Is evolutionary theory a better ‘explanation’?

There is a growing debate between the Creationism and Evolutionary Theory in USA as raised by Christian Right, and, of course it argue that the former is a better explanation than later, while scientist argue otherwise. Although this is the topic of my thesis paper when I was studying in a Christian College, I am not going to dwell into this issue here. There are good discussion of it on the Internet. My point here is to play Devil’s Advocate on the common sense that evolutionary theory in Biology is a better explanation.

What people often missed in the debate is what is qualified as an explanation? I would like argue for the point that although Creationism is not consider as an explanation since it replace one unknown with another, there are some issues associated with calling evolutionary theory an ‘explanation’.

Evolutionary Theory belong to realm of science, what essentially it gave is the how of the process of evolution but not the why. Some has considered that science is not suited to answer this set of questions. Although once we know the process, we can extend the theory to test its external validity(see if it can made accurate prediction), or even applied that to application in daily life (genetics); but can process be consider as ‘explanation’? Does knowing how we breath ‘explain’ what is breathing? Does knowing how our mind works means we can understand what our mind is? What I believe is that evolutionary theory is only the first layer of onion, the process of peeling the onion could go on indefinitely as we want it. Suppose we get the Physicist’s holy grail: ‘Theory of Everything’. Does it means not that we can further ask: Why is Theory of Everything is one way but not the another? Can we dig further into TOE and understand how is what it is? Therefore I could sympathy with religionists stop the investigation in the very first step, they may just know that they can’t finish peeling the onion, and they want to save time to do something else.

Evolutionary theory, in my opinion, by its nature is not really about explanation but predicting what is going to happen next, because what it said essentially is: Now is because of what is happened in the past led to this now but not the other now, follow logics from Mathematics and Statistics; plus some accidents.’ Thus Evolutionary theory, like history, suffer the same problem as it belong to ‘retrospective’ science. We can’t verify how history develop since we can’t test one hypothesis against another in the sense that the past is gone. How could we know what happen if ‘Martin Luther King is not murdered?’, or ‘Al Gore instead of George W. Bush is elected in 2004′? Similarly, although we can do experiment to test the hypothesis in the laboratory, but we can never be sure that the parameters in the laboratory is identical to the parameters of the part of evolutionary history we inquire. Therefore, the internal validity of experiments against hypothesis in evolutionary theory can never be completely ascertained (unless we have a time traveling machine to collect the sample from the past). And we also must not ignore that evolutionary process is full of accidents, since we don’t know exactly how those accidents happen, therefore the ‘explanation’ afforded by evolution theory can never be completed. It is not the fault of this theory itself, but because of the nature of object we inquire about. But it never rules out that there maybe better methods and framework (other than the scientific method) to understand the phenomenas of what evolution theory talked about.

Thus my conclusion is ‘Evolutionary theory’ is the better one at least because it could be argue against, and we can use this framework to build more powerful explanation; as compare to Creationism which can never be objectively falsify. Notice there is a philosophical bias toward intellectualism: Those which allow we to think and argue must be better than those doesn’t allow to think. Why must this be right?