"Bruce Sterling - Creation Science" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.

Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.

It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.

Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.

This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer
"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.
The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.

This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about