The Nature of Science 23they can close their eyes and stop looking; they can wrestle with it and eventually deny
what is self-evident to salvage their beliefs; they can distort it to fit their preconceptions;
or they can face reality. A good example is Kurt Wise, who is famous as one of the few
young-earth creationists with a legitimate background in paleontology; he actually got his
Ph.D. at Harvard. But his advanced training did not lead him to creationism. In fact, he
was raised with a fundamentalist background and describes in his autobiography (in the
Ashton book cited above) how he wrestled with the inherent contradictions between pale-
ontology and his fundamentalist beliefs in high school. He still had those doubts through
his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago. He entered Harvard as a student
of Stephen Jay Gould but apparently did not reveal his creationism to Gould or Harvard
when he was admitted. I am not aware of what Gould thought when he found out that
he had a creationist among his students, but several former Gould students have told me
that their advisor was very fair minded and open to challenges. They speculate that Gould
must either have thought that Wise would eventually see the problems with his creation-
ist viewpoint or accepted him as a grand experiment in intellectual freedom. According
to some of Gould’s students who knew Wise in graduate school, he was polite and par-
ticipated in discussions (although he was considered very arrogant and standoffish), but
he was clearly only going through the motions and was not really learning anything new
or opening his mind to new ideas. Instead, as he told one of his fellow graduate students,
he was treating his Harvard experience as a sort of “Monopoly” game, playing the part of
paleontologist to get his degree but not taking any of it very seriously or really absorbing
the implications of what he was studying—any more than “Monopoly” players are really
bankers or landowners or go to jail.
What’s the point of going through the long ordeal of obtaining a Ph.D. if you’re never
going to learn something new or be challenged and think hard about your beliefs? More
importantly, if you’re doing all this work to obtain the degree but don’t believe in any of the
stuff you said or wrote, isn’t that dishonest and fraudulent? Science is a social network based
on trust and reputation, and nobody has time to constantly check the work of most other
scientists to see if it was done honestly or if it is corrupted by biases and fraud. If someone
like Kurt Wise is just going through the motions, how can other scientists trust whether he
biased his data collection or analysis or whether he just made it up in order to fit his precon-
ceptions? We will see elsewhere in this book how this kind of dishonest science is common
among other creationists whose backgrounds are irrelevant to the stuff they are promoting,
but the question is now relevant even with Harvard-trained scientists like Wise.
Armed with his Harvard Ph.D., Wise has become the most prominent creationist who
actually has seen and studied real fossils and geology. But is he really a scientist by the
standards we have just discussed? Apparently, his Harvard experience never caused him
to truly examine his beliefs. In his autobiography, he freely admits that his entire creationist
viewpoint comes from the literalistic interpretation of the Bible, not from actual scientific
evidence, and that his belief system forces him to reject whatever he doesn’t want to accept.
As he wrote in his autobiography (in Ashton 2000):
I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I
shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the
universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still
be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.