I used to argue with a young earth creationist, until we both went blue in the face, whether exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our own) could exist. He believed, as part of his faith, that they could not. The Earth was produced by God for man. (What the other solar planets were supposed to be for, I can't remember.) It was impossible, according to him, that exoplanets could exist, let alone planets that exhibited life.
At the time of writing, there are an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe, with an estimated 1 to 2 exoplanets per star. Exoplanets have been identified with a large degree of confidence.
My blue-faced friend went very quiet upon the confirmation that exoplanets exist.
In the words given to Ted, Ellie Arroway's father in Carl Sagan's "Contact", an empty universe would be "an awful waste of space".
There are some lessons to be learned from this and from the article I link to.
1) Fervently believing something is no guarantee that what you believe is true.
2) Scientists are not "believers" in the sense that they hold anything to be absolutely true, and they are open to correction if it is warranted. Indeed, in this article, the "sigma" value of a result is used as a mathematical way to express confidence in it. It is never 100%.
3) Scientists actively seek to falsify or disprove their results. This is the way science gets corrected when wrong, and also the way in which our confidence is increased when we fail to falsify or disprove the results. At the heart of this is the notion of "falsifiability", which means that a scientific statement should be open to testing that could potentially falsify it.
4) This stance is in total contrast to the creationist attitude exemplified by the Answers in Genesis' "Statement of Faith" which reads,
"By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information."
Acceding to this statement is tantamount to abdicating your positions as scientists. Regardless of whether or not you have scientific qualifications and a track record of scientific achievement, to relinquish the basic scepticism inherent in the scientific mindset is to relinquish science. Presuppositionally plumping on an outcome and seeking to promote it, whatever the evidence actually suggests, is an anathema to science. We gain confidence in scientific ideas precisely because we seek to destroy them and see if they withstand our examinations and tests, rather than attempting shield them from examination. The fact that they withstand testing is the way in which we gain confidence in their veracity. If creationist ideas were true, they would not need to be corralled away and protected from examination in this way. To sign up to a faith statement like this is essentially to admit to having no confidence whatsoever in the truth of creationism! It should be an unnecessary statement if creationism is indeed true. A statement like this is only necessary because creationism is fundamentally unsupportable.
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