Reply #49: Sure.

[Igel]

I've known decent biologists and chemists--we're talking grad students at Tier 1 research institutions--that were creationists of some sort. Didn't matter. Data are data.

It didn't even alter one biologist's dissertation. He nicely went through all the data in his diss, showing how his analysis made predictions about speciation. That's evolutionary bread-and-butter stuff. Except for the fact that the guy was in on a conversation in which a mutual friend said that all creationists are idiots and probably wouldn't even graduate with their bachelors he'd have never brought it up. After all, he said, every science has evolution at its core.

So this guy stayed under cover and asked the guy mouthing off exactly how evolutionary biology affected his science. He was an astrophysicist looking at stellar formation. "Lots of speciation in those stellar nebulae?" The guy admitted that it didn't matter. Physics? "No." Chemistry? "No." Electronics? "No." Civil engineering? "No." Mathematics? "No." Metallurgy? "No." It only really counts in biology. It only really counts in certain kinds of biology. There are alternative ways to "get" pretty much all the same relevant insights of evolutionary theory for nearly everything but discussing biological evolution. After all, "evolution" is a nice catch-term but it's really speciation that ticks off old-Earth creationists. That's what this guy was. He seemed content.

Later they had a heated discussion about characters in Babylon 5. Would Delenn do X, would Sheridan do Y. And what about Kosh? The "biological evolution is at the core of every science" guy argued strongly for certain interpretations of characters. "Delenn would never do this." "No, that's not something Sheridan would ever do." At the end, the creationist asked how he could be so certain about such things, certain enough to get actually upset--after all, they're just stories made up for a tv show. Yet the evolutionist had managed to "get into" a fictional world. He assumed its postulates. He had learned that world through weekly broadcasts that he faithfully watched. He looked for inconsistencies and had tried to reconcile them within the constraints of the show.

Now, the difference is that for all his strongly held beliefs the evolutionist knew, when he backed up, that it was fiction. The ideas put to paper by a given person (whom he'd met, even), and then hired actors to speak while he had them filmed. On the other hand, the biologist still asserted that his view was a higher truth, more correct than evolution. Yet he knew that there was the data and while it didn't refute what he believed--remember that whole "non-falsifiable" business?--nonetheless evolution was the prevailing heuristic on how to interpret them, a hypothesis that had proved to have rich predictive abilities. His beliefs made no predictions. So he used evolution with enough elegance and finesse to defend his dissertation without his advisor having a clue. Don't know if he got a job or not.

This guy used evolution in much the same way I used Chomskian linguistics. I think it's whack. I did even when I was being taught the theory--not to mention when I wrote papers using it, made theory-internal arguments within its confines, and dueled with functionalists as to which was a superior theory. You want to be taken seriously, you want to have a formal, explicitly delimited theory that makes falsifiable predictions, that's the one you use. It's still the one I'd use.

If I were going to hire somebody it wouldn't matter if he was a creationist or not. The point is that analytical rigor and critical thinking skills are correlated with goofy religious beliefs, but no more than that: One can keep them separate with no great effort, esp. if the beliefs have little to say about their discipline. The idea that a thinking person must be ruthlessly consistent in the application of rigorous analytical thinking to all areas of their lives--from data analysis in the lab to choice sexual practices and the breed of dog you buy for your kid--is loony. But once you've conceded that even the most logical person has illogical bits in their thinking and this is okay, you've ceded not just the battleground but the whole theatre of operations.