Could creationism be a valid scientific approach?
May 28th, 2010 | 
Author: As it stands, I suspect not and ironically the problem is because it tries to frame what’s essentially a belief system in terms that could be put across as science.
The biggest problem with it in scientific terms is that it starts from the premise that everything that exists now was created out of nothing about 6000 years ago. This causes the direct conflict with science in that there are proofs that show that life existed on earth for many millions of years and that the universe has been around for billions of years. The scientific theories that show those ages are inter-linked and many of the underlying principles behind them are used to make 21st century life work too: just about every piece of technology in your house (including the house construction itself) relies on at least some of those scientific principles.
However, supposing that instead of a creator (or rather Creator), there were a race of beings with a civilisation billions of years old. Could such a bunch of people simply create an earth with all the pseudo-history in the form of things like fossils that appeared to be millions of years old? I suspect that the answer would be a clear “yes”. Asking whether or not they would bother to do that is no more relevant than it would be for bacteria to attempt to understand our own reasons for doing things.
Science basically ignores that possibility and attempts to explain things as they are (or appear to be) and goes on to use that knowledge to improve things. Creationism assumes that there’s no point in attempting to understand it and would leave us in the dark ages.
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Michael Moorkcock wrote a novel about that idea in 1971. Have a look at ‘The Rituals of Infinity’ if you haven’t already read it (available on Amazon for pennies.)
Tim.
I should have said, “the idea in your third paragraph” !
Tim.
Nope, haven’t read it yet. It’s nice to see that Michael is still around too… way too many of the SF writers from the good old days sadly are no longer with us to see the 21st century.
In some ways I’m surprised that there’s only been the one SF tale about this (and I’ve read a lot of SF over the years). Having said that, I guess that SF writers (and readers) consider, by and large, purely scientific style premises and would generally have them effectively censor such seemingly religious based premises from their story lines.
Certainly, if you assume that there are a fairly large number of advanced civilisations out there it would seem more than likely that some of them would consider creating an “earth” at some point as an experiment. Moreover, if one were to do it, wouldn’t it be likely to be created well out of the way? Somewhere like the edge of the galaxy perhaps? Somewhere like just where we are in fact.
Yep, Creationism would leave us in the dark ages. With science, we can test an idea to know whether it works and this allows us to continually uncover new facts as opposed to aesthetic guesses that can never be tested/falsified.