Archive for May 19, 2008

Ships Crossing in the Night: Creationists, Peer Review, and Science

Last fall, I spent ten short days as a contributor at CreationWiki, the (now seemingly defunct) “Encyclopedia on Creation Science.” It was an exciting “creationists in the mist” sort of experience. I wanted to understand them. And in the end, I now think I do.

You see, after my brief tenure ended, I had an e-mail conversation with Chris Ashcraft, the founder of the site, where we debated “creationism versus evolution” back and forth for about a week. Before long, I came to the inevitable conclusion: creationists fundamentally don’t understand the meaning of science

This revelation came after we debated the significance of the scientific community’s refusal to accept creationist screeds into “peer reviewed” publications. Peer review is, after all, by virtue of its procedural rigor, an integral part of what Thomas Kuhn postulates makes science to unique, and failure to pass peer review is accordingly death to most scientific ventures.

Ashcraft conceded that creationists cannot produce peer reviewed data which will be accepted by the scientific community. But he downplayed the significance of this, and attributed it to censorship. He said, “peer review is done by professionals who hold to a [point of view] and censor other views.” According to Ashcraft, the goal of peer review is “to uphold the consensus position.”

Like many conservative pundits, Ashcraft mistakes the definition of censorship. Censorship occurs where a structure, normally meant to foster the interchange of ideals, stifles an enumerated viewpoint without cause. So, Ashcraft is arguing that science stifles the “viewpoint” of creationism.

Not so. Rather, science (and peer review in particular) excludes from being called “science” those ideas which, regardless of viewpoint, make appeals to the supernatural or to subjective fact.

The question is one of perspective. Step back from “creationism” for a second to ask, what’s so bad about creationism? What’s the real issue? What makes creationism not science is that it’s unfalsifiable, theorized without reference to natural causes, and subjective. Because of its failure to meet these value-neutral criteria, science can make a morally-neutral and viewpoint-neutral judgment that the idea of creationism is not science. To borrow a term from first amendment law, it’s not viewpoint discrimination, it’s permissible subject-matter discrimination. Creationism shares with other unscientific ideas (like, say, the idea that an undetectable pink unicorn lives in my apartment with me) common themes, than makes creationism, along with those ideas, excludable on neutral grounds.

Arguably, science “discriminates” or “censors” by not allowing non-objective, unfalsifiable, appeals to divinity to count as science. But if creationists would prefer that science stop discriminating on these grounds, what they’re really asking for is an end to science – not an end to “censorship.”