What Is the Malcolm Effect?

These ominous words would foreshadow the ultimate fate of Jurassic Park in the novel by Michael Crichton (much better known as a movie by Steven Spielberg). Ultimately, the story of Jurassic Park is a story of man’s extreme hubris in thinking we can understand and control nature without limits. The “Malcolm Effect” in Crichton’s book refers to the catastrophically unpredictable results of complex systems that are insufficiently understood. Hammond’s scientists assumed that their genetic controls (having only female dinosaurs in the park) would fully prevent any unauthorized breeding of the dinos. Keeping in mind this is fiction, their assumptions turned out to be false because of the unrecognized consequences of using frog DNA sequences to fill in the gaps in the original dino DNA.

Real life is, of course, replete with examples of the disastrous consequences of people making unjustified assumptions. For example, the builders of the Titanic assumed they had understood physics and shipbuilding sufficiently well to construct an “unsinkable ship.” Their assumptions turned out to be fatally wrong for many, as when tested with a real iceberg collision, weak rivets and/or low-quality steel turned out to be the ship’s undoing.2 A couple of history’s most egregious errors, however, dwarf the Titanic’s sinking in terms of the sheer amount of suffering, disillusionment, and wrong thinking that they have engendered: the sibling errors of evolutionism and deep time (belief in millions of years of prehistory).

Historical Science vs. Operational Science

From the very beginning of the modern-day creation science movement, the distinction between operational science (dealing with repeatable, testable claims about the ongoing operations of natural law) and historical science (dealing with claims about non-repeatable, individual past events) has loomed large over the conversation, e.g., in Morris and Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood:

Geologists therefore, must leave the strict domain of science when they become historical geologists. We repeat that we have no quarrel whatever with geological science, which in its many disciplines is contributing most significantly to our understanding and utilization of our terrestrial environment and resources. The so-called historical geology, on the other hand, has not changed or developed in any essential particular for over a hundred years, since the days when its basic philosophical structure was first worked out by such non-geologists as Charles Lyell (a lawyer), William Smith (a surveyor), James Hutton (an agriculturalist), John Playfair ( a mathematician), George Cuvier (a comparative anatomist), Charles Darwin (an apostate divinity student turned naturalist), and various theologians (Buckland, Fleming, Pye Smith, and Sedgwick).3

I remember the first creation book I ever read. It was The Illustrated Origins Answer Book by Paul S. Taylor, published in 1995. I read it sometime in early high school—which would have been around the year 2000. This book had a big impact on me at the time, as I had no idea there was a whole world of scientists out there who challenge evolution. Taylor doesn’t specifically mention “operational science” or “historical science” by name anywhere I can find, but the idea still comes through clearly:

Human science is very good at building skyscrapers and computers, but very poor at reliably unraveling mysteries of the ancient past. Human beings have always been extremely limited in what they can prove with certainty about ancient events. One can only observe and test things as they exist now—in the present, not as they exist in the past—since one cannot travel to the past. . . . There should be no arrogance on the part of any finite being in declaring personal beliefs about Earth’s origin, ancient history, and relative age which are based solely on interpretation, relatively short-term observation, and guesswork.4

I would go so far as to say this distinction is the most important key to unlocking the creation versus evolution controversy.

I would go so far as to say this distinction is the most important key to unlocking the creation versus evolution controversy. Evolutionists like to wield the obvious successes of science in the aforementioned building of skyscrapers and computers as a club with which to hit anyone who would want to challenge their claims about the past. It is likely for this exact reason that one is met with stiff opposition from evolutionists of all stripes when one brings up this topic. Upon hearing a creationist mention historical versus operational science, many evolutionists will quickly chime in that “no scientist” or “no university department,” etc., makes this distinction. Allegedly, only creationists make this distinction in science, and we creationists only like to pretend this division in science exists so that we can ignore the powerful evidence for evolution. This claim has been soundly refuted by multiple authors, including this article showing early evolutionists’ use of these terms by Troy Lacey of Answers in Genesis.5

Operational Science—Repeatability, Falsifiability

Of course, it’s not enough for us to point out a distinction and stop there. We need to explain why historical science is less trustworthy in principle than its present-day observable counterpart. Fundamentally, the logical process behind operational (empirical) science is different from historical science. Operational science is based upon the scientific method wherein testable predictions are made, tests are done, results recorded, and then the whole process is repeated by different scientists to confirm the results. This involves the use of inductive reasoning—reasoning from particular experiences to universal or general truths. Note: inductive arguments are not proofs. Just because we have observed things occurring in one way in the past does not mean that they will always do so in the future.

