Eliminating the Impossible
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? —Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four, Arthur Conan Doyle
When you look at the case against biblical creationism, you find that it’s eminently scientific, in that it’s based on massive, mutually-supporting evidence, math applied to that evidence, and logical analysis of what the results mean. Evidence, math, and logic: the staples of scientific analysis. And these evidence-based, anti-Genesis arguments aren’t simply vague points against the likelihood of Genesis being true — they’re devastating to the Bible stories’ mere plausibility.
When you look at the arguments for biblical creation, however, they’re of a very different character. When they’re based on evidence, the evidence is weak, or interpreted in a very tortured, indirect way. And at most, the evidence can be made to seem somewhat supportive, or at least compatible, with the Bible story.
And many other frequently advanced arguments for biblical creation aren’t based on evidence at all, but instead on philosophical considerations. For example, many people think that the world would be a weird, nonsensical place if humanity was put here with no guidebook about why we’re here, what we’re supposed to be doing, and what comes next. Then, once the existence of said guidebook is philosophically affirmed, the Bible can be identified as the mostly likely candidate for such a creator-given manual.
Same View, Opposite Direction
What I find fascinating is that you see pretty much exactly the same situation when you look at Darwinism — specifically, at the claim that random mutation and natural selection generated the complex biological adaptations in our biosphere. The modern arguments against Darwin’s thesis are eminently scientific, in that they cite massive evidence, math applied to that evidence, and logic to determine the plausibility of the thesis, and find it to be not even remotely plausible.
But when you look at the arguments for Darwinism, you find evidence that either weakly supports the theory, or maybe is just compatible with it. And you find a whole lot of philosophical argumentation regarding “how science works,” how evolution “makes sense of the world,” etc.
However Improbable
I want to be a scientific person. And that means, I think, that I should take a thousand times as seriously evidence-math-logic based arguments about the implausibility of a thesis, as compared to spotty, cherry-picked, supporting evidence, and evidence-and-math-free, philosophical arguments about what properly ought to be discovered. So to be scientific, I must dismiss both the Bible and The Origin Of Species as bogus — though quite popular — beliefs.
So what’s left when the impossible has been eliminated? The truth, however improbable,* appears to be that Earthly species and their complex adaptations were intelligently planned by some sort of gods who wrote new sections of DNA just as a human genetic engineer might. And they didn’t give us a guidebook. They didn’t tell us why they made us, nor what we’re supposed to do, nor what we will experience next after we die.
They just set us loose in this universe to do what we will.
*I assume here that by “improbable,” Doyle’s Holmes actually meant “strange,” “unfamiliar,” or “unpalatable” — not “improbable” in the statistical sense of the word.
© 2012 Darel Rex Finley | design by 