Have you considered that your "creation scientist" might have sincerely believed in the creation account despite understanding the science behind evolution?
Many people believe in divine creation of
the universe or even of
the first living things while accepting evolution as the origin of
humans and other modern lifeforms. The Pope, as a rather notable example, accepts the seven-day fable as a metaphor without forsaking his faith in his god.
But the so-called "creation scientist" who was chosen to represent his community in a public debate didn't merely argue against the evidence for evolution. He
misrepresented it. He hid the majority of it and only displayed a small number of fossils in such a way as to appear to support his hypothesis.
That is not sincerity. It is intellectual dishonesty.
Boltzman pointed out that it's more likely that we're disembodied brains with false memories of a life we never lived than that an entire low entropy universe popped into existence and survived long enough for us to evolve.
Boltzman must be an American. He has the typical American befuddlement when confronted with the application of statistics and probability to extremely large numbers. The Second Law says that entropy
tends to increase, not that it increases monotonically.
If spacetime is infinite both spatially and temporally, then any event which is not ruled out by the laws of nature--i.e. its probability is greater than zero--can happen; it coud even happen more than once. All the atoms in your sofa really can suddenly all move in the same direction and lift you off the floor. An empty universe really can suddely resolve itself into a large, balanced set of quarks, leptons and bosons, which will then slowly revert back to maximum entropy. Of course that is where we would happen to be sitting because we couldn't have evolved anywhere else in spacetime; our existence is evidence that the probability of everything inside our Hubble radius coming into being is not zero. The infinitely larger remainder of spacetime that is empty does not contain any creatures to send us messages of encouragement, reminding us that our little corner of it is a singularity to be cherished and studied. Boltzman doesn't understand that compared to infinity everything is really small, no matter how big it looks from here.
His hypothesis of multiple disembodied brains with synapses full of delicately crafted memories is no more impossible than the Big Bang, but it does seem to be a significantly more singular singularity.
And what of the crazy world of quantum mechanics? A new universe is created every time you make a decision? Cats alive and dead at the same time?
That's veering off into cosmology, that strange place where physics, pure mathematics and philosophy collide uncomfortably. At least it's uncomfortable for me.
To say that every universe that is equally likely to exist after the occurrence of a random event actually does exist is a multiverse model which, like string theory and all the other cosmological models of the last century, postulates dimensions that we can't perceive. I'll leave that to the brane theorists and they can get back to me when they've got it figured out and rendered into understandable language.
I'm not denying science or even evolution, I'm just pointing out that even within the realms of science there's room for plenty of kooky stuff so you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss someone as dishonest just because they don't believe all the same things you do.
I'm not calling him dishonest because he had different beliefs. I meet people all the time who have different beliefs from mine but they are honest about them. I'm calling him dishonest because his manipulation of the evidence was disingenuous.
I personally see no conflict between religion and science. To me, a God who must often break the laws of nature (laws that he established) displays a striking lack of planning.
I state the fundamental premise of science, in layman's language, thus: The natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its present and past behavior. This premise is a component of the scientific method, which is recursive and has been tested exhaustively for five centuries without any respectable evidence being found to cast doubt on it.
So to postulate a supernatural universe whose creatures and forces perturb the workings of the natural universe does indeed contradict science.
So I'd expect God to accomplish what he wants to accomplish thru the natural processes of the universe, which would include evolution.
The Cosmic Watchmaker model. Wind it up, sit back and enjoy watching your toy.
I can even respect the Impatient Cosmic Watchmaker model. Who wants to sit around for twelve billion years watching the galactic equivalent of grass growing, as planets slowly form and primordial ooze turns into protozoa? Put the damn thing together with the humans and their biosphere already in existence; you can easily put light waves in all the right places to look like they've been traveling from the edge of an expanding universe for twelve billion years. Then pull the thread, like a ship in a bottle, setting it all in motion. Now grab the beer and the nachos and sit back to watch some real fun.
Of course this model begs the same question that all creationist models beg. The meaning of the word "universe" is "everything that exists." If the god or the cosmic watchmaker is out there doing all these things, that's pretty incontrovertable evidence that he exists. So okay then, where did he come from?
The problem with any creationist model of the universe is that if you ask all the hard questions and push it to its limit, you end up with a universe of truly comical complexity, and on top of that you still don't have any of your questions answered. You're much worse off than when you started. It's as if it were not created by a Cosmic Watchmaker, but by a Cosmic Rube Goldberg.
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