lt Brown of the Center for Scientific Creationism. Neither Gish nor Brown seem to understand the difference between a fact and a theory. They loudly proclaim that evolution is just a theory and that it is false. Scientific theories are neither true nor false. They are explanations of facts. That species evolved from other species is considered by 99.99% of the scientific community to be a scientific fact. How species evolved is what a theory of evolution is supposed to explain. Darwin's theory of how evolution happened is called natural selection. That theory is quite distinct from the fact of evolution. Other scientists have different theories of evolution, but only a negligible few deny the fact of evolution. Gish is not doing science when he argues against the fact of evolution. He has no interest in scientific facts or theories. His interest is in apologetics: defending the faith against what he sees as attacks on God's Truth. All his arguments are defensive; they are attempts to show that the evidence does not support the scientific fact of evolution. Creationists, mistaking the uncertain in science for the unscientific, see the debate among evolutionists regarding how best to explain evolution as a sign of weakness. Scientists, on the other hand, see uncertainty as simply an inevitable element of scientific knowledge. They regard debates on fundamental theoretical issues as healthy and stimulating. Science, says evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, is "most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines their implications, and recognizes that old information may be explained in surprisingly new ways." Thus, through all the debate over evolutionary mechanisms biologists have not been led to doubt that evolution has occurred. "We are debating how it happened," says Gould (1983, p.256). Creation science, on the other hand, is not science but pseudoscience and it is connected to a particular group of fundamentalist Christia...
