Answers to Creationist Nonsense

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15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
By John Rennie

Image: lAYNE KENNEDY Corbis
NAUTILUS SHELL: Designed or evolved?
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.

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Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.


Image: PATRICIA J. WYNNE
GALÁPAGOS FINCHES show adaptive beak shapes.
In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

"Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Galápagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild [see his article "Natural Selection and Darwin's Finches"; Scientific American, October 1991].

 

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The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.

3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.


These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Galápagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.


4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.

 

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5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology.


Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.

When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.


6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.


7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.


8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

 

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As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.

More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.


10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

Image: CLEO VILETT
CLOSE-UP of a bacterial flagellum.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.


11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

 

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Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.


13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see "The Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

 

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Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.


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14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

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Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.


15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

"Irreducible complexity" is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap--a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.

Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells
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The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

Complexity of a different kind--"specified complexity"--is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.

Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.


"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover--their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics.


A broadcast version of this article will air June 26 on National Geographic Today, a program on the National Geographic Channel. Please check your local listings
In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?)

Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.

Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.

 

[Droopy Eye]

Good post. (I read it all)

For people who don't want to read, check out (download) "Penn & Teller : Bullshit! - Creationism".

The only reason creationism is believed by so many people is because they WANT to believe it, not because there are any evidence that indicate it.
Creationists have just as much evidence to show for as the holocaust-deniers, and to people who don't WANT to believe that millions of jews, homosexuals and communists were gassed by the Third Reich can a man who know how to exploit and twist facts sound very convincing in the same way that a creationist who knows how to exploit and twist facts will sound very convincing to people that don't WANT to believe that we have evolved from monkeys and instead WANT to believe the Genesis.

Heres some CTRL+C - CTRL+V :

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As an aside, the tactics of evidence denial employed by creationists are eerily similar to the tactics employed by Holocaust deniers. In both cases, we have a group of people who are trying to counteract a mountain of evidence against them. In both cases, they use clever tricks, such as exhaustive attempts to discredit one particular piece of that evidence (Lucy for the creationists, Dachau for the Holocaust deniers) in an attempt to show that it was either exaggerated or falsified. These attempts (usually based on partial truths with some lies thrown in for good measure) are then combined with the hasty generalization fallacy that if the one piece can be discredited, then all of it is discredited by association.

If you only read the propaganda of creationists (or Holocaust deniers) without doing independent research to verify their claims, everything sounds authoritative. They list names, places, and important "facts" which "most people don't want you to know". The problem is that if you actually check out these claims, they are invariably fraudulent. That's how creationists (and Holocaust deniers) operate- they count on you not to educate yourself.
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// My comment : This tactic is used by a lot of conspiracists also.

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Example of an argument from a creationist :

"If man evolved from apes, then where are the missing-link fossils? Where are the half-man, half-apes?"

Today, this argument is a plain and simple lie. It carried weight in Darwin's day because Darwin had based his theory on the distribution and physical nature of living species, not fossils. A century later, we have found fossils of intermediate forms of man. The australopithecus fossils is but one example, and there are many others. There are also examples of transitional forms between other species, such as Archæopteryx (between dinosaur and bird, discovered in 1862) or Amphioxus (between invertebrate and vertebrate). Since Darwin's time we have increased our knowledge of the Tertiary period more than tenfold, and the unbroken chain of life is so clear now that no one in the entire paleontological community has seriously doubted evolution theory for the past century. In fact, it's been said that if the biologists hadn't invented evolution theory, the paleontologists would have eventually had to do it for them, otherwise none of their findings would have made any sense.

Creationists have four tactics which they use against this evidence:

Pretend that the transitional fossils aren't really transitional, ie- australopithecus is 100% human. They typically find a characteristic that is like modern man and say "ha! Australopithecus man is just a human!". But that is a deception because the "missing link" should, by definition, have some structural aspects which are like humans, and other structural aspects which are like apes. If they want to disprove the status of a transitional fossil, they will have to demonstrate that all of its structural aspects are like a modern species, rather than simply showing that some of them resemble those of humans.

