Judge Overton Explains It All for You

In 1981 the Arkansas state legislature passed a law that required the state public schools to teach "creation science" and "evolution science" in a balanced manner. It was immediately challenged. Poorly written, the law was dead on arrival in court. Michael Ruse, a Darwinist philosopher of science, provided key testimony that the presiding judge, William Overton, drew upon when writing his decision.

The results of this "collaboration" were a definition of science put forward by Judge Overton and a set of rules he termed the "essential characteristics" of science. Firstly, he stated that science is that which is "accepted by the scientific community." So the problems begin right at the start. Truth is to be determined by the preferences of a community. Overton elaborated with his five essentials:

1. Science is guided by natural law.

2. All phenomena are explanatory by natural law.

3. Ideas are testable against the empirical world.

4. Conclusions are held tentatively.

5. All scientific statements are falsifiable.

Other philosophers of science were not happy with the details of the decision and several of Judge Overton's "rules" are fundamentally flawed. Scientists are not in the least tentative about their basic commitments to evolution as we have seen, commitments that are themselves not subject to empirical investigation--how do you prove empirically that ideas must be testable against the empirical world? Advocates of "creation science" do make several claims about their theory that are truly falsifiable, so why should they be excluded on this criterion? How can they be declared false and yet unfalsifiable at the same time? Sad to say, though, the scientific community at large was quite delighted with the decision and it was published in toto in the journal Science, demonstrating that scientists may be expert geologists or zoologists but are often lousy philosophers.