This is one thing that gets me about these evolution debates. Most of the arguing I hear is about what ideological spin to put on the same evidence. What all these scientists who are crying about the teaching of evolution should do is propose bets to creationists based on the outcomes of experiments, or since probably no creationist would accept such a bet, make it known that they would enjoy accepting bets from them. If there is such an experiment (I’m no expert) and the creationists accept the bet, then you win.

I think it’s worth taking the time to note that if you follow the creationism wars closely for awhile, it will become immediately obvious that this could never work. The reason why is that it actually turns out that Creationists love bets. Creationists actually already propose bets all the time. And they never, ever, ever follow through on them.

In the most obvious case, this covers big flashy publicity-stunt bets that by design could never be collected on. For example take Kent Hovind’s $25,000 challenge, a monumental bounty that was claimed upfront to be a challenge to anyone who could prove “evolution”, but in the fine print required that any applicant satisfy a laundry list of arbitrary and maybe impossible conditions, incidentally including requiring any applicant to empirically prove that God does not exist and the Big Bang occurred without any extrauniversal causative agent (worded in a way that I think would present real problems for advocates of colliding brane models).

I assume James wouldn’t include Hovind’s challenge as an example of the kind of thing he was talking about, though, since he seems to be more talking about predicting the outcome of a simple factual matter or experiment where the bet and the result can be readily agreed upon by both sides. Alas, we see these kinds of bets being embraced by the creationists too. And it never really works out.

The serial offender here is a Mr. William Dembski (research theologian at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky), who I’ve seen over the last few years propose enough simple bets on his blog, then quietly delete or just forget about those bets later on when they don’t go the way he’d planned, that I’ve lost count. The most recent example of this happened just a couple days ago; the most famous is probably the one he issued a few years before the Dover, Pennslyvania “Intelligent Design” trial was first filed, in which he said

Comment: They are herewith throwing down the gauntlet. I’ll wager a bottle of single-malt scotch, should it ever go to trial whether ID may legitimately be taught in public school science curricula, that ID will pass all constitutional hurdles.

To my knowledge no such bottle of scotch has ever been produced.

When it comes down to it none of this should be surprising. The idea of making a bet implicitly depends on the idea of the betters being able to agree after the fact that the bet occurred and such and such an outcome was reached, or otherwise on the existence of some kind of impartial judge existing who can decide who won the bet. The entire thing that distinguishes creationists from the rest of us, meanwhile, is that they reject the authority of the thing that normally we’d expect to be the impartial judge in a scientific experiment– the scientific method and its conclusions. So why, having made a bet, would any creationist ever admit to having lost it? Since they’ve already made the decision to make their own reality in the case of the entire scope of how we interpret Biology, it’s not much of a big step to decide to make their own reality over the outcome of a small agreed-upon bet…

And will the mainstream Press be able to identify the winner of the game with probability 1/2 + epsilon?

Ah, well there is empirical evidence for this. Observations show that more often than not the mainstream press get the answer wrong. Obviously this could be adapted into a winning strategy by simply negating whichever answer is most prevalent in the press.

Thanks for the reply!

Actually, one quibble is that you put yourself in the debate with D-wave (I think — if they called you out, please correct me), yet in your imaginary dialog above, the poor scientist was minding his own business when he got cornered in the frozen-food section by the aggressive layman. Maybe your setting should have been a listener calling in to a radio show on which the scientist has been expressing skepticism about theory X, and the listener says, “You’ve been expressing lots of skepticism about X. How skeptical are you? 2-to-1? 100-to-1? 10000-to-1?”

Wow. I sound really critical. Actually, if paired against an equally ignorant mathematician, I would most likely bet on you over D-wave. If we could think of a precise wager.

we’d need to consider a spherical Scott in a vacuum, and that can’t be too comfortable.

OTOH the ideal Scott would be observed without gravity, which in comparison seems easy to fulfill.