Pretend that it doesn't exist, stating the nonexistence of transitional form fossils as a fact. For example, creationists will often say things like "contrary to popular misconception, no transitional form fossils have ever been discovered anywhere." They try to make it seem as if all of the paleontologists in the world are subscribing to "popular misconception", and we enlightened folk should know better. Yeah, sure.

Pretend that it has been faked. Invoke the ever-present spectre of the vast, overarching global conspiracy of evil scientists.

Demand ever smaller steps of transition. If a missing link can be found between man and ape, then demand a missing link #2, between ape and the missing link. If that is found, demand yet another missing link #3, between ape and missing link #2. If that is found, demand missing link #4, between ape and missing link #3. Repeat ad nauseum.

These tactics are desperate and against rational people, they would be utterly futile. However, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of people in this world who have poor or virtually nonexistent critical thinking skills and who are therefore vulnerable to such arguments.

Even if we had not discovered these fossils, this failing would still not constitute disproof of evolution- it would only constitute a gap in the supporting evidence, which would still fit evolution theory far better than creation theory. Trends in the fossil record are very clear, even though we have not unearthed all of it and will never unearth all of it due to the effects of tectonic activity and other environmental effects which can act to obliterate fossil evidence. Some gaps will undoubtedly exist in this record, but the continuity of life has been well established. Remaining gaps do not constitute disproof of the validity of paleontology, or of evolution theory. The creationists again rely upon logical fallacies, by claiming that "if the evidence for evolution is not 100% complete, then we don't have to explain any of it."

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[Droopy Eye]

These arguments for Creationism sound convincing right for people who want to believe the earth isn't billions of years old :

Actually, the only real "evidence" for a billions of years old earth model is the fact that the philosophy of evolution requires it. That's why radiometric dating "discovers" the ages they do: they triangulate based on a few "knowns," none of which really are known at all:
They "know" that the solar system is about 4 billion years old -- based on the philosophy of evolution, which means they don't really know that.
They "know" that potassium, Carbon-14, or whatever element they're testing decays at a certain invariable rate -- except they don't know that at all. Decay rates can change, and they don't know if the rate changed or not. Also, they don't know if the amount of daughter material was originally zero.
Let's say you're doing Uranium/Lead testing. Uranium decays into lead, so you can accurately determine an artifact's age by calculating the amount of uranium and lead, then plugging those figures into an equation with the decay rate, right?

Well...

The ONLY way to ensure accuracy is to know the following:
How much daughter material (lead) was originally in the artifact? (They don't know! If X amount of lead in the artifact is assumed to ALL be decayed from uranium, when in fact some lead was already there, the artifact could test much older than it really is -- and with no way to tell whether your figures are accurate!)
Did the rate of decay remain constant? (They don't know! What if it accelerated? What if it slowed down?)
Based on these "facts," which are really assumptions, they measure the ratio of uranium to lead present in the artifact -- the only fact in this whole equation -- plug in their assumptions, and voila! Dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago! Right? Well...

What about human skulls and gold chains found in seams of coal? (Oops!) What about tree trunks running vertically through quot;millions of years" of sedimentation?

Here are a few other uncomfortable facts:

The age of the universe outside the solar system is calculated based on the distance and speed of star and galaxy recession -- but this method presupposes a "Big Bang," which is far from being scientifically established. Not to mention the fact that the distances and speeds are hotly contested.

NASA expected 54 feet of dust on the Moon, assuming a 5-billion-year age. Oops! They found only 13 feet at the Apollo 11 landing site, 2 to 3 feet at Luna 16, and 11.5 feet at Apollo 12.

The Poynting-Robertson effect slows down small particles in orbit and makes them fall into the sun. In only 2 billion years, all particles less than three inches across clear out to Jupiter's orbit should have been eliminated. Oops! There are huge quantities still out there (they show up during the Perseid meteor shower every August).

All short-term comets in the solar system should have been evaporated in 10,000 years or less. Oops! They haven't!

Here's the results of radiometric Moon-rock dating: Uranium/lead and thorium: from 3.36 to 28.1 billion years. Potassium/argon: 2.2 to 7 billion years. These figures are incompatible with each other and any known solar system aging model -- if radiometric dating is reliable, that is...

