The Limits of Science

Unable to mount an effective scientific argument, champions of Intelligent Design and older forms of creationism resort to rhetoric. They claim, for instance, that evolution is actually ideology, spawned from a cult of naturalism, which claims that God has no role in the universe and events have only natural causes. Darwinists “have adhered to the myth out of self‑interest and a zealous desire to put down God,” writes Phillip Johnson, a law professor and outspoken creationist. Johnson claims that evolutionary biologists refuse to consider the possibility that supernatural intervention has influenced the universe and are blind to the weaknesses of evolution. In a fair hearing–in which .divine intervention could be considered as a possible explanation for life’s history–Johnson claims that creationism would win.

Yet science, whether it takes the form of chemistry, physics, or evolutionary biology, can explain only the lawlike regularities of the world. If God were to change the mass of protons every morning, it would be impossible for physicists to make any predictions about how atoms work. The scientific method does not claim that events can have only natural causes but that the only causes that we can understand scientifically are natural ones. As powerful as the scientific method may be, it must be mute about things beyond its scope. Supernatural forces are, by definition, above the laws of nature, and thus beyond the scope of science.

Johnson and other creationists direct their fury at evolutionary biology, but in effect they are attacking every branch of science. When microbiologists study an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis, they do not research the possibility that it is an act of God. When astrophysicists try to figure out the sequence of events by which a primordial cloud condensed into our solar system, they do not simply draw a big box between the hazy cloud and the well‑formed planets and write inside it, “Here a miracle happened.” When meteorologists fail to predict the path of a hurricane, they do not claim that God’s will pushed it off course.

Science cannot simply cede the unknown in nature to the divine. If it did, there would be no science at all. As University of Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne puts it, “If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance ‘God.’ ”

“Creation science” in any form doesn’t influence the way practicing scientists study the history of life. Paleontologists continue to discover fossils crucial to our understanding of how humans, whales, and other animals came into being. Developmental biologists continue to listen to the symphony of embryo‑building genes to understand how the Cambrian explosion took place. Geochemists continue to uncover isotopic clues about when life first appeared on Earth. Virologists continue to discover the strategies that viruses such as HIV evolve in order to outwit their hosts. For all of them, evolutionary biology, not creationism, remains the foundation of their work.

And yet, despite this failure as a science, creationists are trying as hard as ever to gain control of the way American public schools teach science. For the most part, their work has gone unnoticed by the public at large, but in 1999 a scandal in Kansas brought creationism back to national headlines.