To provide scientific explanations, a creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the… — Philip Kitcher
To provide scientific explanations, a creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the creation. The trouble is that there are countless examples of properties of organisms that are hard to integrate into a coherent theory of design. There are two main types of difficulty, stemming from the frequent tinkerings of evolution in the equally common nastiness of nature. Let us begin with evolutionary tinkering. Structures already present or modified to answer to the organisms current needs. The result may be clumsy and inefficient, but it gets the job done.… (examples of the panda’s thumb, orchid self-fertilization, and the ruminant digestive system elided)
The second class of cases cover those in which, to put it bluntly, nature’s ways are rather repulsive. There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about the scavenging of vultures, the copulatory behavior of the female praying mantis (who tries to bite off the head of the “lucky” male), or the ways in which some insects paralyze their prey.… (example of coprophagy elided)
p. 138Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Barnes and Morris both choose processes that we know to operate at different rates at different times, and then use the observed rates to estimate the time at which the process began. Dating the past is a complicated and technical business, and one cannot ignore the technical details simply to generate the ages one wants. Without a thorough understanding of which rates are constant overtime and which rates fluctuate wildly, Creationist dates are bound to be stabs in the dark. However, Creationists know what they want the age of the earth to be. So just as in the case of the second law of thermodynamics, important parts of science are abused. By carefully picking a process on the basis of its ability to give the desired result, without attending to the question whether it is reasonable to think that it happened at a constant rate, Creationists attempt to convince the uninitiated that their blind dates have scientific references. Nobody should be taken in.
p. 163
Ironically, philosophers of science owe the Creationists a debt. For the “scientific” Creationists have constructed a glorious fake, which we can use to illustrate the differences between science and pseudoscience. By examining their scientific pretensions, I have tried to convey a sense of the nature and methods of science.
p. 5
This response gets high marks for low cunning.
p. 99
