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Science consists entirely of theories -- tentative, fluid proposals based on people's best bets for how the world works. It is because they are not set in stone that these ideas have a chance of being nudged closer and closer toward describing reality, or discarded in favor of something better.

Last week, two days after the Kansas school board decision, paleontologists published evidence that may push back the appearance of complex life -- single cells with nuclei -- by as much as a billion years. Whenever setbacks like the one in Kansas occur, scientists leap forth to point out the fallacy of the creationist position: There is no compelling reason to single out the evolution of life or the cosmos as being less than absolute. It would be just as sensible for school boards to affix a warning inside physics books: ''No one has directly observed the detailed substructure of matter.

Therefore, any statement about it being made of atoms should be considered as theory, not fact. The problem is that the dynamic view of science doesn't come across strongly enough in the classroom. For reasons of expediency, scientific theories are presented as done deals. Little appreciation is conveyed for the intellectual struggle that went into interpreting the data or examining the assumptions -- always open to question -- that lurk behind the experiments.

Lost from most explications is the exhilarating possibility that a theory that seems undeniable today could be overturned tomorrow. With science presented almost as though it were received wisdom, it's little wonder that some legislators and school board members confuse it with a competing religion, and misconstrue a religious belief like creationism as an alternate scientific theory.

They're encouraged to do so by a new wave of creationists who, in an act of intellectual jujitsu, promote their belief in absolute knowledge by invoking the relativistic arguments of post-modern philosophy: While creationism is built on belief in a caring, all-powerful, constantly intervening creator, who completed his work just thousands of years ago, evolution has its own tenets of faith. The most fundamental is the belief that the world consists of insentient matter unfolding on its own over vast eons of time -- eons that can only be inferred from indirect evidence.

One is still free to believe in a deity, but it's not a necessary part of the equations. Among the other fundamentals of science is the doctrine of uniformity, that the physical laws are the same now as they were in the past. And this is closely related to another unprovable assumption, Occam's razor: Given two explanations for a phenomenon, the simpler one is more likely to be true. If one chooses to reject these assumptions, then evidence taken to support evolution, like radiocarbon dating, can be rearranged to support creationism.


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Viewed this way, science may seem like just another religion -- based on things one chooses to believe because they seem deep down to be true. But giving creationism equal time in the classroom would undermine the comparison. GRANTED that it is possible, starting from naturalism or supernaturalism, to draw different pictures of the world, which one, the lesson plan could ask, seems more ad hoc, more a case of special pleading?

Can you envision evidence that would cause science to support a much younger Earth? The answer is yes. It would take very convincing data coming from many different directions, but the mechanisms used to measure geological time are not unshakable truths. Then the teacher could ask, Is there any conceivable experiment that would cause creationists to accept a four-billion-year-old planet or the evolution of human life from a single-celled ancestor? Does this refute the theory of evolution? No, not at all.

Antievolutionism and Creationism in the United States | National Center for Science Education

Natural selection can only randomly favour the best of what is available, it does not purposefully turn all living organisms into one super creature. It would be really convenient if humans could photosynthesise; hunger could be immediately cured by standing in the sun and the much-sought miracle diet would have been found: stay inside. But alas, the genetic ability to photosynthesise has not appeared in animals. Still, selection of the best option possible has led to an amazing diversity of forms remarkably well adapted to their environments, even if not perfect.

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A common argument in favour of creationism is the evolution of the eye. A half developed eye would serve no function, so how can natural selection slowly create a functional eye in a step-wise manner? Darwin himself suggested that the eye could have had its origins in organs with different functions.

Organs that allow detection of light could then have been favoured by natural selection, even if it did not provide full vision. These ideas have been proven correct many years later by researchers studying primitive light-sensing organs in animals. In molluscs like snails and segmented worms, light-sense cells spread across the body surface can tell the difference between light and dark.

It is important to make it clear that evolution is not a theory about the origin of life. It is a theory to explain how species change over time.

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Contrary to what many people think, there is also little conflict between evolution and most common religions. Pope Francis recently reiterated that a belief in evolution isn't incompatible with the Catholic faith. Going further, the reverend Malcom Brown from the Church of England stated that " natural selection , as a way of understanding physical evolutionary processes over thousands of years, makes sense.

I fully agree. Explore further. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article. More from Biology and Medical.


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    Exploring Faith and Reason: The Reconciliation of Christianity and Biological Evolution

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