Yet Another Anti-Creation Straw Man

Holden Thorpe, chair of chemistry at the prestigious University of North Carolina, today in the NY Times offers yet another noisy but ill-conceived discussion of the bane of "creationism" in public education.

His first argument is this: "creationism" can't explain the commercially exploitable phenomena that evolution can explain.

Dr. Thorpe is to be forgiven, since as a chemist, he is neither a life scientist nor, more importantly, a philosopher of science. Of course neither is SWNID. But we will carry on nevertheless, not expecting the Newspaper of Record to invite us to opine on subjects like this.

As usual Thorpe argues that what evolution can explain, design cannot. Specifically, bacteria and humans have some of the same strands of DNA. This is consistent with evolution, but not with creation, pontificates Thorpe, as a designer would never have done such a thing.

Why? Because the similarities make it very hard to create medications that will kill the bacteria and not the people whom the bacteria infect.

Well, what to make of such an argument?

This is, of course, no real argument against design. A designer who finds a particular design useful may use that design repeatedly. He may even have specific reasons for binding the whole of his creation together with similar discrete bits of design He may even want it to be difficult to kill bacteria and not harm other creatures.

So in fact what Thorpe offers is the assertion that he doesn't like the design that he sees.

Most anti-design arguments run this way. "That isn't design" means "I prefer a different design."

Thorpe's second and more politically potent argument is that the teaching of creation in some schools will lead to ignorance of real science, even hostility to it, and so an absence of wealth in those areas of the country.

Of course, such would be closer to true if anyone was mandating no teaching of evolution whatsoever. Ideologues like Thorpe apparently believe that the creationist conspiracy is so powerful that if its perverse notions are uttered in a schoolroom, it instantly mesmerizes every student, turning all into bigoted, antiscientific, religious ignoramuses.

But we'd like to turn that argument around. To wit:

If the science establishment continues to wage a social and political war against religion and religious people, people of faith will not pursue careers in the sciences. Many of those people of faith being also people of intelligence, brains will be drained from the sciences, to the impoverishment of the many who would have benefited from the research they could have carried out.

So there it is. Hostility to faith in the science classroom has the potential to make us poorer and sicker in the future.