Young Australian Skeptics

[The following is posted from Homologous Legs, my evolution/​creation-​​themed personal blog.]

Have you ever come across an argument that sounds a little like this?

Scientist X was a creationist, so you should believe in creation.

You’ll probably never see anything worded exactly like that, but there are still plenty of implied arguments which creationists make that rest on the historical or scientific authority of an individual. The latest one that comes to mind is Stephen C. Meyer’s Thomas Jefferson debacle, where he quoted the US founding father is support for intelligent design, but opponents of the theory of evolution have been doing it for years.

An excellent example of a covert argument from authority is this 1982 article, written by the late Henry Morris, from the Institute for Creation Research. If I may:

… many of the greatest scientists of the past were creationists and for that matter, were also Bible-​​believing Christians, men who believed in the inspiration and authority of the Bible, as well as in the deity and saving work of Jesus Christ. They believed that God had supernaturally created all things, each with its own complex structure for its own unique purpose. They believed that, as scientists, they were “thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” learning to understand and control the laws and processes of nature for God’s glory and man’s good. They believed and practiced science in exactly the same way that modern creationist scientists do.

Morris goes on to list forty-​​one separate scientific disciplines founded by “creation scientists”, such as isotopic chemistry, statistical thermodynamics, electrodynamics and a whole host of others, including some which, to my knowledge, aren’t actually scientific disciplines. Err, gynecology and antiseptic surgery? Huh. Right.

He also includes a separate list of inventions which were the products of the minds of, again, “creation scientists”, such as the barometer, the Trans-​​Atlantic cable, and the galvanometer (Ooh, won’t the Scientologists be impressed with that one!).

The point is clear — Morris wants us, the reader, to be convinced by his impressive lists of scientists who obviously knew what they were talking about, and think more carefully about what we believe. But how much does weight does this argument carry?

You skeptical readers, who I would high-​​five if I could, know where this is going. All this injection of fame and prestige into the issue of creationism is logically fallacious, so much so that it’s a wonder that people still consider arguments built on it to be worthy of any merit.

To explain why you can’t believe something just because a famous scientist believed it, I’ll need to give a few examples of why you can’t trust the personal beliefs of famous scientists. And, luckily for me, there have been plenty of wacky scientists throughout history.

Isaac Newton is a classic example of the crazy scientist. A genius, he proposed the laws of motion that bear his name, as well as invented calculus at the same time as fellow mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. However, he was also into alchemy in later life, and may have died due to complications arising from mercury poisoning relating to his alchemical pursuits. He was also a creationist, and is often cited in arguments as one of the many early “creation scientists”.

So, if we accept the argument from authority, as laid down by Morris and others, what must we believe? Clearly, if Newton was such a great scientist, inventing calculus and the like, then he should be also correct about his alchemy, right? Even more so if he was right about the authority of the Bible, since correct views in more than one area of their life lends even more credence to their other belief, doesn’t it?

Linus Pauling is another example of a scientist who was right only some of the time. As the only recipient of two unshared Nobel Prizes, he was certainly a great scientist (even though one of them was a Peace Prize), but his research did not stop at simply the nature of chemical bonds. He was an advocate of orthomolecular medicine, or, in other words, megavitamin therapy, a highly controversial and weakly supported area of alternative medicine that prescribes intense doses of vitamin supplements in order to treat disease.

So, given that Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner, does this impact on his views about orthomolecular medicine? Does it make it more plausible?

The answer, to both the Pauling and Newton examples, should be: no, their scientific prestige does not affect the validity of their other beliefs. The reason why is obvious — people can be crazy in some areas and brilliant in others. People can delude themselves, and quite easily at that. The fame of a person does not shield them from this, scientists included.

A kind-​​of flipside to this type of argument is the one that some creationists used to use, that Charles Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed. Even if it were true, because it most certainly isn’t, would the fact that he suddenly “saw the light” change the validity of evolution, at that time or now? No, of course not. Thoughts of a dying Darwinist aren’t relevant to the science.

The point I’m trying to make is this: scientific hypotheses, once conceived, are completely independent of the scientist who developed them. Ideas are ideas, and they stand alone by themselves, far away from the messy world of emotions, politics and self-​​delusion. Crazy people can have sane ideas, and sane people can have crazy ideas. The merits of an idea are all that is needed to prop it up in science.

As such, if I were to wake up one day, ranting and raving about how I was deceived all this time about evolutionary theory, sure, listen to what I have to say (or not), but please judge evolution based on its own facts and evidences, not on any authority that I, or anyone else, has.

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Yes, the title of this post is a reference to the Muse song, Thoughts of a Dying Atheist. Extra points to all those who picked up on that —  you get two high-​​fives.

Tags: Authority, Darwinism, Logic, Philosophy, Science

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Creationism, Evolution, Jack Scanlan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.