Philip Kitcher s Article Believing Where We Can Not Prove

In this essay I will comment on a paragraph in Philip Kitcher’s article entitled â€Å"Believing Where We Cannot Prove.† The paragraph says, â€Å"Like Tennyson, contemporary Creationists accept the traditional contrast between science and religion. But where Tennyson agonized, they attack. While they are less eloquent, they are supremely confident of their own solution. They open their onslaught on evolutionary theory by denying that it is a science. In The Troubled Waters of Evolution, Henry Morris characterizes evolutionary theory as maintaining that large amounts of time are required for evolution to produce â€Å"new kinds.† As a result, we should not expect to see such â€Å"new kinds† emerging. Morris comments, â€Å"Creationists in turn insist that this belief is not scientific evidence but only a statement of faith. The evolutionist seems to be saying, Of course, we cannot really prove evolution, since this requires ages of time, and so, therefore, you should accept it as a proved fact of science! Creationists regard this as an odd type of logic, which would be entirely unacceptable in any other f ield of science.† (Morris 1974b, 16). David Watson makes a similar point in comparing Darwin and Galileo: â€Å"So here is the difference between Darwin and Galileo: Galileo set a demonstrable fact against a few words of Bible poetry which the Church at that time had understood in an obviously naà ¯ve way; Darwin set an unprovable theory against eleven chapters of straightforward history which cannot be