However, the Christian worldview, from which modern science was birthed, gives us a foundation for believing there are certain regularities in nature, and that God will uphold his creation in a predictable fashion (see, for example, Genesis 8:22). Thus, if we repeatedly test a hypothesis and find consistent results in line with it, we conclude it is likely an accurate description of nature. Conversely, even one verifiable result is sufficient to disconfirm (falsify) our hypothesis.6

Eyewitness Testimony—Actually a Major Part of Science!

One hugely important aspect of operational science that is nearly always overlooked is that operational science is essentially a systematic collection of eyewitness testimony from human scientists. In debates over the truth of the Christian worldview, it has been my extensive and consistent experience that skeptics, atheists, and evolutionists employ a tactic to attempt to downplay evidence for the Christian worldview by denigrating the value of eyewitness testimony. For example, in a livestream I recently did explaining the concept of historical science, an evolutionary biologist issued the statement, “eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable.”7 Of course, it is well-known that eyewitnesses can misapprehend things that they witnessed while under duress, running for their lives, and so forth. Eyewitnesses can deliberately lie in situations where they have a motive to do so. Even absent such factors, eyewitnesses can disagree on details of events they witnessed or mention different details, just by virtue of their different vantage points and personalities.8 However, it does not follow from this that we should dismiss eyewitness testimony wholesale. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Christian cold case detective J. Warner Wallace explains,

Every case I handle is like this; witnesses seldom agree on every detail. In fact, when two people agree completely on every detail of their account, I am inclined to believe that they have either contaminated each other’s observations or are working together to pull the wool over my eyes. I expect truthful, reliable eyewitnesses to disagree along the way.9

Ironically, it gets worse for skeptics, however. Because in their zeal to eliminate eyewitness testimony from consideration (and with it, the Bible’s historical record), they fail to realize they are sawing off the very branch they are sitting on. The empirical scientific method would be impossible to follow were it not for the collection of numerous bits of eyewitness testimony in the form of published experimental results. Each time a scientist performs an experiment or records a data point, that scientist is essentially notating a piece of their own eyewitness testimony for posterity. If such testimony is “famously unreliable,” then by extension so must be all human knowledge including the knowledge of operational science.

Operational Science Depends upon Honest Reporting

Sadly, examples are not hard to find where this assumption of truthfulness and reliability does prove to be false, even in science. A high-profile contemporary example of alleged scientific fraud implicates no less than the president of Stanford University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.10 A recent YouTube video bringing to light this high-profile case is perhaps even more remarkable for the kinds of comments that are being left. To take just one interesting example,

As an active geneticist in academia . . . I am kinda shocked that your viewers didn’t think that this [scientific fraud] was common or could happen in the “hard sciences.” It is sadly all too common. I have seen many instances of this in my own field of plant genetics and cellular biology, as well as in other fields like neuroscience.11

The fact is that even operational science becomes highly suspect in the context of a society that has thrown off the “shackles” of religion (as the Western world is currently in the late-stage process of doing)! Science—both operational and historical—needs the Bible. Knowledge without honesty is indistinguishable from ignorance.

Historical Science—Abductive Reasoning

By contrast, historical science relies on abductive reasoning, which means inference to the best explanation for the available facts/clues we possess.12 This is different because it is inherently non-repeatable: we cannot repeat individual past events. Because historical science doesn’t deal with regularities but rather with particulars, the criterion of repeatability isn’t satisfied. And because we cannot observe the phenomena in question, the criterion of falsifiability is also removed: failure to find expected evidence is not a conclusive proof that the hypothesis was false. To use the crime scene analogy, failure to find the killer’s fingerprints at the scene doesn’t falsify the crime, since the killer could have been wearing gloves. Failure to find the murder weapon isn’t a falsification either: the killer could have disposed of it. To falsify a past event is impossible in practice because it would require omniscience to be able to rule out every possibility except one—that it didn’t happen.

