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Failure versus Incompleteness

Neocreationists (a.k.a. Intelligent Design advocates) argue that the incompleteness of scientific explanation is a failure of scientific explanation. They single out and target the theory of evolution for this incompleteness criticism because they perceive evolution to be a more direct challenge to their monotheistic religious beliefs than other scientific theories. But the logic of their argument is applicable to science in general. If the theory of evolution fails because it is incomplete than many other scientific theories also fail, despite the differences in the details, for the same reason.

The theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics are incomplete in the sense that they are inconsistent with each other. Quantum mechanics is incomplete in the sense that it describes better than it explains. Yet they, like the theory of evolution, are still the best fit explanations for the unknown complete explanation of the relevant known facts that we currently have. Improving upon, or replacing, existing theories and finding more comprehensive theories is an ongoing process. Science is an activity of non-omniscient, non-omnipresent humans who lack complete evidence of everything that happened everywhere in the universe, Such completeness is not needed. All or nothing is a false dichotomy. The understanding we gain isn't false simply because it is incomplete. Scientific theories are necessarily contingent. Some uncertainty is unavoidable.

Entrez PubMed is a searchable database of 15 million peer-reviewed publications in the primary scientific literature that is maintained by the National Library of Medicine. A recent search for "natural selection" found 14,000 references, "speciation" gets 5,000, "human origins" gets 22,000. A search for "intelligent design" produced 25 references, of which 13 were irrelevant, five were news articles, six were critical of ID, and one was a historical review. "Irreducible complexity" gets five hits, one irrelevant and the others critical of ID. Exact numbers change daily as new publications are added to the database, but the pattern is clear. The Intelligent Designer(s) (a.k.a. god(s)) did it declaration is a placeholder for our ignorance masquerading as knowledge and pretending to be science.