Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Creationists believe that all species were specially created by God during creation, as related in the biblical Book of Genesis. If they were specially created, one would expect that the creator would have produced physiological structures that are perfectly suited to each species’ environmental requirements. This is often not the case, as Gould (1980) discussed in his essay “The Panda’s Thumb.” Although the panda’s thumb performs the role of a thumb in primates, allowing the panda to skillfully manipulate objects—especially the bamboo it feeds on—it’s really not a thumb at all. Rather, it is a highly modified sesamoid bone, a bone usually found in the wrist. The panda’s thumb “wins no prize in an engineer’s derby. It is, to use Michael Ghiselin’s phrase, a contraption” (p. 24). Another example of such poor engineering is found in the human spinal column. The spinal column gives so many people so much trouble because it is poorly constructed for the bipedal, upright posture of humans. It still shows the anatomical signs of having evolved in an organism that walked on all fours much of the time. In actuality, many other aspects of the human body are very poorly designed, including the eyes, ears, and rib cage, to name a few (Olshanasky et al. 2001). One would not expect an intelligent creator to come up with such slapdash contraptions, but that is exactly what would be expected of a process of evolution that operates in the way Darwin and his successors have proposed.

If one is going to contend that the universe was created only some six thousand years ago, as many creationists do, one must argue against much more than evolutionary biology. One must argue against much of modern science, especially geology, astronomy, and physics, because fundamental findings in all these disciplines point to the great age of the universe. It is therefore not surprising that some of these sciences have lately come under creationist attack. Sheaffer (1982–83) quotes one group of creationists as stating that the idea that Earth revolves around the sun “is an anti-Biblical notion and is the precursor of Darwinism” (p. 7). Another problem exists for creationists. If the universe is only six thousand or so years old and as vast as it is, which most creationists accept, then how could the light of stars billions of light years away have reached earth in the mere six thousand years the universe has been in existence? The obvious answer is that it couldn’t. Another answer given by creationists is that the speed of light has been slowing down since creation. This is but one example of how far the creationists will go to twist the facts to support their pseudoscientific theory.

When pressed by detailed refutations of their arguments, creationists often resort to the ultimate defense of the proponents of pseudoscience: the unfalsifiable hypothesis. One form of the nonfalsifiable defense of creationism is to hold that the evidence for evolution, the age of the earth, or the age of the universe was put there by God to test our faith. A closely related version holds that the evidence was put there by Satan to lead us astray. Note that there is no conceivable piece of evidence that could disprove these hypotheses. No matter what new evidence turned up to support evolution, it could always be explained away by the use of either of these nonfalsifiable hypotheses. As has been noted, such hypotheses can be very seductive because of their seeming power. Their use actually demonstrates only the intellectual bankruptcy of the belief system they are used to support.

Another common argument against evolution is to argue that it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law can be stated in many ways, but for the purposes of the present discussion, it basically states that a system will not spontaneously become more organized or complex. So, opponents of evolution argue, evolution can’t be right because the theory requires that organisms do become more complex as they evolve. In the first place, it isn’t always the case that evolution increases the complexity of organisms. Sometimes they get simpler. This seems to be especially the case with parasites that, in the course of evolving from a nonparasitic to a parasitic form, may lose certain features (see Zimmer 2000, for a fascinating discussion of parasites and their evolution). Nonetheless, it is the case that for most species, evolution has resulted in more complex forms. But this does not violate the second law because that law pertains only to closed systems with no net energy input. Earth is not such a system—there is constant energy input from, for example, the Sun. It is this energy that ultimately allows evolution to proceed (Patterson 1983).

This brief discussion has by no means covered all the fallacies of the creationists’ arguments. Further such discussions can be found in Miller (1999), Pennock (1999), and Elderedge (2000). Rennie’s article “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense” (2002) is an especially nice summary of the refutations of the most common creationist arguments.

Periodically one hears of an expedition to Mount Ararat, near the Turkish-Russian border, that hopes to find the remains of Noah’s ark. Why Mount Ararat? For hundreds of years, it is said, people have reported seeing the remains of the ark on the mountain, which fits, more or less, the biblical description of the place where the ark came to rest. The most dramatic reported ark sighting took place in 1917, when a Russian pilot flying over the mountain not only saw the ark but took photographs of it. His report led to an expedition that located the ark and made a detailed study of the structure. All the documentation of this expedition and the pilot’s photographs were lost in the Russian Revolution. Bailey (1978), in an excellent and unfortunately out-of-print book, finds that this story “is almost entirely fiction” (p.55) and that other reports of the ark on Mount Ararat are equally without foundation. More recent photographic evidence, Bailey (1978) finds, is of a highly dubious nature. Moore (1983), in response to creationist claims that the story of Noah and the ark is literally true, has exhaustively catalogued the physical impossibilities in the story, concluding that “such a voyage never took place and could not possibly have ever occurred” (p. 39).

Reports of creatures such as the Loch Ness monster, the yeti or abominable snowman, and bigfoot have a great deal in common with reports of UFOs. First, monster reports are common, although not as common as UFO reports. Second, monsters are reported by sane, reliable witnesses who frequently truly believe that they have seen something huge, mysterious, and frightening. As it does for UFO reports, the honesty of such reports leads many to accept them at face value. Third, the case for the existence of monsters relies almost entirely on eyewitness reports, as genuine physical and photographic evidence for their existence is lacking. In fact, some individuals in the UFO movement contend that there is some sort of relationship between UFOs and monsters, as the latter are allegedly seen more commonly after UFO sightings (Clark and Coleman 1978). Given the similarity between UFO and monster reports, what was said in chapter 7 regarding the constructive nature of perception and memory applies with full force to reports of monsters.

The Loch Ness monster of Scotland is probably the world’s best-known monster, second only to bigfoot in the United States. Binns (1984) and Campbell (1997) have carefully examined the Loch Ness monster story, and these books form the basis for the present discussion. It is widely believed that sightings of the monster date back more than a thousand years to one by Saint Columba, and that sightings have continued on a more or less regular basis since then. This is incorrect. The Saint Columba sighting report is an example of the poor scholarship that plagues the Loch Ness mystery. The sighting is taken from a biography of the saint written in 565 C.E., a time when the biographer of a saint was expected to prove his saintliness by telling marvelous stories about strange and miraculous occurrences associated with the saint (Binns 1984). Such stories can hardly be taken as reliable. Furthermore, Saint Columba’s “monster” wasn’t even seen in Loch Ness, but in the River Ness, a different body of water so shallow that it cannot support navigation, let alone a resident monster.