debate-pointsRecently a Christian told me,
“You only accept evolution because everyone in science does. If you were to disagree with it, they’d throw you out, and your papers would never be published.” (They even mentioned Expelled, the film.)
Now I was about to point out how stupid this argument is because it can be flipped around by replacing “evolution” with “Christianity” or “creationism” or even “religion”, science with “the church” and “papers” with “religious writings.” But I wonder if anyone else has any response to this?
I only accept evolution because it's the only theory that explains the diversity of life on Earth which has never been refuted.
I should also note that it isn't absolutely correct to accept or decline a theory based on Arguments from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam), because the theory is not considered either true or false based on just someone's opinions. An excerpt from Wikipedia:
Argument from authority (also known as appeal to authority) is a fallacy of defective induction, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The most general structure of this argument is:
- Source A says that p is true.
- Source A is authoritative.
- Therefore, p is true.
This is a fallacy because the truth or falsity of a claim is not related to the authority of the claimant, and because the premises can be true, and the conclusion false (an authoritative claim can turn out to be false).
I think this argument arises out of a non-standard definition of evolution… i.e. the one that many evangelical Christians hold, as a result of being told throughout their upbringing that evolution is not true, is riddled with gaps, can’t explain complexity, etc.
It’s along the same lines of why we constantly hear the definition of “Atheist” as “Someone who KNOWS there is no God.”… an absolute non-starter, pushed by religious folks as a way to make our position a straw-man easily attacked.
Both evolution and atheism are easy to attack… if you believe, or start from, the premises offered by evangelicals.
I realize that this might be an unpopular response here, but as a scientist I feel obliged to submit this evidence to the discussion.
Research has at least suggested that people who accurately believe in science often justify their belief via deference to authority, just as they do with (Shtulman, A. (2010). Confidence without competence in the evaluation of scientific claims. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 302-307. pdf)
Your observation that the two claims can easily have the words flipped and the claim rings true. All your theist friend (or non-friend) pointed out is a general trend for how human beings obtain, and in some senses, need to obtain knowledge. Consider your likely acceptance of climate change, though you are not a climate scientist; this is reasonable, since this belief should guide your behavior, but you have neither the ability nor time to actually learn the science you would need to know to answer this. It is this knowledge transfer that gives language and education its remarkable power, it shouldn't be surprising that scientists or religious people do this, it's who the appeals are made to that makes a difference.
But there is good news too, there is research that suggests their dislike of science may be at least partially due to their religiousness. I'll admit, this is a bit of a stretch of their research findings, but it has been shown that unconsciously suggesting to people that religion is a good explanation for the world decreases individuals' unconscious positive feelings towards science.(Preston, J., & Epley, N. (2009). Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 238-241.)
Here’s why I accept evolution, summed up in one word. Depth.
You see, ID and it’s ilk all always end up being at the bottom supported by the bible. There’s NO depth there, and there’s a fundamental and willing ignorance. For example, how do christians explain the myth of Mithra? Answer - they don’t. How do they explain geological strata, radio-carbon dating, etc? Answer - God did it. No depth at all.
Now on the other hand, if I decide that I want to know more about any field of science, say evolutionary biology… I can find multiple sources. I can find evidence based reasoning, I can find argumentation over data, meanings, etc. I can trace the history of an emerging consensus - AND - this is critical - if I find a weakness in a line of evidence or reasoning I can attack it using the same method and if I am right about it, my view will prevail.
None of that applies to ID. That’s why. Its an answer for children. “God did it, now run along and stop asking questions.”
I accept evolution and the theory of gravity and the value of Pi because they have depth, logic, argumentation, lines of evidence and a certain humanist beauty to them. We wrested those answers from our own ignorance. I reject ID and similar things because they encourage that very same ignorance.
If you’ve never really been exposed to any aspects of evolutionary theory, that would be true. However, assuming you’ve exposed yourself to any of the underlying concepts, the fact that scientists say it’s true is certainly not the ONLY reason you accept it.
Scientists have presented facts and made arguments about how those facts fit together. You accept evolution because you find those arguments convincing. If you’ve never observed any of the facts first hand, then you are indeed placing your trust in scientists to be honest about them.
But there are plenty of facts available. The diversity of life you interact with on a daily basis is enough to gain a basic understanding. Darwin drew his conclusions from little more than the behavioral and physical characteristics of extant, macrobiotic organisms. You would be hard pressed to find someone without exposure to a wide range of living organisms. You could convince practically anyone that evolution is true without them accepting it just because scientists say so.
But there is disagreement on evolution, just not to the degree to which creationists would have you believe. The true disagreement isn’t with the crux of the theory, but rather with some technical specifics and where, in history, different species actually diverged. I believe both Wikipedia and RationalWiki have articles that explain the differences between the fact and theory of evolution.
You can usually see through the argument when they display their ignorance of what evolution really is, resorting instead to strawman arguments that aren’t really evolution. The most common strawmen are:
If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? (Because we didn’t evolve from monkeys. We and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor).
If evolution is true, why haven’t horses evolved wings (or some similar outrageous claim of why some animal doesn’t do something it shouldn’t)? (This is a projection argument, actually. Stuff like this is better asked about god, not evolution.)
Anything associated with the appearance of design. For some reason, they like to focus on the complexity of the eye, but there are no shortage of others. This ignores the simple fact that cell specialization occurs slowly and evolution had a lot of time to do it, and the existence of the eyes in other animals that don’t really need them demonstrates this.
