The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article on a new breed of young-earth creationists. This new movement, Hanna Rosin reports, consists of not fundamentalist cranks, but intellectuals “with an impressive wall of diplomas among them.” While the story has some insight into this movement, it has a glaring hole–namely a paragraph or two saying why creationism is not science. Rosin distinguishes creationism from “mainstream science,” and seems to start going into why creationism lacks the rigor of modern science (italics mine):
The old-earthers see their discipline as more pure than intelligent design; the intelligent-design people focus on a notion of a mystery “designer,” without specifying who that might be and what the mechanisms are. To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. “We don’t subscribe to this idea of the ‘God of gaps,’ meaning if you can’t explain something, then blame God,” Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. “Instead, we think: ‘Here’s what the Bible says. Now let’s go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.’ ”
But then she stops. Rosin subtly points out the problem with this new brand of creationism: they claim to follow scientific principles, but they seek evidence to fit their ideas, instead of seeking ideas to fit the evidence, as is the basis of modern science. While this may be implicit in the story, Rosin should make this explicit to place the story in proper context.
Also, I may gripe about how she oddly inserts herself into a couple of paragraphs. It didn’t seem necessary, and was a little jarring at first. I wonder why she did that and what the editor said.
