Creation science makes sense, but . . . .
Many Christians, and almost all adamant atheists, see creation science as a backdoor to sneaking God into school curricula, and public life generally. Among most educated people, creation science lacks respect. Wikipedia defines creation science as “a pseudoscientific form of . . . creationism, which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible.” But what if we think about creationism more generally, as the claim that mind created the universe? Then it makes perfect sense, especially when you consider the alternatives: that the universe created itself, or that it has existed forever. “Perfect sense” doesn’t mean automatically true. It just means that it rests on a good argument.
The Odds
One argument for creationism is that the conditions under which the universe could form, including planets on which people could live, are so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. Roger Penrose estimates it as 1 in 10 10123 . That is, 1 in 1 + 23 zeros. It’s a big number. Physicists have estimated that the entire universe contains “only” 1080 elementary particles (Moyer, p. 238).*
The only alternative is God, or so some creationists conclude. But that puts it too narrowly. What if instead of God we say “mind”? We’ll see. But couldn’t life have formed itself, lightening setting off a chain reaction in a pre-biotic chemical soup? It’s possible, but again unlikely in the extreme, perhaps impossible. As John Walton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “intense laboratory research has failed to produce even one nucleotide (RNA component) under geologically plausible conditions.” Scientists have faced “insuperable problems” in explaining the origin of the information that would need to be present in “the chains of nucleotides required for the RNA world.” RNA is the first genetic molecule capable of reproducing itself.