The Smoking Gun

Philosopher of science Dr. Carol Cleland, an evolutionist and a naturalist, has not failed to recognize this distinction. She wrote,

Historiographic science differs in important ways from experimental science. The hypotheses of experimental science typically postulate regularities among kinds or types of events . . . In contrast, the hypotheses of scientific historiography typically postulate particular events.13

This fact alone is enough to cause her to run afoul of at least some in the scientific community. During the livestream I recently did on historical science, a person claiming to be a PhD scientist from the University of New South Wales in Australia (name was unintelligible) called in to inform us that Dr. Cleland is not a scientist, and that her ideas are not used in the “hard sciences.”14 Apparently, those engaged in “hard science” cannot be bothered with the irrelevant musings of philosophers of science, even when those said philosophers happen to be “on their side” as it regards origins. This is unmitigated anti-intellectualism, coming straight from those people whom we’re told are the greatest truth-givers in our society.

In any case, Dr. Cleland wants us to regard historical science on an even par with operational science. She argues that the historical counterpart to empirical testing is the search for a “smoking gun” piece of evidence. According to Cleland,

A smoking gun is a trace that picks out one of the competing hypotheses as providing a better causal explanation for the currently available traces than the others.15

But notice the subjectivity being smuggled in by the use of the word “better” here. Who decides what counts as a better explanation? Notice also she said, “currently available traces.” Who gets to decide if those traces which happen to be currently available are sufficient to give us an accurate picture of the past?

Cleland seems to at least partially understand the difficulty in her position when she later writes,

Even supposing that the correct explanation is among those under consideration, there are no guarantees that a smoking gun for it will be found even supposing that one exists.16

Indeed, that is a problem, and it is a problem that practitioners of operational science need not be particularly concerned with, as the success of operational science is primarily based on successful prediction rather than on a correct conceptual understanding of the underlying causal forces responsible for natural laws. For example, with Newtonian physics, we can predict accurately how gravity will affect mass because of repeated experimentation, despite the fact that to this day what exactly causes gravity to happen is not well understood!17^,18 This predictive ability of operational science is not without its limits, however, as we’ll see.

Cleland undersold the difficulties with her “smoking gun” methodology. In addition to the problems she stated, there is the even bigger issue that even if “smoking gun” evidence is found, there is no guarantee it will be accepted by the scientific community, or that it will be correctly interpreted. I have previously written about the stunning find of unpermineralized (unfossilized) dinosaur bones found in Alaska, as well as the ensuing row that happened in the publishing journal.

The upshot is, these bones are mostly unpermineralized, with only a tinge of superficial rust-colored mineralization happening on the exterior.19 Given that bone collagen has been empirically tested and shown to have a half-life of 1,678 years (by a creation scientist, no less!), this would argue for a young earth at least as forcefully as radiometric decay argues for an old one.20 Why is this “smoking gun” being summarily ignored? Because it is convenient for the evolutionary establishment to do so. Cleland’s wishful thinking about the objective neutrality of scientists in interpreting the evidence is not realistic.

“Asymmetry of Overdetermination”

Cleland’s explanation of the difference in methodology between historical and operational science is couched in some pretty technical language (the asymmetry of overdetermination), but what it boils down to is simply this: it’s easier to infer something happened in the past based upon a relatively small collection of evidence than it is to predict future events:

As an example, the eruption of a volcano has many different effects (e.g., ash, pumice, masses of basalt, clouds of gases), but only a small fraction of this material is required in order to infer that it occurred; put dramatically, one doesn’t need every minute particle of ash. Indeed, any one of an enormous number of remarkably small subcollections of these effects will do. Running things in the other direction of time, however, produces strikingly different results.21

This generally tends to be practically true, however the way Cleland presents this is misleading to say the least.22 It is indeed easy to jump to conclusions based upon a small trace of evidence. We can jump to the conclusion that a storm has just passed by if we find the ground wet. In the end, though, that’s all we would be doing—jumping to a conclusion. Finding a trace of ash or pumice is, in fact, not sufficient to prove that a volcano has erupted. That conclusion is underdetermined by the evidence not overdetermined by it. Any number of things could cause something like that to be found, including possible causes we haven’t even thought of yet. And this underscores a major weakness of historical science: our ability to explain is limited by our experience and our imagination—and these are then further constrained by our biases. After all, as Lewontin famously said,23 evolutionists above all do not want to allow a “Divine Foot in the door.”24 They are not going to allow any explanations to be under consideration that would violate their naturalistic, anti-Biblical maxims.