Living snails have been radiometrically dated by Carbon-14 to be 2,300 years old. A Hawaiian lava flow known to be less than 200 years old was dated at 3 billion years. New wood in growing tress has been dated at 10,000 years. Oops!

Sediment on the ocean floor is an average of 1/2 mile deep, or about 8.2 x 10/17th tons. Rate of deposition is 2.75 x 10/10th tons a year. Works out the oceans can't be more than 33 million years old, even if we stick with a uniform deposition rate. And a non-uniform deposition (caused by something such as a worldwide flood) could greatly reduce the time involved by speeding up deposition.

Oil and gas deposits are still under lots of pressure, even in porous rock. That pressure is known to bleed off, and it shouldn't be there anymore if the oil fields are more than a few thousand years old.

The only way fossilization occurs is if living tissue is suddenly cut off from air and subjected to great pressure. Scientists studying the topography surrounding Mount St. Helens therefore found fossilized layers of flora and fauna created by mudslides that they know are only 15 years old -- yet they almost exactly reproduce the "millions of years" of fossilization found elsewhere on earth.

Here's the "age" of Black Hills Granite, under different radiometric dating methods:
Sr/Rb = 1.16 billion years
U238/Pb206 = 1.68 billion
Pb207/Pb206 = 2.55 billion
(Which one is "right"?)

Reunion Island rocks tested similarly tested all the way from 100,000 years to 4.4 billion!

The earth's magnetic field decays exponentially, with a half-life of 1,400 years. Projecting in reverse, the earth's age comes out as -- surprise! -- 10,000 years or less.

There's a lot more (I'm just skimming my Anthro/Christo/Soter. notes from last semester). The reality is that very little evidence points to an old earth, but a lot of evidence points to a young earth, with a fossil layer caused by some sort of worldwide catastrophe.

Evolution started with the philosophy of "uniformitarianism," which says that all changes happened very, very slowly. No such thing as a worldwide catastrophe; can't be.

Except they have since needed to explain why the dinosaurs went extinct so suddenly. So now we have a worldwide nuclear winter caused by an asteroid hitting the earth. Worldwide changes in geography, topography, climate -- the works.

So why not a flood, which would do all the same things? Well, a flood is "unscientific" -- but a giant asteroid isn't! Huh?

I've carefully avoided mentioning the genealogical "proof" of the age of mankind, because counting "begats," as you put it, is not a very good method to determine passage of time. But it is very interesting that a lot of the scientific evidence points to a much younger earth than the evolutionists were (and still are) looking for, isn't it?

But in-fact all of the arguments here isn't any real proof that the earth is just 6000 years old as stated in the bible.

One example :

They "know" that potassium, Carbon-14, or whatever element they're testing decays at a certain invariable rate -- except they don't know that at all. Decay rates can change, and they don't know if the rate changed or not.

This is one of the oldest Young Earth Creationism attacks on radiometric dating: he thinks radioactive "decay rates can change", and that this therefore invalidates the concept of radiometric dating.

This is tantamount to claiming that the gravity of the Earth might have been 5 times stronger in medieval times, or that the boiling point of water might have been a thousand degrees a century ago. The decay rates of radioisotopes are driven by the quantum mechanics of barrier tunneling and the relative strengths of coulomb repulsion and nuclear binding energy which drive all nuclear interactions. If they were to change, this would mean that the characteristics of fundamental particles and forces are changing, which means that the behaviour of all matter in the universe is in a state of flux. Moreover, since they claim the Earth is just 6,000 years old, these sweeping changes would have been occurring right before our eyes, during recorded history!

