiful to see how this works. It is equally easy to understand why people who appreciate this are unlikely to abandon such a theory because of small discrepancies in the orbit of Saturn. Their intuition tells them that there must be some other explanation for the anomaly, even though they have no idea what that might be.

Scientists' unwillingness to be persuaded by anomalies may look like pigheadedness. A lawyer could make such apparently blind allegiance to a theory in the face of counterevidence seem irrational and suggestive of a conspiracy to protect a failing theory. But there is a collective wisdom in the scientific community that I don't think Bill appreciates. The experience of the scientific community when it comes to evolution is that countless anomalies from the time of Darwin down to the present have been happily resolved, just as the irregularity in the orbit of Saturn was resolved with the discovery of Uranus. I trust this collective judgment. Bill does not: "Giberson and Collins' constant drumming of mainstream and consensus science is beside the point—science progresses by diverging from the mainstream and by breaking with consensus."

The collective wisdom of "mainstream and consensus science" is most certainly not "beside the point." It is precisely the point. I think Bill is just wrong when he says that science progresses by "breaking with consensus." This widespread misperception comes from conflating "revolutionary" science with "normal" science, to use Thomas Kuhn's terms. Revolutionary science is exciting and makes the history books; it is easy to remember. Famous scientists—Newton, Darwin, Einstein—are "revolutionaries" to be sure, but most scientific progress occurs by steadily expanding our knowledge, not blowing it all up and starting over. We need think only of the rapid progress in cosmology in the 20th century to see this clearly. Einstein inaugurated a revolution with his theory of General Relativity in the first couple of decades but, after the dust settled on that, there was steady progress for eighty years.

Anti-evolutionists need to undermine the concept of "scientific orthodoxy." And they have succeeded in convincing many evangelicals that it represents nothing more than the unsupported collective opinion of scientists who are basically just "voting" on things. Going against this orthodoxy, as the anti-evolutionists have to do needs to appear courageous and revolutionary, not eccentric and uninformed.

A year ago the renowned Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke lost his job at a conservative seminary for suggesting that evangelicals needed to take seriously that the scientific community had reached a consensus on origins. He was chastised by a blogger at Uncommon Descent for his inappropriately "high regard for 'current scientific orthodoxy.'"

The blogger asked the same question that Bill is asking in his review of The Language of Science and Faith: "Can we no longer confront the data on our own?" Bill and I have very different answers to this question. My response, which I provided at greater length a while ago on the BioLogos site, is "Of course we cannot confront the data 'on our own'."

Dealing with scientific data requires training and experience in whatever narrow area we are considering. If you say, for example, that you can interpret fossil data on your own—as biochemist Duane Gish and legal scholar Phillip Johnson do—then you need to know about fossils. You should be able to answer detailed and sophisticated questions about fossils, before you presume to challenge the conclusions of people who study fossils for a living. But most non-specialists cannot answer even basic questions like: Where might you find a fossil? How much of a fossil skeleton is typically present? How do you determine the age of a fossil? What exactly is a fossil? What parts of a skeleton are most likely to be missing? How do you decide if fossils found together are from the same organism?

If you cannot answer simple questions like these then you cannot confront fossil data "on your own." But, rather than engaging such a quixotic project, you can simply accept the conclusions of people who know way more than you do.

And fossils are the simplest part of the evolutionary picture. Interpreting genomic data, with its complex biochemical, statistical, and historical underpinnings is not remotely possible without the relevant expertise. In my field of physics I cannot imagine what it would mean for a layperson to deal with the data and draw their own conclusions. If you don't understand differential equations, to take one example, then you cannot understand quantum mechanics. You can look at the colored lines in a spectrum and somehow imagine that they come from electrons jumping back and forth in the atom, but that is a far cry from understanding what is going on.

Article Continued On Next Page

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5/11/2011 4:00:00 AM

Book Club

Bill Dembski

Creationism

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Francis Collins

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