After a number of Poster-Quotes featuring the words of scientists and philosophers, I'm quoting sci-fi author Isaac Asimov this time around, and I realize how big of a nerd that makes me. "Oh man, I KNEW it! The planet guy's a dork. He probably writes this stuff with a pair of Spock ears firmly attached to his noggin." I mean, I am a nerd, but truth be told I'm not all that big a fan of science fiction. Some of it's perfectly good—the better sci-fi movies and a little Heinlein for example—but I don't necessarily favour the genre over others.

Yet when I found this particular quote from Professor Asimov, and thought about the debate with a creationist I had taken part in earlier that day, I figured it was especially appropriate.

What debate you ask? It began when I interjected into a Facebook conversation a friend was having with a gentleman by the name of Chris. I say gentleman because Chris conducted himself cordially throughout our debate on an admittedly touchy subject, and he seemed to accept the notion that while I don't share his faith, I certainly wasn't attempting to attack it in the course of the discussion. A person's faith is one thing, something I'd rarely, if ever, challenge; but the way Chris was both mischaracterizing and denying evolution was something altogether different. At the time that I stumbled upon the conversation he had been attempting to cast doubt on Darwin's great discovery with the use of typical creationist arguments, and at that moment I got my skeptical back up.

Now, I'm not a scientist, nor an expert in biology, but I am a skeptic. As a result, I've heard the creationist platform against evolution time and time again. Many of these arguments were included in Chris' response, and needless to say he had some pretty strange ideas about how science works, while also being grossly misinformed about the mechanisms of evolution. I could discuss many of his arguments in detail, but I'll instead focus on one particular avenue of attack, that being towards how certain I was about the truth of evolution. 

The following part of my statement seemed to bother Chris the most:

He then used the creationist's favourite tactic, that being to suggest that by questioning evolution it is the creationist who is keeping an open mind. An extremely truncated version of Chris' response follows. (Chris' arguments were more nuanced than I can fairly represent here without reprinting them all and thereby turning this article into something it wasn't intended to be. While the full debate over creationist pet-theories can be found in many places online, I wanted to focus on a specific idea in this piece.)

Obviously in a pithy Facebook comment I wasn't being as pedantically accurate as I could have been, but yes, evolution could still be disproved were new evidence to come to light. Nor can the theory of evolution ever be "proved beyond a shadow of a doubt", as I chose to put it initially. Later I modified my argument to say that it had been proved beyond any "reasonable doubt"*, as is the best case scenario for any scientific theory. For example, there's always a chance that some omnipotent force could be working behind the scenes to make things look like they evolved, but you can say that about anything. Instead of water having a boiling point of a hundred degrees, it's entirely possible that little invisible fairies blow bubbles into your saucepan at the precise moment that the water within hits a certain temperature. There's no way to say with 100% certainty that this is not the case. However, just because it's theoretically possible isn't a good reason to believe that it's so.

The point I was trying to make was to describe just how massive the evidence for both evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection really is, and also that no credible evidence has ever been raised against it. Chris is suffering under the false impression that the evidence against evolution is compelling, something he no doubt came across in creationist propaganda. Furthermore, he misunderstands what I mean about evolution not having been disproved, and in that way demonstrates his ignorance of how science works.

Scientific theories are routinely picked apart, ideally by the very people that formulate them, but certainly by their peers. This is necessary for something to be called science in the first place. By attempting to falsify a theory in any way we can, we get a very good sense early on if that theory holds any weight.  A perfectly accurate theory should obviously be impossible to falsify, and when more and more attempts to do so fail, our confidence in that theory grows. In fact we continue to test evolution to this very day, in that every current related experiment has the opportunity to present us with new evidence to refute it. And you know what? Nothing would make scientists happier than if such evidence became apparent.

I wanted to convey this idea to Chris, but I think Isaac Asimov does a far better job. Here's the quote. Click to see larger, then please read on.

I've cut the quote down for my poster, but the meaning remains the same: there's nothing more thrilling in science than finding some odd bit of evidence that doesn't fit our current models. If even a single piece of compelling evidence were to come to light that cast doubt on natural selection, scientists would leap at the chance to develop that evidence into a new theory. That's because any such discovery would open up an avenue towards a better understanding of the world, while also advancing scientific knowledge. Careers would be made, grants would be given, nobel prizes would be awarded; all for proving a favoured scientific theory wrong. This is the very method by which science works, and it's the one thing that people who think of science as exclusionary of new ideas just can't seem to grasp.  

Although I've never read Asimov, I've now read his Wikipedia article, and I'm pleased to find another prominant skeptic in the annals of history. According to the Wiks: "Isaac Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist.  He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science."

Asimov embodied the skeptical ideal, fought against exactly what creationt's try to do, and his sentiments towards religion were just what I tried to communicate to Chris at the end of our debate.

"When it comes to faith I really don't care who believes what - however I don't like to see science get confused by ideology. 

Yes, one should keep an open mind, but if your conclusions run so far afield of what the vast majority of educated people are saying on the subject, the critical mind must ask itself if it's allowing bias into the equation, or cherry picking evidence to fit an already existing ideology.

Science is about one thing: evidence. Wherever it goes, so does the scientific understanding. That's why science works, why we can shoot a bullet into space and have it land softly on a planet a million miles away, why we don't die from smallpox anymore. I say we keep going in whichever direction the evidence takes us."

So maybe I'll start reading some of Isaac Asimov's work, because the man sure could write a good one-liner. While I'm still not the world's biggest fan of science fiction, I most certainly prefer it to the anti-science fiction of creationism.