Philip Kitcher Quotes

All the Creationists’ major objections have now been examined. What appear, at first glance, to be imposing obstacles turn out, on closer inspection, to be conjuring tricks employing inaccuracy, misrepresentation, dazzling numbers, and layers of confusion. As a teacher, I sometimes wonder after an exam why some students became confused on a particular point, and I try to understand how my presentation or the formulation in a book could have misled them. In the case of the Creationist authors we have studied, there is no great difficulty in seeing how muddles arise. They want to use scientific data and scientific principles to attack evolutionary theory. So they skim, searching for ammunition. When they find a claim that seems to be at variance with evolution, they seize it as a trophy to bring back to the Institute for Creation Research for public display. If they actually tried to understand the terrain they scavenge, they would have learned some interesting science. Instead, they seem to acquire only the most tenuous grasp of complex theories and then offer their muddled caricatures of important scientific works to as wide an (inexpert) audience as they can reach. (It is possible, of course, that their understanding is greater than that revealed in their confused discussions. But I am loath to accuse them of perverting ideas that they actually comprehend.)

This is purely a figment of Gish’s imagination. He speculates about the character of transitional forms, and then chides paleontologists because they do not find what he demands.

It is hard to resist the impression that all these computations are designed to bamboozle those who become weak at the knees at the sight of numbers.

This response gets high marks for low cunning.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Although they do not refer to closed systems in stating the second law, Creationists have heard that the law only applies to such systems. So they are ready for the response I have just given. Morris even calls it “an exceedingly naive argument.” There are two popular Creationist rejoinders. The first is to pooh-pooh the concept of a closed system. The second is to change the subject.

The formulation that I have given accords with those found in textbooks on physics. But it does not coincide with the statements of the second law offered by some Creationists.
Creationists like to present the second law either by omitting any mention of its restriction to closed systems or by choosing a statement that does not make this restriction clear.

The road to Creationism is paved with bad philosophy.

Consistency is not the hobgoblin of the Creationist mind.

Do the doctrine’s problem-solving strategies encounter recurrent difficulties in a significant range of cases? Are the problem-solving strategies an opportunistic collection of unmotivated and unrelated methods? Does the doctrine have too cozy a relationship with auxiliary hypotheses, applying its strategies with claims that can be “tested” only in their applications? Does the doctrine refuse to follow up on unresolved problems, airily dismissing them as “exceptional cases”? Does the doctrine restrict the domain of its methods, forswearing excursions into new areas of investigation where embarrassing questions might arise? If all, or many, of these tests are positive, then the doctrine is not a poor scientific theory. It is not a scientific theory at all.

Evolutionary change is change in the genetic constitution of a population. This type of change can come about as a result of a number of factors. Immigration and emigration of organisms will bring new alleles and new allelic combinations into the population and will cause others to disappear. Mutation will lead to the formation of new alleles. The major claim of a Darwinian theory of evolution is that the principal factor of change is natural selection: The most important evolutionary changes come about because some allelic pairs are fitter than others, and these obtain greater representation for their constituents alleles in subsequent generations.

In almost any natural population of organisms, more offspring will be produced than are able to survive. The offspring will vary—in particular, they will vary with respect to characteristics that affect their abilities to survive and reproduce. Some organisms will survive longer and reproduce more frequently. If the advantageous characteristics are inheritable, then they will be transferred to descendants. As a result, they will become more prevalent in later generations. Over a large number of generations the common features of the population may be radically changed.

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.

Creationists are actually criticizing methods that are used throughout science. As I shall argue extensively, there is no basis for separating the procedures and practices of evolutionary biology from those that are fundamental to all sciences. If we let the creationists have their way, we may as well go whole hog. Let us reintroduce the flat-earth theory, the chemistry of the four elements, and mediaeval astrology. For these outworn doctrines have just as much claim to rival current scientific views as Creationism does to challenge evolutionary biology.

The book that follows is a chase. The Creationist is allowed to choose one battleground after another. Given each choice of battleground, I insist that the battle be fight on that ground. In every case, “scientific” Creationism is defeated. When all the distortions have been removed, all the attempts to flaunt credentials examined, all the misleading quotations returned to their contexts, all the fallacies laid bare, we shall see Creation “science” for what it is—an abuse of science.

Creationist strategy is often to run entirely different issues together, to concoct a muddy paste out of distinct allegations about the evils of evolution and the glories of Creationism.