is talking about the scientific method, which scientists use and which may reasonably be said to be naturalistic. Creationists have no comparable method, which frequently hurts the creationist arguments where the issue is one of whether intelligent design is or is not scientific. Thus, if you insinuate that the scientific method is atheistic, you tend to reduce the importance of the scientific method in the reader's mind. Since naturalism (or materialism) is logically independent of theology (see chapter 2, section B.4, “Logic/epistemology”), their mixing is particularly loose.
Some creationist advocates have favored the term creation science as a means of suggesting that it, too, is scientific. Evolutionary scientists in return have scornfully referred to creation science as an oxymoron—a loaded term if there ever was one. (An oxymoron is a term that is inherently self-contradictory. Notable examples include “deafening silence,” “civil war,” “friendly fire,” “jumbo shrimp,” “original copy,” and, yes, some people maintain, “military intelligence.” Students at Occidental College in Los Angeles have any number of “Oxymoron” jokes.) Certainly the level of emotion in our example would be greatly reduced by saying instead that creation science is not in fact scientific. (See “Rhetorical Devices,” in this section)
Another example of loaded words is the following humorous conjugation of verb forms such as “I am persevering, you are stubborn, he is pigheaded.”
Examples of loaded words can be seen in a discussion of peppered-moth selection involving a creationist (Jonathan Wells) and two evolutionists (Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick). Wells wrote a book, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, that Padian and Gishlick reviewed. The data at issue are from peppered-moth studies carried out by H. B. D. Kettlewell.
Kettlewell's research is about moths that are generally peppered or very light in color. They spend most of their lives perching on the bark of trees. In the mid 1800s, when the industrial revolution was occurring, industry smokestacks were emitting much soot and thereby blackening the trees in industrial British cities like London and Manchester and their neighbors. And about that time someone found a previously unseen dark moth. As the trees got blacker, the frequency of dark moths increased, reaching sometimes to 98 percent. With an interest in preserving the environment, laws were passed to reduce the pollution. To no surprise for a Darwinist, the frequency of the dark moths declined again as the blackness of the trees declined.
How might this have occurred? Birds are known predators of these moths, and it was soon suggested that the increase of dark moths was a matter of camouflage. When the bark of trees was black, dark moths were difficult for the birds to see, but when the bark of trees was whitish, peppered moths were the variant that were difficult to see and thus their chances of survival were enhanced. The positive correlation between the blackness of the trees and the frequency of dark moths supports the proposition of natural selection going on before your eyes. Kettlewell illustrated the camouflage by pinning a peppered and a dark moth side by side on a dark tree trunk and also a similar pair on a light-colored tree. It was astonishing how well the dark moths blended in with the blackened trunk, and equally astonishing how the peppered moths blended in with the light-colored trunk.
But things are not quite as simple as they may at first appear. The Kettlewell study was incomplete in that it failed to properly consider other possible factors, such as migration of moths from surrounding areas that could have overwhelmed the influence of selection. The Kettlewell study also gave undue emphasis to moths resting on tree trunks and failed to consider that birds see ultraviolet light much better than humans and thus might have been able to detect moths that are well camouflaged to human eyes. There are unanswered questions, but the evidence for differential survival in agreement with the selection hypothesis is basically sound, despite the incompleteness of the Kettlewell study.
Wells published a rejoinder to criticisms raised by Padian and Gishlick—criticisms that included pejorative phrases like “notorious peppered moth experiments,” “staged photos of moths on tree trunks,” and “the statistic is bogus” (Emphases mine.) The statistic arises from the observation of forty-seven peppered moths observed resting in the wild, of which twelve were resting on a tree trunk, giving 12/47 = 0.225 of the resting peppered moths located on tree trunks. This was hardly the critical measurement of the study, but it can be said to demonstrate the assertion that peppered moths do rest, in sizable numbers, on tree trunks. That is important, not bogus. In conclusion, loaded words should not be used to attempt to sway your audience.
4. Repetition. “Testing Darwinism by the molecular evidence has never been attempted…. The true scientific question—Does the molecular evidence as a whole tend to confirm Darwinism when evaluated without Darwinist bias?—has never been asked.” Repetition is a form of emphasis present in the two phrases “has never been attempted” and “has never been asked.” Moreover, “Darwinist bias” would be unloaded were it altered to “the Darwinist view.”
F. OTHER TERMS RELEVANT IN LOGICAL ANALYSIS
1. Bias: Any assumption, often unrecognized, that tends to cause the experiment to produce inaccurate answers, pushing the results in one direction. (See objectivity and subjectivity below.)
2. Objectivity: A scientist's goal, reflecting the scientist's attempt to see what is there in his experiments rather than what he hopes, believes, or expects is there. It is the overcoming of one's personal biases or inclinations. This is something that is often difficult to achieve. A common phrase is “If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it.” This typifies the nature of objectivity. A different humorous phrase, also typifying objectivity, is “If I hadn't believed it I wouldn't have seen it.” Shakespeare seems to have recognized the problem:
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
Wishful thinking can often lead us to accept “evidence” that would be rejected by a more objective observer. For example, a primitive human called “Nebraska Man” was once thought to have existed, based on the evidence of a tooth. It was found later that the tooth was not from a human but from an extinct peccary (a piglike hoofed mammal), and had been misidentified as being primitive human. Other examples include the “Paluxy Event” and the “Piltdown Affair.” (See the discussion in sections I and J of chapter 4.) In a more famous example, Martin Fleish-mann and Stanley Pons claimed to have produced “cold fusion” in 1989—but this claim has not been accepted by the scientific community. A case of wishful thinking? In science, it is best to proceed with a good dose of humility.
3. Subjectivity: The misreading of evidence because of personal beliefs. (See bias and objectivity above). Problems associated with bias, (lack of) objectivity, and subjectivity are common to evolutionists and creationists alike. But the two groups typically do not respond in the same manner.
Suppose there is disagreement over two proposed dates for the age of some event or artifact. The evolutionist, understanding the requirements of the scientific method, will ask whether his determination of the dating is repeatable on another sample from the same geographic site. The creationist, on the other hand, doesn't have much interest in repeatability except for its hoped-for conclusions. Then the lack of scientific repeatability is, for the creationist, evidence that the science is wrong and creationism is right. Of course, in the worst case for the scientist, both dates
