After watching the umpteenth discussion between Richard Dawkins and some random creationist on youtube I concluded three things: 1) Richard Dawkins has infinite patience and belief in the wisdom of humanity, 2) Richard Dawkins is too polite to be a good debater, and 3) though a staunch believer in the effectiveness of the scientific model, he does not seem to demand this attitude from his fellow scientists. All of these points come up in every single debate where prof. Dawkins comes up with argument after argument after argument and the only thing the creationist has to do is repeating the line "I don't see the evidence, show me the evidence".
Apparently it has come to the point where prof. Dawkins does not want to enter into a debate with creationists anymore, because he has finally realized the futility of these debates. Ofcourse in creationistland (right next to middle earth it is said) this refusal is seen as confirmation that they are right because prof. Dawkins cannot win the argument. They are ofcourse wrong, for the reason prof. Dawkins (and anyone else for that matter) can't win this debate, is that he is the only one trying to debate. The creationist is not interested in arguments or evidence or logical reasoning, they are interested in being right. I shall try to show their inability to reason and I urge anyone to call them out on this while you have a discussion. I will start by shortly explaining the scientific model.
the scientific model
Since creationism wants to be seen as a scientific model, it has to play by it's rules. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. The experimental studies must be repeatable, to account for both anomalies and biases. A scientific theory which encompasses wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure.Scientists set out to falsify their hypotheses, instead of verifying them. This is done because it is both a time-saving method (if a hypothesis is proven to be false, oftentime the theory must be altered or even discarded), and a way of diminishing all sorts of biases that could appear when trying to verify a hypothesis.
The problems with creationism start with the basic principles scientific model. In my opinion the inability of creationism to be a scientific theory should disqualify them from the debate, but I'll pretend like I don't feel this way. Creationists tend to start with the conclusion that their theory is true and then look for the evidence supporting that conclusion. Furthermore, evidence that suggest either a hypothesis is false, or another hypothesis might serve as a better explanation, is not being explored. I will give an example of how this works by the hypothesis of "miracle healing". Creationists use unexplained recovery of mostly cancerpatients as evidence for the existence of a benevolent God. They believe that if you are a devout believer, God will cure all your ailments and afflictions. So there are multiple hypotheses here.
1) since God is benevolent, he cures people from ailments
2) since God is omnipotent, any ailment can be cured
3) since believe in God is both optional and a condition of being cured by miracles, you'd suspect a higher number of people with faith will be cured than people without faith.
Of these 3 hypotheses, the third one poses a real problem, which is oftentimes exploited by creationists as an escape route. Since being healed by God requires you to believe in God, and since there is no way of measuring believe in God that does not rely solely on people's given answers, this hypothesis provides a problem for the measurability of the concept of miracle healing. Consider the case where some self-proclaimed religious people are cured miraculously, and many others aren't. The creationist would say that those that weren't healed were not true believers. Since there is no way to measure this correctly, the entire concept already falls apart.
For the sake of argument however, let's pretend that it doesn't yet. Let's discuss miraculous healings. It is true that sometimes cancerpatients go into remission and their cancer might even disappear entirely. Doctors sometimes have no solid explanation as to why this happens. The creationist sees this as evidence for the existence of God. There are 2 things that are wrong with this conclusion.
1) the absence of an explanation from a medical proffessional does not warrant the conclusion that God did it. First of all, our knowledge is not omnipresent but is slowly growing. It is entirely conceivable that in the future the remission of cancer in patients can be predicted, or even ameliorated. 2) the fact that miracles only seem to occur with diseases like cancer, which happens at a cellular level and is very hard to monitor, makes this a very premature conclusion. If God was to cure people from ailments, why focus only on cancerpatients? A much presented example of a group of people who have NEVER been cured are amputees. This is remarkable since religious based war have in the past resulted in many amputees. The evidence therefore points towards a more earthly conclusion, which I am sure scientists will eventually discover.
The theory of Evolution
The implications of Darwin's theory of evolution are vast and numerous. Not only does the theory clearly show that all life on earth shares a common ancestor, it also shows that life has been around for a good 2 billion years. The theory of evolution is a thorn in the side of the devout believer, since the holy bible says that men and animals were all created the same day, some 6000 years ago. The response to the theory of evolution by creationists is that they are constantly trying to debunk the evidence. Again, two mistakes are made: 1) Creationists seem to think that the scientific community does not have a critical attitude towards the theory of evolution. This shows a disspiriting lack of knowledge about the scientific process and about the literally millions of experiments, which ALL support the theory of evolution. 2) We've seen this one before, even if they were to disprove the theory of evolution, this would not mean that their theory of intelligent design were true.
What goes wrong in a discussion?
Clearly, there is no argument worthy of mention. There is no disagreement in the scientific community about the theory of evolution: it is accepted as a truth. This is the case because 1) the theory neatly explains and predicts an enormous range of phenomena, and 2) although millions of attempts to falsify the theory have been made, not a single one succeeded in doing so. In contrast, the theory of creationism is unfalsifiable and makes no predicitions whatsoever.
How on earth is it then that when a debate is being held the creationist is always the one on the offensive and the scientist the one on the defensive? There is a fairly simple answer here, which is: because the scientists let them. The scientist should be the one asking the creationist to show him the evidence, since there does not appear to be one. When the scientist presents his evidence, he should not allow the creationist to make the point that he doesn't see the evidence, when clearly this is from 1) a limited understanding of the theory, evidence, or the scientific process or 2) he bluntly refuses to see it. If the creationist doesn't understand, debating is pointless. If the creationist refuses to accept the presented evidence, debating is pointless.
Prof. Dawkins was right in concluding that debating is pointless, because that is exactly what it is. I only wish that he would have stuck to his guns and exposed the creationist' ignorance and lies before pulling the plug.
Let us not forget that the creationist is the one trying to gain scientific acceptation, not the other way around. You want in, you gotta play by the rules.
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