"That's a popular way of avoiding the extremely difficult and embarrassing task of having to explain the origin of matter or life. However, the non-existence of God requires a non-theistic explanation of the origin of matter and the origin of life. Or do you want to give God a foot in the door? Your buddies say you can't.
You are making a number of incorrect assumptions. One is that biological evolution, which is what we here have restricted ourselves to, can address abiogenesis, or cosmology. Biological evolution is restricted to living organisms on which natural evolution can operate. Abiogenesis (which is more an hypothesis than a theory at this point) and cosmology do not present any organisms for the mechanisms of biological evolution to operate on. The second erroneous assumption you make is that biological evolution is an attempt at proving the non-existence of God. Science can not address anything that does not present physically testable data. God is untestable. Therefore science can not and does not address God or his existence. Many creationist leaders have attempted to lump every science that uses the term 'evolution' together, despite the fact that the word is used differently by the non-biological sciences. It has been done simply to give creationism a handle with which to manipulate the minds of the faithful.
Based on that, I cannot see why anyone should pay any attention to creationism in the first place, since it is not arguing against anything real.
"But Mineral, you just disqualified yourself from criticizing creationism because you have demonstrated that you don't understand it. You said:
The 'un-real' that MM is talking about is the strawman version of evolution that the creationists here, and at a number of other forums I participate in, faithfully regurgitate. The creationist strawman is not in any sense real.
If those arguing the issue do not understand the theory in the first place, then whatever their argument is has no relevance.
"Have you not just discarded your own credibility?
Here you are making an erroneous assumption that we 'evos' are arguing against God and religion. This is not true, we are arguing against the misconceived, mutilated and ubiquitous misrepresentation of not only evolution but science in general. We do not need to know anything about creationism because we are attacking their arguments, arguments that we have thrust upon us every day. How could we not be experts in those arguments?
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