The non-war over evolution

Here's an article discussing why Utah hasn't seemed to be as 'active' in the war against teaching evolution in schools, as other highly religious states have.

I take this to be a good sign, that (for once) Utahns in general have learned to keep a little bit of perspective on some issues, without uneducated knee-jerk reactions...

My mission president, an archaelogy professor, can tell you as much about evolutionary theory as anyone.  Yet, he also believes in 'creationism'--that the Earth and the universe were created through the guidance of higher beings...and he doesn't feel the need to choose one or the other, nor explain why he can 'believe' in both.

Evolution is taught in BYU biology classes...and creationism is taught in the religion classes. I, myself--along with many other BYU students--never felt the need to explain this 'contradiction', nor do the professors on either side feel the need to 'disprove' the other in order to make their points.

Early readers of the site know I don't feel evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive theories.  Neither, it seems, do Utah students (or their parents) for the most part, who haven't extensively gotten involved in the debate over which one should be taught in schools.  They learn about evolution in science class, and creationism in seminary.  What's the problem?

Science can explain, at most, 10% of the workings of the universe.  The problem comes when you make guesses as to what the other 90% is based solely on that 10%.  There's no reason to assume all true scientific principles and all true religious principles can't be circumscribed into one big circle of "Truth"--in fact, by definition, they must be.  They're just working from opposite directions...

Like "homosexuality", people frequently use (and argue over) the word 'evolution' without really defining what it means.  Evolution meaning 'natural selection' is scientific fact--it has been demonstrated conclusively that humans and other plants and animals can adapt dynamically to their environments and become 'better' over time.  Scientists often use 'evolution' to represent 'natural selection' in their assertions that evolution is fact and undeniable--and, in fact, not very controversial... 

Yet, 'evolution' is also frequently used in a much larger scope, referring to the theories behind the origin of species--where humans and all other forms of life ultimately came from and how they were created.  Now we've gone beyond talking about how zebras developed stripes to why there are zebras in the first place...

When evolution is confined to natural selection, there is no problem.  Yet, using natural selection as the be-all-end-all explanation of where all life came from in the first place is where evolutionists start biting off more than they can chew. 

If giraffes, for example, developed long necks because it was easier to find food or (more likely) because longer necked males were more able to dominate shorter necked males and thus have better mating opportunities, that makes total sense...but shouldn't there then be a multitude of short-neck, 1/2 size neck, and 3/4 size neck giraffes in the fossil record?  Since evolutionary processes take a long time to change, shouldn't there be plenty of 'intermediary forms' for all animals as they gradually changed over time?  After all, the change from 'proto-giraffes' to long-necked giraffes supposedly happened after the age of the dinosaurs, and we have plenty of their bones lying around...  Has anyone seen the remains of a 'proto-giraffe', though?  Yet, evolution as the explanation for the origin of all species requires their existence...

And, of course, on the other side of things, creationism (in its pure, literally-translated-from-the-Bible form) raises questions of its own.  How about those dinosaurs?  Don't see any mention of them in Genesis...  How does carbon-dating techniques line up with the Earth being created in six 24-hour periods?

Now, of course, you can think of theories that can answer both sets of questions...yet, curiously, people don't seem to try.  It's either one or the other.  This wouldn't be bothersome, except that both sides, instead of admitting what they don't know, continues to guess...and hold their guesses as binding truth.

The article mentions that human and chimpanzee DNA is 98.6% identical.  This is fine as established scientific fact.  Yet concluding that this 'proves' that humans and apes must have evolved from a common ancestor implies that no other theory exists that could explain how the DNA could have been so similar.  And if they did evolve from a common ancestor, this does not prove that it was not part of the creation process by a intelligent Creator.

The article quotes a statement that the theory of Intelligent Design is "overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence".  Wait...a theory that says basically "there is higher intelligence involved in the creation of the world, and life on it" is supposedly contradicted by scientific evidence?  That means science has proven (overwhelmingly!) that there is no Creator in the universe, and that no theory involved a Creator can be created to explain everything in the universe.  That's a little bit of an overstatement, don't you think?  I must have missed the issue of National Geographic where they proved that God does not exist...

A common fallacy among scientists:
(1) If God exists, he must have characteristics X, Y, and Z.
(2) I can't find any evidence that something with characteristics X, Y, Z exists.
(3) Therefore God does not exist.

This makes a number of errors:
(1) That absence of proof is proof of absence
(2) That X,Y,Z are capable of being detected by scientific means, anyway.
(3) The assumption that their principle #1 is accurate to begin with--it doesn't consider the option that God exists, but is different than the 'requirements' they arbitrarily defined to begin the experiment.

These kind of arguments imply from the beginning that science can know everything--and therefore if it can't know God, then God doesn't exist.  Certain things are beyond the realm of science--if mankind really does have a 'spirit' that continues existing after death, made up of a 'purer' form of matter (as in the D&C), then how would science know?  If science can't know if there's such a thing as 'spirit'--you can't compose an experiment to test for it, in other words--yet could still be true, then we've found a limitation of science.  And what good are scientific theories about things that can't be proven or disproven through science?  Yet, that doesn't stop people from making assumptions...

Also from the article:

There is no scientific controversy over evolution, argue these scientists. And to detractors who argue that "evolution is just a theory," they point out that in science "theory" does not mean hunch. "A theory in science," says BYU biology assistant professor Marta Adair, "is not like your theory about why BYU has a lousy basketball team. A theory in science means something nobody has been able to disprove."

Interesting, that here a 'theory' is defined as not something that's been proven, but something that hasn't been disproven.  Science hasn't proven that all life evolved from single-cell organisms, nor that single-cell organisms evolved from nothing--that's impossible to prove, in fact, because it would require an Earth-sized laboratory with the exact same conditions that existed in the Earth's beginning.  Saying that it hasn't been 'disproven' drops the standards of proof considerably.  My theory that "God exists and He created the world" hasn't been 'disproven', either--and if that's the only criteria for acceptance by science, then science shouldn't have a problem letting creationism be taught in schools...at least until they can prove no higher intelligences exist in the universe.  As Spongebob Squarepants says:  "Good luck with that!"

[Side note:  the article refers directly to Gayle Ruzicka, president of the Utah Eagle Forum, as a 'conservative gadfly'.  A gadfly--according to my dictionary--is "a persistent, irritating critic; a nuisance".  If that's a title Ms. Ruzicka uses to refer to herself, that's one thing--but that seems to be a fairly judgmental and un-objective term for a news reporter to use in describing one of the subjects of her story...]