Predicting the Past Is Hard

Chaos theory teaches us that complex systems like weather patterns are theoretically predictable due to deterministic physics but practically impossible to actually predict because to do so would require omniscience and infinite computational resources.25 This is one of the themes embraced in Jurassic Park and expounded by the character Dr. Ian Malcolm. But while this fact of life seems to be accepted by most when it comes to predicting the future, it seems comparatively few have understood the implications of this when attempting to do the same thing in reverse: predicting the past. When we use present-day observations of complex processes like radiometric decay, and then we extrapolate those processes into the past, we are assuming we know enough about present-day processes and enough about past conditions to safely make statements about how things were millions or even billions of years ago. We should all collectively know better. As Malcolm points out in the book Jurassic Park, we aren’t even able to predict the motion of billiard balls past a few collisions on a table due to the effects of so many imperceptible factors in play.26 Why, then, should we have confidence in our ability to predict the amount of past time elapsed on the basis of a complex physical process of radioactive decay over alleged millions of years of time? I think the obvious answer is, we shouldn’t.

The Evidence Is Crumbling

Evidence is being lost every single day. This means that the bigger the time gap between a claimed past event and the present day, the less we have to go on. The general process of entropy, where order tends to disorder, is constantly at work in our world. Wind, rain, and lightning gradually wear away geological features. People lose important documents. Fires burn. And as these processes go on and on, our picture of the past gets gradually obscured. This problem doesn’t just affect historical science: it affects history in general, as documents containing important historical records are lost as well. This is why we can’t be certain of anything at all in the past, especially in the remote past, without a certain and preserved testimony from God himself.

One particularly interesting geological example of crumbling evidence is that of rock arches. In Utah’s Arches National Park, the rock arches are collapsing very quickly; in fact, they have been averaging about one collapse per year between the years of 1977 and 2015, according to park rangers.27 That rate of collapse wouldn’t comport with the deep-time geological explanation of their gradual formation, but it also shows us something striking about the nature of evidence about the past. Cleland’s “smoking gun” approach is deeply flawed because we have no way to know which “smoking gun” pieces of evidence we’ve already lost without ever being discovered by mankind. Going on what happens to be available to us today is naturally all we can do, but it’s dishonest to pretend this is on an equal footing with repeatable science in the observable present.

One more example will suffice: the exposed fossil-bearing strata in the cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, are directly exposed to the tides. Ian Juby’s discovery of the impressions of inverted stumps controverts the evolutionists’ claim that these strata formed slowly over a succession of local flooding events.28 This is a huge fossil repository, but they are literally falling from the cliffs and onto the ground, where people could easily pick them up without cataloging them, or the sea could carry them away forever.29 Similar things like this are certainly happening all over the world. Evolutionists love to proclaim that a Precambrian rabbit find would falsify their whole paradigm. But how can they be confident that such a Precambrian rabbit, were it to exist, would happen to be found before being destroyed?

Summary

The more we learn, the more we know how little we know.

The more we learn, the more we know how little we know. The history of science has taught us this lesson in humility time and again, but nonetheless the scientific/academic community has not assimilated this. They continue to ignore the Word of God in favor of their own speculations. They do this because of a spirit of arrogance and rebellion that is a natural outworking of mankind’s sin nature, and the appearance of monolithic “truth” they give off allows the average scoffer on the street a false sense of security in their denial of the Bible. The distinction in science between what is repeatable, observable, and falsifiable (operational science) and that which is inferred about the past based upon limited available data in the present could not be more important. Historical science is less reliable because (1) we are biased, and we jump to conclusions; (2) chaos theory means even slight errors in measurement or calculation can result in major misses over long timespans; and (3) evidence is being lost over time. Those of us who care enough to engage in creation apologetics should continue to hammer this point home at every available opportunity. Solomon’s wise words at the end of Ecclesiastes seem an apropos way to end this treatise on scientific ignorance:

The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings30; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:11–14)