Other miscellaneous stuff that they say to make themselves look more informed than they really are. Arguments that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics (no it doesn’t. That law only applies to closed systems, which the earth definitely isn’t), that there are no transitional species (sure there are; we are transitional between our parents and children…), and the false dichotomy of microevolution and macroevolution (there’s no difference between them if you even recognize the separate terms) all meet these criteria.
The good thing about science is you can repeat experiments, to quote Dawkins “Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence”. Such experiments as the ones that lend weight to gravity or evolution. I have held replicas of the skulls of about 8 of our ancestors, you can see the slow change over time. There is an open source DNA analyser you can build yourself and see the genetic similarities between yourself and your child, and mouse, even a lizard. I have worked on a farm and had a childhood friend who’s parents bread birds and I you can see the artificial selection at work, is it really a hard stretch to say environmental factors could select even better than the whim of a human?
The Discovery Institute has compiled a list of scientists who dissent from Darwinism.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=660
I can’t vouch for all of them and there are some on the list who were surprised to find their names there. One well-known dissenter is is biochemist Michael Behe who teaches at Lehigh Universtity. He certainly hasn’t been expelled although the university has issued a disclaimer about his opinions.
The reason evolution is so widely accepted in science is the overwhelming level evidence from many branches of science. Scientists are not required to believe anything. Research gets published after peer review to ensure it is at least legitimate and not to make sure it follows any dogma. Anyone who believes the nonsense in Expelled is ignorant of how science works.
Theists know they will eventually be asked to prove that god exists, and they try to avoid it by bringing up the subject of evolution instead. They much prefer to have an atheist trying to defend evolution, rather than themselves trying to defend their religion.
But I short circuit that ploy by happily (and truthfully) informing them that I know nothing about evolution and I don’t care whether it works or not. I may not know how evolution works, but that’s no surprise, I don’t know how my refrigerator works either…
So now the ball is back in the theist’s court, and they can no longer avoid presenting their proofs for god’s existence.
As a scientist, I’d like to say “That kind of persecution would never happen”, but I’m not 100% sure that’d be true.
I’d be more likely to say “That kind of persecution would never succeed in the long run. If evolution were false, it’d have been debunked by now.” The reward for being amongst the first to disprove something would act as a force somewhat analogous to the Streisand effect.
I am an Atheist and a skeptic, so if the whole scientific method found that God did exist, then I would only be a skeptic. But which God would they show made me?
I accept evolution, because I read books of Richard Dawkins. ;-)
But to be serious, I accepted evolution before, because I understood the process to build the nature we see and was simpler than to accept a creator. And the theory of a creator has the flaw, that natural beings are not perfect. I myself use glasses and sometimes I’m ill. That doesn’t match good with the image of an almighty creator.
Eventually, all of us need to trust some sort of authority to gain knowledge. It’s all a matter whose word do you take for authority - the scientific community that experimented, observed, learned, understood and predicted various phenomena, or leaders of your faith who mostly say what they believe without any evidence other than “It’s written in the holy book, and God made it so”.
Life is too complicated and the scientific subjects are so numerous, that we can’t simply know everything from experimenting ourselves. Probably hundreds of thousands of human hours were spent on scientific experimentation, analysis, developing theories and models and verifying it all. That’s why we have the scientific method that we can trust because it is very rigorous and it is constantly under inspection through a magnifying glass from other scientists that just want to prove something wrong and get their Nobel prize (kidding, they also want to get a book deal) ;)
Each person chooses whose authority to take. Rational people would take the word of the scientific community, because scientists that are qualified in a specific subject will know what they’re talking about more than people who have no qualification is that specific subject. They study the details for years to understand, and if anyone’s word can be taken on authority (but not blindly on faith, always demand explanations and proofs!), scientists would be the ones to be authoritative each in his own domain.
Any person can go and look for the science, read and learn, and understand how it works. There are many figures of authority (scientists) who give lectures and explain how it all works, publish books with references to studies, and some subject may be extremely complicated, but it’s not taken on faith. You can take for example the Higgs boson particle that makes sense mathematically, but until it is observed in an experiment, physicists will speculate about its existence but they won’t claim that it’s in fact a physical particle/wave that is sitting out there. Once a mathematical concept is actually observed, and the experiment is performed by many scientists independently, only then the concept becomes a proven fact of science, and only for as long as it isn’t proven to be false by further inquiry.
Usually when science accepts a hypothesis and it becomes a scientific theory (a.k.a. scientific fact), it means that it’s true, at least to explain the specific phenomenon that it was supposed to. Science always improves on itself. Evolution is a scientific fact by all imaginable criteria, although there are debates about specific mechanisms. But as it seems after 150 years, Evolution stands true in any test, prediction and observation that it was put through, it will not be discarded. Of course, a deeper understanding on the mechanisms of selections will arise, but it will not negate evolutionary process as a whole, as we understand it.
Religious people take it on faith from figures of authority (priests, preachers, etc.), but unlike in science, these people often have no real qualification in the scientific subjects that they deny. Anyone can say that “Evolution is not true”, but there wasn’t anyone who falsified it yet.
We trust science in matters that we can observe, like the fact that the earth is round, and goes around the sun, that gravity attracts objects, etc. Some things are harder to see by yourself, like evolution, quantum mechanics, maybe even global warming. It doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
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