As shifting ideas began to catch the air in the early twentieth century, new laws were introduced across several states in America. These laws were protective of tradition as much as they were of religion, and they all did one key thing: ban the teaching of evolution. For years they sat as garrisons, defending against the encroachment of science and critical thought.
It took decades of silence and repression before the constitution – and the nation’s founding principles – reasserted themselves. It happened with the 1968 Supreme Court Case Epperson v. Arkansas (Arkansas having a strange central place in much of this story) where it was ruled that the state had passed an illegal restriction: “The law's effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read.” The First and Fourteenth Amendments had been violated, and so all such laws were abolished.
Unpleasant but not unusual, this was what most of human history has looked like: the denial of error, the refusal to change, and the suppression of heretics. But it is with the next step in the battle that things get interesting, and epistemological. In 1981, Arkansas sharpened its tools and passed Act 590, or otherwise titled: “Balanced Treatment for Creation Science and Evolution Science Act.”
Missing from that name is the sophistication of what was being done. The protectors of religious tradition weren’t just watering down their demands to make them less of an infringement upon basic liberties, but rather they had been listening closely to the language of their enemies. So as they insisted upon Creationism being taught in classrooms on an equal footing with evolution, they were claiming something important about the nature of knowledge: both theories were equally scientific!
The onus was now upon the other side to say clearly and definitively what science was, and what it was not! A question that had been criminally neglected for centuries (save for a few parochial thinkers at a few parochial universities), and which most practicing scientists couldn’t answer. Something was clearly different, but what was it? What did that demarcation look like?
A year later in 1982, the new law was challenged in the case McLean v. Arkansas. Philosophers were suddenly being consulted for fast and convincing thoughts, and Judge William Overton was tasked with the unenviable job of deciding the “essential characteristics of science”. The ruling was correct and commendable, but as far as Larry Laudan was concerned, it was also “reached for all the wrong reasons and by a chain of argument which is hopelessly suspect.”
Overton saw science as being: “(1) It is guided by natural law; (2) it has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) it is testable against the empirical world; (4) its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and (5) it is falsifiable.” The first two of these, are categories of “law-likeness”, the last three amount to the very Popperian position that scientific theories be testable and falsifiable – that there is some reasonable way to prove them wrong!
At different points in Overton’s ruling, Creationism is convicted of being dogmatic, non-tentative, stubborn, close-minded, and self-referential; all ways of tiptoeing around the harder line being drawn between science and the rest: Creationism was unfalsifiable! Looking in, Popperians of the day must have been happy, even if no explicit credit was given to Popper or critical rationalism. Laudan was a lone voice from the world of science and philosophy daring to say not only that something had gone wrong with the court’s decision, but also that creationists were being unfairly slandered by it.
The Old and New Testaments are rich with factual claims about the world, about the age of the earth, its geological formation, the variability of species on it, as well as more specific events such as the Noachian flood. All of which are testable, making Creationism falsifiable by the failure of any such test. But after this brief restoration of character, Laudan is finished being a friend to the losing team, and the reason for his defence is let loose: creation-science has committed itself to testable claims, those claims have been tested, and it has failed each and every one of them! “By arguing that the tenets of Creationism are neither testable nor falsifiable, Judge Overton… deprives science of its strongest argument against Creationism.”
Laudan has always had a fascinating way about him, someone uniquely able to irritate and anger the Popperian community: they think he is ignoring their arguments, while he thinks those arguments are unbearably fragile, never connecting with the real world beyond academia. It is true, Laudan acknowledges, that some of what Creationism professes to be is in fact untestable, such as “the claim that man emerged by a direct supernatural act of creation”. But these claims are only untestable in isolation. And that is an impossibly high standard for us to insist upon. “Many scientific claims are not testable in isolation” and are never condemned for it. What matters is that the larger theory, and its consequences, remain testable.
The charge of dogmatism against Creationism (or in Overton’s words, they have “refuse[d] to change it regardless of the evidence”) is as unhelpful as it is untrue. The mistake here happens when people confuse the doctrine with the proponents of the doctrine. The Arkansas law insisted only that Creationism be taught in classrooms, not that Creationists should teach it. The difference matters a lot more than it might appear, and moves in large steps towards making the theory falsifiable for those students listening.
But something remains here for Laudan, something that is being allowed to slip by between all the legal-speak: Creationism has, and does, change! Most adherents today accept greater variability across species, accept challenges and alterations to the story of the Noachian flood, and accept that other scientific discoveries have implications for their theory. These people do not think the same things as their counterparts did fifty years ago – they debate how to assimilate new evidence, and they revise their ideas when necessary.
So if Creationism isn’t as dogmatic as the ruling suggests, what about Overton’s fourth principle of good science being tentative? Creationism might change over the years, and might even be responsive and testable against the empirical world, but with each new position and claim comes an unhealthy sense of absolute certainty. Laudan is having none of this: look at Newton he says, look at the followers of Newton, look at every great person in every great era of science and you will find them “regard[ing] some of their beliefs as so fundamental as not to be open to repudiation or negotiation.” Scratch just a little way into the language, and the happy, ego-fulfilling claims that science likes to make for itself begin to look “exceedingly weak”.
Acknowledging that he might be “nit-picking” a bit here, Laudan is convinced that there is a better way forward for science and knowledge creation. A better, and less convoluted, entry requirement in the form of a question: who has the stronger evidence and the more robust argument, Creationism or evolution by natural selection?
And as simple as it may appear, Laudan’s thesis stands! What is the best way to combat creation-science? Disprove the empirical claims it makes for itself, or simply “pretend that it makes no such claims at all” and act as though the label unscientific should be enough to put the whole messy affair to bed. “However noble the motivation, bad philosophy makes for bad law.”