Evidence: Creationists Are Doing It Wrong
We’re going to illustrate a common misuse of evidence by resorting to one of my favorite rhetorical tropes: the television police procedural, or the Law & Order example.
The tough but secretly sensitive detectives of Law & Order: Zoo Patrol are on the case. A rare primate, a librarian orangutan, has been found murdered in his book-filled enclosure at the Manhattan Animal Sanctuary. The orangutan was recently acquired by the zoo, after he was confiscated in a raid of an illegal animal smuggling ring.
The Zoo Patrol detectives have two prime suspects: the smuggler, who’s out on bail and looking for revenge, and the husband of the zoo’s head primatologist, who has exhibited increasing hostility toward the animals that are occupying all of his wife’s time.
During an initial interview, the animal smuggler is extremely hostile. It turns out that he was busted because the orangutan dialed 911. In response to the orangutan’s frantic “ook, oook,” the dispatcher sent police, who arrested the smuggler and confiscated his animals. The smuggler is looking at a 20 year prison sentence.
The detectives start digging into the smuggler’s life. They [long, boring description redacted], and discover that the smuggler has an airtight alibi. (Since this is Law & Order, he was probably cheating on his wife/boyfriend/Real Doll, and lied to keep her/him/it from finding out.) There’s no way he could have broken into the zoo and killed the orangutan.
The impossibly slim and beautiful Assistant District Attorney looks at the detective’s report. She knows the smuggler is innocent. She looks up, eyes narrowing. “Arrest Mr. Primatologist, and charge him with ape-icide.” The detectives hustle into the car and drive off, to surprise their new prime suspect and arrest him in a public place. Right?
WRONG. It’s wrong because of a logical fallacy called the false dilemma, and a related misunderstanding of evidence that is appalingly common.
A false dilemma occurs when you’re faced with two alternative explanations for a phenomenon. A sloppy investigator will often take a lack of support for the first alternative as “evidence” of the second. If there are only two suspects in our example, and it looks unlikely that the first suspect committed the crime, well then the second suspect must be guilty.
Our gorgeous ADA is ignoring the distinct possibility that there may be many additional, unknown suspects. Hell, in a real episode of Law & Order there are usually at least half-a-dozen potential suspects, and the writers go out of their way to throw in a laborious “twist,” which means that the initial suspect is almost never the actual murderer. Unless she is.
This is where the misunderstanding of effective evidence becomes apparent. Specifically, evidence AGAINST the guilt of the smuggler is not the same as evidence FOR the guilt of the primatologist’s husband. Proving that one suspect didn’t do it doesn’t mean that you’ve proven that the other suspect did do it. The prosecutor in our hypothetical is storing $2.00 worth of brains under a $200 haircut.
In order to prove that something is having an effect, you can’t just rule out another alternative and call your hypothesis tested. If you hear a banging sound in an empty house, and you determine that it isn’t a loose shutter, you can’t call it a ghost and go home. You’ve only proven that the shutters aren’t banging. There still isn’t any evidence that the noise is caused by something supernatural. (Fiddling around in the dark with infrared cameras and EM meters that you don’t know how to operate doesn’t prove anything either, but at least you’re making the effort.)
This misunderstanding has been on flagrant display during the heated debates over science textbook standard in Texas. Over and over again, the creationists trying to impose their religious agenda on the state’s schoolchildren point to the “weaknesses” of evolution, and the “controversies” about specific issues in the evolutionary framework. And they claim that this is evidence that there must have been an intelligent agent at work in creation.
Ignoring for the moment the cited weaknesses and controversies – which are overstated, simply false, or both – they’re making the same mistake as the ADA in our hypothetical. They’re gathering a few scraps of evidence to suggest that one explanation is incorrect, and touting this as evidence that their alternate explanation must be the right one.
But as we’ve already established, this isn’t how evidence works. Let’s pretend that anything you’ve said in any way weakens evolution. That doesn’t prove that your invisible sky-grandpa magicked the whole thing into existence 6,000 years ago. If evolution suddenly didn’t adequately explain everything we observe in nature, we couldn’t just throw up our hands and say that it must have been god. We’d have to start gathering evidence to determine what does explain all those observed phenomena.
The thing is, the evolution/creationism “debate” is a classic false dilemma. If evolution collapses, god doesn’t automatically fill in the hole. If evolution were suddenly shown to not work, it would open the door to innumerable possible explanations. Aliens deliberately seeded the planet with life. We’re all virtual inhabitants of a massive supercomputer. Godlike hamsters shat out all of creation, and we grew from microbes in their heavenly feces. God did it. If we’ve removed evolution, all of these alternatives are just as likely as any other. And until you’ve gathered a single shred of evidence in favor of your preferred explanation, no amount of evidence that our explanation is wrong works to make your version any stronger. Your explanation is still completely unsupported.
So the next time you’re watching Law & Order, or one of the eight hundred hours of police procedurals on TV every week, watch what happens when a promising suspect has an alibi. Notice how the detectives don’t immediately run out and arrest the next person on the list. They investigate, gather evidence, build a case, and then they run out and arrest the next person on the list. Creationists don’t take the necessary middle step. They decide that evolution is somehow mistaken, and then they figure that their preferred deity has been in the house since he created it in 4004 BCE.
