But essentially if you look at a bunch of criteria for what constitutes a scientific theory--irrespective of whether those criteria are even real criteria for what constitutes science--you'd have to be forced to conclude that creation science is science, it's just really bad science.
https://webspace.utexas.edu/kal698/science at the bar.pdf
I'd broadly identify with Laudan's position.
Well, notwithstanding that this article is discussing "scientific knowledge", not "theory", the definition it uses:
"(I) It is guided by natural law; (2) it has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) it is testable against the empirical world; (4) its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and (5) it is falsifiable."
I accept this definition for the purpose of this discussion. We don't have a definitional problem.
", the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species." In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests
Creationists do not agree that they have been tested or that they have failed those tests. For example, if we take radioactive decay dating as a testing apparatus for the first claim in the abridged quote. Some YECs argue that radioactive decay dating simply isn't valid. Others argue a "trickster god" type hypothesis where it is valid, but the apparently falsified claims are true regardless.
I would agree that if a hypothetical Creationist accepted all of our building blocks (that protons and neutrons and electrons exist, the elements exist, that things behave in certain ways, that radioactive decay occurs, that we can mathematically calculate rates of radioactive decay, etc) but simply disagreed on the age of the earth, we would test the age of the earth using those building blocs, their claim would be falsified, and thus it would be bad science.
The problem is that in reality, any such Creationist would have disagreed with building blocks heading back further and further. For example, a YEC might yield everything about radioactive decay but then argue that some universal constant has changed in some unknown and unspecified way and so while all current objects have apparent ages, some past event invalidates any potential evidence that could falsify their statements.
So I don't agree that Creationism, as proposed to be taught, is bad science. It is not science. Creationism could easily be bad science.
. Over and over again, he finds Creationism and its advocates "unscientific" because they have "refuse[d] to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of their investigation." In point of fact, the charge is mistaken
The criticism here is correct. Creationism has materially changed through the years.
But he misunderstands the way in which things change. While proponents of conventional science are willing and able to trace the intellectual forebears of their theories--that is to say, they can state a historical hypothesis, show which predictive power it had, show what it was not able to explain, show which adaptations were made to it to strengthen it, etc; we can easily trace from the beginnings of heliocentrism to our currently cosmological understandings; we can easily trace from Newtonian mechanics to relativistic mechanics--no such process seems to occur in Creationism as proposed. Scientific theories start small and expand as required to explain situations with increasingly more nuance. Those that cannot adapt are thrown out wholesale (for example pre-germ theories of disease, lamarckian evolution, etc). It's by definition that scientific theories start small; parsimony dictates that we find the smallest possible explanation, and expand it only as we need to to gain predictive power or explanatory scope.
Creationism starts huge ("All can be explained by the Creator") and shrinks every time a position is held to be untenable. This is characterized by skeptics as the "God of the Gaps" argument. It doesn't take a genius to show how such an argument is asymptotic. There will be no situation where the final gap can be closed. There's no planck constant for minimum creation explanation.
I agree with his criticism that both science and creation change over fairly long periods of time, that individuals can be dogmatic, and that there's a process of socio-cultural change mediating scientific research. I don't have a strong background in philosophy of science so if I'm abusing jargon the way creationists abuse "theory", please correct me gently.
Even worse, the ad hominem charge of dogmatism against Creationism egregiously confuses doctrines with the proponents of those doctrines. Since no law mandates that creationists should be invited into the classroom, it is quite irrelevant whether they themselves are close-minded. The Arkansas statute proposed that Creationism be taught, not that creationists should teach it. What counts is the epistemic status of Creationism, not the cognitive idiosyncrasies of the creationists.
I do not agree with this. In every case that Creationism laws or school board rulings have been tested, there were specific creationists with specific texts. Creationism is not an agent in American politics, it is a front made of very specific people. More broadly, the entire process of resolving policy disputes in America is driven by cognitive idiosyncrasies. Laws do not collapse on their own accord, they are challenged by people with standing in jurisdictions with standing to hear the cases or overturned by specific courts. Disenfranchised groups do not obtain rights out of nowhere, they specifically lobby for their case and their case is used as a concrete example of an theoretical question.
To give you a specific example, if a college student proclaimed that he had a religious duty to do something that was prohibited by law, before a balancing test was applied to the action itself, the authenticity of his religious expression would be determined. In the same way, I cannot declare myself to be a tax exempt religion. Courts have a modulation process to determine this.
In all of these cases, specific creationist groups are representing a specific idiosyncratic creationism in court. Making their case legally relies on their idiosyncracies. Imagine the alternative: A court rules that a "Scientific Creationism" can be taught in theory, but that certain idiosyncratic ways of defining or teaching it was forbidden. This ruling is meaningless, since each implementation would be tested until there was some sort of clear test defined, as above or elsewhere.
So defending the general from an attack on the specific doesn't go anywhere as far as I'm concerned.
I remain unconvinced; the type of creationism proposed to be taught in American schools by these people is not merely bad science, it's not science. I think the article's best case scenario would be that "There exists a definition of creationism, irrespective of whether or not it has any actual practitioners, that meets a definition of scientific. However it is bad science."
