If We Only Had Faith

May 26th, 2006 The Lone Beagle Posted in News |

BELIEF IN EVOLUTION is nothing but a religion!

If I had a loonie (a Canadian dollar) for every time I’ve heard this canard put forward as a serious argument by a creationist during a debate about evolution, I would be rich. Or at least able to afford a new vehicle (my old one is getting tired). It seems the smaller the available store of arguments for creationism (and god knows that store is shrinking very day) the more they rely on appeals to emotion. One of the currrent favourites is poisoning the well by associating faith with the belief in evolution and its mechanisms. Unfortunately this argument can be made to look quite reasonable; at least if the reader isn’t prepared for the sudden jump from logic to emotion.The following is my response to a request from a poster arguing abiogenesis with a creationist who was using the ‘abiogenesis is nothing but a faith’ argument. It applies equally well to evolution.

This usually stems from an equivocal use of the term ‘faith’. The term has a different meaning when used colloquially than when used in religion. What your sparing partner is doing is using the word in the religious sense, where the belief in God is an inspired one and requires no physical evidence, when speaking of his own beliefs, using the less formal meaning when speaking of a belief in the truth of (external) information such as science provides and then making them equivalent when speaking to your beliefs.

They aren’t equivalent. (This confusion may be what is at the heart of the creationist attempts to scientifically prove the truth of their faith)

The belief that chemical abiogenesis did in fact occur need not be based simply on a trust in science but can be based on an extrapolation of current evidence from biology and biochemistry. Even in cases such as abiogenesis where we have limited evidence, the extrapolation of that evidence fits in with what we know of physics and chemistry and is reasonable given current knowledge levels. If an hypothesis put forward to explain abiogenesis needed to invoke some unknown law or ‘broke’ current laws (which are just descriptions of physical consistencies) then our ‘faith’ in them would be unfounded and closer to the religious meaning. As it stands all the hypotheses currently put forward have at least some evidence for them and none of them require any unfounded extrapolations or abuse of physical laws.

Because faith in a God is inspired and based on evidence other than the physical it is usually viewed as binary, either you have faith or you do not have faith. If we assign a range of possible ‘faith’ levels as a percentage, the faith in God would have only two values, 0% and 100%. In contrast, ‘faith’ in a scientific hypothesis can ‘potentially’ cover the entire range from 0 to 100 but in practice and based on available evidence, it would not reach 100%. This is simply because it is not possible to have ‘all’ evidence availible and potentially, future evidence may force a review of the hypothesis.

Many creationists see things in terms of absolutes so they have difficulty in accepting science’s ‘level of confidence’ as a factor in the amount of ‘faith’ we have in the accuracy of an hypothesis/theory. To them faith is equivalent to a level of confidence of 100%, and since science is based on physical evidence, if we have a high trust level in any theory/hypothesis that has less than 100% physical evidence we are guilty of invoking religious faith.

We can be sure that life started somewhere at some time in the past whether it started on Earth or somewhere else so our concern would be the ‘how’ of that beginning. So far, all available evidence points to a natural beginning. However, even this evidence based ‘faith’ does not preclude a supernatural beginning; a god, or God, could have easily used processes which left evidence interpretable as purely natural.

I would make the claim that anti-evolutionists are simply dishonest in their equivocal use of the term ‘faith’ but I have faith they are completely unaware of their own illogic.