If creationists had a shred of intellectual honesty, they’d admit that the “evidence” they claim supports their “god did it” hypothesis is nothing more than evidence – incorrect, overstated and thoroughly disproved – against evolution. It’s as if our hypothetical detectives applied for an arrest warrant for Mr. Primatologist, and the gist of their argument was “there are minor technical disagreements among the millions of detectives who nonetheless agree that the smuggler did it.” Our detectives would be laughed out of court; the creationists should be laughed out of the science classroom.
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Blog of the year! (Also, I was watching Law & Order while reading this.)
You’re exaggerating, but it’s complimentary, so I’ll let it slide. =)
xD you made that case all by yourself? Well, I don’t know how 911 works in there, but here the Orangu would be dead before it could answer the lady on the line all the questions she has to do XD
So, you’re stating something funny here :3 Sometimes it bothers me not to be in touch with what’s going on in there and this debate, but I’ve seen way to much proof that Evolution took place and little few on Creationism. I am not saying that there isn’t a God there waiting for us – I just don’t think the world (and the remaining universe) could ever be so young. And I don’t think all of this could ever be made in 6 days. (but oh well, He is God, he can do almost everything…) . It’s funny to see how the Creationism believers are trying to close the others’ eyes and saying something – allow me – so arrogant as: “We KNOW the truth.” In the very least, they could say they were just SEEKING it.
Oh boy, I should stop thinking and making huge replies XD
That’s the thing that drives me crazy. If they want to believe against all the evidence, that’s fine. But when, either from ignorance or deceit, they use bad arguments to try and convince others that they’re right, then my blood boils.
Well, I was once taugh that you can believe in something even if there is not evidence to support it. You can even believe in something that is not true. But one cannot believe in something they know it’s not true in the same way one cannot believe in something they have evidence that’s not right. No matter how many good words they find, no arguments can beat facts.
I just wonder what they’re really doing to support their thesis. Are they going to cover everyone’s eyes to evidence?
Technically, this is exactly what they’re doing:
Evidence shows that most of their 6K old earth hypothesis is complete BS, but they still believe it none the less. Mostly because they’ve managed to misunderstand the facts so thoroughly that in their heads it somehow still makes sense.
They ignore whatever doesn’t, and it seems they actively resist correct understanding of the facts to be able to continue ignoring them.
It’s like going out with an arrest warrant for Mr Primatologist even though he has an iron clad alibi: he was appearing on American Idol, live, in front of millions of viewers. They just missed that episode, so in their heads, and according to their logic, that never happened. You could show them footage, and they’ll claim it was made afterwards. You can show them witness statements, and they’ll claim they’re falsified. You could have a witness testify, and they’ll say he’s being bribed, or lying because he has something at stake, or he’s an accomplice, etc…
And sadly, none of the excuses are crazy or farfetched enough not to be believed by someone who really wants Mr Primatologist to be guilty.
Faith triumphs over reason? It can’t be true! I refuse to believe it. =)
Hm. It looks like we’ve reached the limit of comment nesting. Exarch, this one was for you.
Oh no! Someone killed the Librarian of Unseen University?
I was so hoping that someone would catch that. =)
As an ex-Creationist, I was struck by something as I was reading this. It occurred to me that, as perfectly reasonable as the point made is, that’s not what the believer would likely take away from the post. He would be thinking, “Ah, see? They’re trying to hedge their bets. Evolution’s on the way out and they know it. They’re knocking together a preemptive excuse for still not believing even after it’s been demolished.”
It’s a great post, but sometimes I have these flashbacks….
Yeah, I don’t harbor any illusions of changing anybody’s mind. I’m sure that they see their position as perfectly reasonable, since they’re getting it direct from a deity, or at least from a person who claims to speak for the deity. “God told me so” trumps evidence, or lack thereof. =)
It’s a good point but you are not considering where the creationists are coming from. Not that you really should I’d just like to play Devil’s Advocate for second. To them creation was the proven theory (the husband in your case). For centuries they knew that the husband killed the ape then all of a sudden out of nowhere came this guy named Darwin with a new suspect. Instead of looking at the evidence and deciding who is guilty based on that they, rather, claim that Darwin’s suspect must be innocent because they’ve known for centuries that the husband did it. To them knocking down Evolution defaults the beliefs back to where they used to be. Obviously this is not how science works and it’s something that they fundamentally don’t understand, and I wouldn’t hold your breath for the day they might.
I figure that they’ll keep believing their junk, and I’ll keep making fun of them. They’ll be smug in their certainty, and I’ll feel slightly less outraged. It’s a simple dance, and it’s more fun the more people we get to join in. =)
It’s a good point you make, that evolution did replace a previous paradigm of creation. And I think I’d be less bothered by it if they’d just admit that they don’t have (or need) any evidence for their belief. If they were straightforward about the fact that it’s all a faith-based initiative, I could handle that. But when they make evidentiary claims that are so basic and so wrong that an intellectual lightweight like myself can understand how bad they are (and can illustrate their mistakes with an explanation from TV), then I get worked up. Not that it will change anything, but blogging about it is at least cathartic for me. =)
Some of them have to know that what they’re telling the flock is nothing but a pack of lies.
And they probably excuse their actions under the guise of “doing the right thing”.
Still, that’s what really makes me angry. They’re making people believe BS and even pat themselves on the back for doing a good job. Then if you to correct their lies and, FSM forbid, try educate the people who are now dumber for having listened to it, you are accused of lying and making shit up. Never mind the truth, it’s not important. Only the bible is.
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