A principle that nearly everyone involved in the origins debate agrees upon is the importance of protecting the integrity of an objective scientific process.  However, there are very different views about how best to accomplish that goal.

 
 
 
 

Two views:
 
 

1)  must consider only naturalistic explanations
 

If not:  danger - give up too early, miss naturalistic mechanisms

 

2)  must consider alternative(s) to naturalism
 

If not:  danger - the evidence may be distorted to fit this view  (worldview trumps data)

 
- conclusions are presented as the result of objective science when in fact the scientific support is weak, nonexistent, or even adverse
 

- no pressure to demonstrate a plausible mechanism, essence of the claim is simply assumed
 

- apparently insurmountable problems are ignored
 

- conceivability replaces plausibility as the standard for accepting a claim
 

- can't objectively address the selectivity and distinctiveness of indirect evidences.
 
 
 
 
 

"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist.  I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is [more than] not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist.  And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scienstists, and I think to laymen."

R. Feynman, commencement lecture at Cal. Inst. of Tech., 1974, reproduced in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character, pg 308-317.

 

Should Feynman's statement apply when naturalism itself is at stake?
 
 
 
 
 
 

"We shall see that the adherents of the best-known theory have not responded to increasing adverse evidence by questioning the validity of their beliefs, in the best scientific tradition; rather, they have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology.  In response, many alternative explanations have introduced even greater elements of mythology, until finally, science has been abandoned entirely in substance, though retained in name."

R. Shapiro, "Origins:  A skeptics guide to the creation of life on Earth", pg 32.

 

"Some defenders of Darwinism embrace standards of evidence for evolution that as scientists they would never accept in other circumstances".

Henry "Fritz" Schaefer, Computational chemist, U. of Georgia, 5-time Nobel nominee, quoted by C. Boyd in "Loosening Darwin's Grip", Citizen Mag. Mar. 4, 2003.
 
 

"So far, the acceptance of ideas such as superstrings, wormholes, and parallel universes within their respective subdisciplines is based almost completely on subjective criteria held dear by these communities - much as happens in the humanities - and not on any wider, more objective standards.
    Most of the respondents share my concern that physics may be in danger of relaxing its acceptable standards of truth.  If that happens, physics will lose its claim to special knowledge, and the postmodern humanist scholars will have won the debate."

Michael Riordan, Physics Today, Dec 2003, p 18.
 

 

"... it is better to admit ignorance than to have confidence in an explanation that is not true."

P. Johnson, "Reason in the Balance", pg 12.

 
 
 

Examples:
 
 

1.  R. Shapiro on George Wald
 

For another statment of this view we can return to George Wald's Scientific Amer. article:  "One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet we are here - as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. ...  Time is in fact the hero of the plot.  The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years.  What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here.  Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain.  One has only to wait:  time itself performs the miracles."

Shapiro writes "but is it correct?  We want to weigh the argument and measure the quantities involved, rather than be overwhelmed by them. ...  The Skeptic will want to rewrite Prof. Wald's conclusion:  Improbability is in fact the villain of the plot."

R. Shapiro,  A Skeptic's Guide to the Origin of Life on Earth
 
 
 

2.  "... the time available for the origin of life seems to have been short, a few hundred million years at the most.  Since life originated on the earth, we have additional evidence that the origin of life has a high probability."

Carl Sagan, Scientific American, 1975, 232(5), pg 82.

 

3.  "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd, Nature, 410:(6752): 423, 1999.
 

4.  Stanley Miller - atmosphere of early earth must have had methane and ammonia, since prebiotic synthesis requires methane and ammonia.
 
 
 

5.  NM museum of natural history:   "Gas + energy = DNA"
 
 
 

6.  Equating the presence of liquid water anywhere in the universe with life
 

When the crippled Galileo spacecraft painstakingly beamed back pictures of Europa from its backup antenna in April 1997, NASA scientists were jubilant.  The word on everybodys' lips was - "life".  What Galileo revealed were icebergs.  Icebergs spell liquid water, or at least slush.  ... The rationale was summed up by NASA mission scientist Richard Terrile.  "Put those ingredients together on Earth and you get life within a billion years", he told the press.  ...  Unfortunately, the slender thread of logic that links water and life is scarcely more than the observation that life without water seems impossible.  Equating water with life conceals a gigantic leap of faith.

Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p 245.

 

7.  Uncritical acceptance of the extrapolation of microevolutionary processes to account for the entire complexity of life.
 

"The Darwinian struggle does not extrapolate to the tree of life."

Steven J. Gould, "The Confusion About Evolution," New York Review of Books, Nov 19, 1992.

"First, Darwin's theory of evolution is a theory of descent with modification.  It does not yet explain the genesis of forms, but the trimmings of the forms, once they are generated."

Stuart Kauffman, "Investigations", 2000, pg 17.

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