Date: Sun Jan 31 1993 17:14:00
From: Aaron Boyden
To: Wesley R. Elsberry
Subj: Laudan and Johnson
Attr: recvd
evolution -------------------------------
> Did you notice the quote from Laudan in part five of
> Johnson's SWAA speech?
> Johnson is using Laudan's comments as a cudgel, trying
> to open the way for SciCre to be considered
> scientific. However, your comments seem to indicate
> that Laudan specifically referenced and dismissed the
> SciCre movement as falsified. Do we have the makings
> of yet another SciCre quote-out-of-context?
> I would greatly appreciate at least a sentence of
> Laudan commenting upon SciCre and the reference again
> for a little FAQ building, if that wouldn't trouble
> you too much.
The following is from "Science at the Bar- Causes for Concern" by Larry Laudan,
from Science, Technology and Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982):16-19, reprinted on
pages 351-355 of Michael Ruse's _But Is It Science_. It refers to McLean v.
Arkansas, the famous Creationism trial:
"At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being
untestable, dogmatic (and thus non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three
charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked claims
that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that
Creationism makes no empirical assertions whatever. This is surely false.
Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about empirical matters
of fact. Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its
implications), the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin
(say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological
features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of
the postulated worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number
of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they
assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view
that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil
record must be paleontologically co-extensive with the record of lower animals.
It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such claims with the
available evidence- evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history,
among other things.
"In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have
failed those tests."
I provide the somewhat lengthy quotation to show both statements that could be
ripped from context by creationists (the first few sentences) and also the
context, to make clear why such statements were made. I also attributed to
Laudan the view that the psychological fact that creationists are unwilling to
accept contrary evidence is irrelevant to the status of their theory, so the
following quote, from "More on Creationism", Science, Technology and Human
Values 8, no. 42 (1983):36-38, also reprinted in Ruse's book, will support that
interpretation:
"...the soundness of creation-science can and must be separated from all
questions about the dogmatism of creationists. Once we make that rudimentary
separation, we discover both (a) that creation-science is testable and
falsifiable, and (b) that creation-science has been tested and falsified-
insofar as any theory can be said to be falsified. But, as I pointed out in
the earlier essay, that damning indictment cannot be drawn so long as we
confuse Creationism and creationists to such an extent that we take the
creationists' mental intransigence to entail the immunity of creationist theory
from empirical confrontation."
Hopefully this makes Laudan's views, or at least his published views, clear; if
you're really interested, look up the essays, as they are quite short and
painless. It seems to me, looking at this from the viewpoint of philosophy as
a whole, that a strain of crypto-Positivism remains strong in philosophy of
science, and that Laudan represents a move toward the present philosophical
mainstream (at least in Anglo-American philosophy) of post-Positivist analytic
philosophy. Insofar as it seems to me that Logical Positivism died for good
reasons, I can only consider this progress, even if it produces quotes that can
be abused out of context.
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