Creationist escape hatch

From RationalWiki
(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
(Goddidit)
(Evidence, not proof)
Line 32: Line 32:
 
==Evidence, not proof==
 
==Evidence, not proof==
  
When creationists have weak to no evidence for their assertions, they usually say that it's "evidence, not proof" of creationism.  Unfortunately, it's often not evidence at all.
+
When creationists have weak to no evidence for their assertions, they usually say that it's "evidence, not proof" of creationism.  Unfortunately, it's often not evidence at all, or at best, fairly weak evidence.
  
 
==The existence of X has never been disproved==
 
==The existence of X has never been disproved==

Revision as of 20:54, 3 October 2010

Goddidit!

Creationism

Icon creationism.svg
Key claims
Science
Random articles

Truth fish transparent.png

A creationist escape hatch is an unarguable, unfalsifiable statement or reply in an argument that ends all further discussion. When creationists use one of these statements against you, they usually think they have won the debate and you will roll over begging for mercy. Some of these points are indeed very tricky philosophical conundrums but they aren't entirely beyond questioning, the circular nature and "unquestionable" outcomes of some of these points are what should be questioned. For the most part, they either don't really prove much either way but are worth knowing about.

On the other hand it would do the sane person well to note that if a creationist uses one of these arguments, they have effectively admitted that they have failed in their attempts to falsify the much-spat-upon naturalist world-view; the presuppositionalist door swings both ways.

Contents

Goddidit

Who can argue with an omnipotent, omniscient supernatural being? Goddidit is the ultimate escape hatch, as it absolves the creationist of having to provide any evidence whatsoever. How much of this sort of argument is begging the question is controversial; on the one hand you most certainly have to assume a god exists to prove it exists through Goddidit, while on the other hand, omnipotence is part of the definition from the outset.

Variants include:

  • Biblesaysso - a suitable alternative, most often used with the phase "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it."
  • Aliensdidit - the same concept applied to Extraterrestrials.
  • TheFalldidit - a newly emerging theme that conveniently makes the Earth 6000 years old (or any age you like, if you fiddle the numbers enough).

God is outside of time or is not subject to natural laws

This is possibly one of the more important and common escape hatches - putting God "outside of time" or "outside the natural laws" is a great way of putting the entire hypothesis outside of the reach of science. This is often the position of those who believe in Non-Overlapping Magisteria, however it is not a completely airtight argument (it certainly doesn't prove anything). We're not even sure what being "outside of time" even means, really, but it usually centres around the fact that because god is "outside" time he/she/it is not observable, testable nor falsifiable. This is a very interesting admission because it has some remarkable consequences that work very much against the creationist (or any religious believer, in fact). Put simply, if God is outside the universe and cannot be detected in anyway, its existence is moot; it doesn't matter either way, God could be anyone or anything or completely non-existent entirely. Consider the following dichotomy:

  • God is able to perform actions that violate natural law as we know it. In this case, God can be detected by the nature of these actions.
  • God is not able to perform such actions. In this case, God's existence is not relevant to any question answerable by science.

The creationist cannot have their cake and eat it too, by having God totally immune from naturalistic scrutiny while still being able to control and affect the universe. The creationist response to this would almost certainly be to repeat the original point.

And this isn't even mentioning the odd position that one can make God totally "unknowable" on one hand and then make grand descriptions of His benevolence or power on the other. If we're talking about a realm entirely beyond the ken of human beings, there's no reason to assume that anything we say or suppose about it will in any way be accurate.

Earth was different before the Fall or the Flood

Diseases infecting people? Too much water during the Flood? Not enough oxygen at the water level of the Flood? Just say it was different back then! Variations include c-decay and time dilation fields. This is really a case of special pleading, arbitrarily changing the rules. There are some very specific rebuttals to these sorts of arguments, but in general to propose that features were different in the past, one needs to propose a mechanism for that change.

The creationist response to that is goddidit and we return to the top of the list...

Evidence, not proof

When creationists have weak to no evidence for their assertions, they usually say that it's "evidence, not proof" of creationism. Unfortunately, it's often not evidence at all, or at best, fairly weak evidence.

The existence of X has never been disproved

In this case "X" may be whatever supernatural entity is being proposed. It is usually considered to be argument from ignorance, summed up by the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Of course, it will be always impossible to disprove a supernatural explanation; the supernatural by definition hides in our lack of knowledge about the world. Originally, the gods made the plants grow until we noticed that plants came from seeds, then they pulled chariots across the sky in the form of the moon and the sun until we noticed that they moved of their own accord. Now, supernatural entities exist only where believers in them put them; "outside" the realms of reality, and when those are disproved, the boundaries will be pushed back further.

You will never disprove what, almost by definition alone, will lie outside what can and can't be disproved. But then again, that's the point of this particular escape hatch.

In a less supernatural sense, this argument is similar to Russel's teapot - disproving things can be very tricky when the burden of proof doesn't actually lie with you. We cannot conclusively disprove a global flood or the claim that it made the Grand Canyon, all we can do is state that there is no evidence for it and conclude that in all likeliness, there is no evidence because it didn't actually happen.

Science has no explanation for X

Also known as the God of the gaps, argument, "X" here may be anything for which science presently has no explanation, or even something for which there are several competing explanations with no consensus. The argument then proceeds in this form:

  1. There is no agreed-upon scientific explanation at this time.
  2. Therefore, science will never have an explanation.
  3. Therefore, God did it.

These three steps are almost equally problematic. The first step presumes that science has already explained everything that it is capable of explaining, which is patently false. This is an interesting point as it matches up with the other common rhetorical phrase of "science doesn't know everything", to which one would reply "of course science doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop". The second and third points are blatant non sequiturs; assuming that science will never have an explanation for a phenomenon is, at best, naive while assuming that Goddidit if the scientific method is even partially undecided begs the question so hard its difficult to comprehend someone saying it with a straight face.

Typical examples of "X" in this case are the origin of life and the origin of the universe. Both these key points in understanding the world around us are currently cutting edge biology and physics, and science can only get closer to an answer.

See also

External links

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support