Ok let's begin with a couple of warnings or perhaps
reassurances depending on where you’ve come from to arrive here;
1. Science is great - this is neither an anti science nor an
anti evolution article.
2. This is not an article that pits science against religion,
though it does engage with the conversation between science and theology.
This article is primarily about clarification and definition;
gosh, that sounds exciting doesn’t it? Hey, but wait a minute, on this occasion
the clarification and the definition may just mess with your head.
So let's get to the main and possibly controversial point of
this article - Evolution is not science.
‘How can this be’ I hear you cry? Well, science is a
methodology or a collection of connected processes. The Oxford dictionary
defines science as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing
the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural
world through observation and experiment." The key words in there for
clarifying the limits of the discipline of science are "systematic
study" and "observation and experiment." Evolution is a process
that is inherent within the way that living organisms have developed on this
planet. Science has been instrumental in discovering and analysing this
process, scientific processes have allowed us to observe, collect information,
compare and of course scientists had the privilege of naming the process of evolution. So evolution's association with
the world of science is entirely reasonable. However evolution itself is not
science, the clarification should be that it is a process that was discovered and
subsequently named by science. This may seem like a pedantic clarification, but
it’s essential for understanding the position of science in our culture.
If evolution is as most scientific studies suggest, then it is something that was inherently part of the universe
before the process of scientific study ever existed. Let’s be fair, this is
true really of all scientific discoveries, but for evolution there are a number
of reasons why this is even more significant.
· Firstly
evolution has gained a deep cultural association with arguments in the 21st
century between extreme viewpoints about religion, theology, science and
atheism. So understanding what we are arguing about is essential.
· Secondly,
unlike say a galaxy, a fish or penicillin, evolution is not a thing, it is a
process.
· Thirdly,
and here’s where it get’s exciting, if we understand science as a process by
which we observe study and experiment upon aspects of the world around us, it
is essential to understand that evolution is the process being observed and
studied, not the process by which it is studied. That is to say the process
being studied (evolution) and the process by which it is studied are two
different processes.
That in itself is enough to change the way we ought to frame
many arguments, but here is the thing that we should realise when we
get down to the nitty-gritty of these two processes. Evolution is a highly
unscientific process. Evolution is trial and error, random; it has no observers,
except the survivors who weren’t there to witness the beginning of the
experiment. It makes no effort to collect data or keep records of the results or
the conditions of its experiments. There are no control groups with which to
make comparisons and no clear delineation between one set of experiments and
the next. Evolution as a process would make very bad science.
But why is this so important? Well it’s vital when we look at
how we talk about science in our culture and even how educated
people talk about things like
evolution. Just click on the Science and technology tab in the trending
subjects column on Facebook; every time an interesting animal is spotted
somewhere or an unusual event in the weather has been noticed, it’s labelled as
science, when no scientific analysis is being done. This use of language permeates into arguments that say ‘you can’t
deny evolution, it’s science!’ Well I have no interest in denying evolution,
but it’s not science. this kind of thinking bypasses both the scientific process
and the reality of what evolution actually is. It's important when people say, 'you have to believe in evolution, but you can't believe in God because evolution is science but God isn't'.
There are those who will attribute everything in the
natural world to science before anything scientific has
been done with it. This is actually more like bad theology than good science. It is a mixing of an unconscious
belief in a human capacity to understand and control our surroundings
through intellect with what we call science. If these things are science, then so are we and so is all that we do. The oddest thing
about this cultural attitude is that it primarily sees the natural world as
science, and us observing that world as science, but sees most human endeavour as
something other than science, something different. Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’
offered no shock to the majority of the religious world in terms of evolution
in general as this had been discovered by Christian botanists and was well
known to many Christians at the time. The challenge that Darwin offered was
that we as human being were perhaps not so special in God's creation as we also evolved from
other creatures.
In reality, reading Genesis and other books of the Old
Testament in the original language reveals that there has always been an
understanding that human beings and other creatures of God’s creation share the
same breath and the same life force. But, for Christians, as for many religions,
there is thought to be a special relationship between God and humanity. In
parts of Christian history that relationship has been seen in terms of a harsh
and cold division between humanity and the rest of creation. In the post Darwinian
world that division has been softened and the Church’s relationship with the
environment has been improving. It is not as good yet as perhaps it ought to
be, though we are in general heading in a better direction. However, the scary irony
is that this new tendency to use of the word ‘science’ to
refer to natural things as opposed to human activity is anti scientific to the
point of re-establishing that false ‘special’ relationship of humanity that
sets us apart from and above the rest of creation.
Evolution is not science any more than a thunderstorm is God.
And God is not theology or religion any more than the sea is a fish. Until we understand that as a culture we are unlikely to be able to have a
healthy conversation about any of these things together.