Why, then, do Egyptian pyramids built 4500 years ago still stand? How did a 4800 year old California Bristlecone Pine tree (nicknamed "Methuselah") survive? Changes in physical constants such as the electric charge of electrons and protons or the strength of the nuclear binding force would have changed the fundamental behaviour of matter. Let's imagine that electromagnetism was much stronger in the past; this would help pry apart nuclei faster, thus increasing the rate of radioactive decay. However, it would also make solid objects stronger and more rigid, it would make fire burn hotter, it would change the melting points and densities of all materials, it would increase the coulomb barrier for nuclear fusion in the Sun (thus cooling and dimming it to the point that we would have frozen to death), it would drastically alter the electrochemical reactions used in living organisms, and that's just the tip of the iceberg! Alternatively, let's suppose that the strong nuclear force was much weaker in the past. This would also increase decay rates, with similarly severe side-effects. Large elements would become more radioactive, thus greatly increasing the background radiation and producing anomalous low mass radioisotopes. Worse yet, the binding energy of nuclei would be much smaller, so the energy yield of nuclear fusion would be much lower and the ancient Sun would have been so cool and dim that the Earth would have been a dark, frozen, barren rock.

------------------------------

Point is, just accept that not necessarily everything in the Bible need to be interpreted literally. Even if the whole Genesis part is just a fable that isn't proof that that the whole Bible is fake.
The notion that the earth was created in six days for 6000 years ago shouldn't even be a topic any more because it has no root in reality and should be put on the shelve together with the statements "the Earth is flat", "black people are inferior to white people" and "the Sun revolves around the Earth".

I know you creationists WANT to believe this, me and Sixx WANT to believe that a communistic world will work and be great for everyone, Mcleanhatch WANT to believe that capitalism and free trade will is the best solution for everyone, but that doesn't make it so.

 

[MizeryU]

ignorant fuck^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[MizeryU]

like dude said b4 how do viruses develop immunity to viruses

 

[MizeryU]

i cant believe how many people out there are so fucking stupid that they take the old testement litterally

ITS FULL OF FUCKIN SYMBOL STORIES GET THE FUCK OVER IT

 

[MizeryU]

im talkin bout adam n eve n noah's arc you retarded monkey
is jerusalem a fucking story NOOOOOOOOO
go smoke crack with your mom

 

[MizeryU]

by adam n eve or noah?
how the fuck you gonna believe that adam n eve were created by god? does you mom look like she was made from one rib? lol stupid fucker

n og reread my post i said MOST faggot

 

[MizeryU]

no why dont you tell me how god created adam then eve then the animals n adam went aroud n named them
let me say it again
NOAH AINT REAL HIS ARCH AINT REAL N NO NOAH STILL AINT REAL N NEVER WAS
im done

 

[2-0-Sixx]

And you Don't believe in Noah? So EVERY culture in the world is wrong when they refer to a universal flood and a man and his family in a boat that survived it? Every single culture is wrong? You should have changed your name from Fuckoff to Miserable Intellect. Since you agree that some of the Old Testament characters are legitimate characters, I'm curious where do you draw the line between the real ones and the myths? Between Noah and Abraham? Abraham and Moses?

Please enlighten the GOM with your superior scholarly theological thought.

Explain to me how Noah fit every creature on this boat. Explain to me how the world flooded. Explain to me where this water disappeared to.

 

[2-0-Sixx]

ROFL!!!!!!!!!

Man, damn. Ok, lol, shit. Straight comedy man. After reading that shit man, you are either seriously misinformed or you must really under estimate my intelligence. I will only comment on one thing....If all of the atmospheric water precipitated at the same time that the ice caps melted, it would yield less than 30 million cubic km, almost all from the ice caps. The surface area of the earth is around 510 million km, so the average increase in depth would be around 60 meters. This is a scientific fact. End of Story.:dead:

 

[miggidy]

But in-fact all of the arguments here isn't any real proof that the earth is just 6000 years old as stated in the bible.

Sorry dude. The bible never says that Earth was created 6,000 years ago.

 

[miggidy]

im talkin bout adam n eve n noah's arc you retarded monkey
is jerusalem a fucking story NOOOOOOOOO
go smoke crack with your mom

How is Noah's arc symbolic?

Peep out the Ararat mountains in Turkey and see what the government's hiding up there....

 

[miggidy]

Hey 2-0,

Remember that genetic science has just discovered that human and dogg DNA is 75% the same.
Has science figured out who fucked who yet?
Was it the monkey or was it the dog?

Personally I think it's easier for a monkey to fuck a dog.
Plus it would look hella funny LOL!