Community Commentary -- William Bentley

Science may be defined as the systematic knowledge of the physical

world gained through the application of the scientific method. And the

scientific method?

It consists of the following steps: A phenomenon is identified that

has no present explanation; a hypothesis is formulated to explain it; the

hypothesis is tested against all of the known data; if anything does not

fit, the hypothesis is modified, and the process is repeated. When it all

fits, and the hypothesis has passed the terrible peer review process, it

is upgraded to either a theory or a law.

What’s the difference?

There is none; a law usually contains more math than a theory, but not

always; just check out the amount of high-powered math in Einstein’s

relativity theorems.

It should be noted that science is only concerned with naturalistic

events that take place in the physical world. It is completely neutral

with regard to the spiritual world, religion and morality. Thus, the

Roman Catholic Church and most mainstream Protestant denominations accept

evolution as the best present explanation for the variety of fauna and

flora we see around us.

Evolutionists have no problem with the concept that God created the

universe, the Earth and man as long as it is recognized that he did it by

the naturalistic methods that science is trying to discover (and doing a

pretty good job of it). The idea that he accomplished the whole thing in

a six-day period in 4004 BCE (Before Christian Era) and then flooded the

Earth 1,656 years later flies in the face of virtually everything we know

about geology, astronomy, paleontology and ancient history.

The quote from Colin Patterson is rather spurious. Patterson was a

cladist, a person who specializes in the determination of the

relationship of species by the comparison of their physical configuration

and DNA. In the quote, he was chiding the paleontologists because

cladistics had, in many cases, been able to show better results than the

fossil record.

The study of the origins of life is called abiogenesis and is not a

part of the theory of evolution. Enormous strides in this field are being

made almost daily, and it is a pretty good bet that the secret of life

from inanimate matter will be discovered within the next 10 years.

The second law of thermodynamics essentially states that energy can be

converted from one form to another, but in doing so, some of it is lost.

As a result, the entropy builds up until the conversion process no longer

works. However, this is for closed systems in which no energy enters or

exits, and is not quite true for the Earth, which receives about two

calories per square centimeter per minute from the sun. The creationists’

use of this law has been so thoroughly debunked by thermodynamicists that

I am surprised to see it in print again (Community Commentary, “Pilot

columnist too accepting of evolution”).

The human eye is indeed a wonderful device, but its design is not

optimal. The retina is inside out, the lens ceases to function after half

of our normal life span of three score and 10, and a large industry has

been built around the inability of the average person’s eyes to focus

correctly. One would expect the perfect creator to build us the perfect

eye; instead, it is a typical mammalian eye, slightly refined, just about

what we could expect as the result of millions of years of slow

evolution.

In fact, a while back, two scientists wrote a computer program to

simulate the evolution of the human eye from a simple pigmented eye spot.

They used pessimistic values for the inputs, but when they ran the

program, even they were startled to find that the transition took less

than a half million years. I have not been able to find the quote from

Stephen Jay Gould (he has written over 17 books), but I have read enough

of his works to figure out that he is setting up a straw man, which he

will proceed to demolish in the next few paragraphs.

The quote from Fred Hoyle also does little to aid the creationists’

cause. He is pushing his own hypothesis called Panspermia, which proposes

that life reached the Earth from outer space by way of meteoroids.

It is an interesting concept, but the jury is still out. In the

interest of equal time, I would like to give a few more quotes from Sir

Fred: “The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no

true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we

observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words

of God and Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the

cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of

microbial life are well-nigh proven.”

If, despite all of the above, it turns out that the majority of the

parents in a school district want their children to learn about

creationism in school, by all means let them. This is a free country.

But, please don’t teach it as a science.

* WILLIAM BENTLEY is a Costa Mesa resident.