15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense [THE FINAL DEBUNKING]

Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up

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.

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. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

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. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

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. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

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. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

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. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]

CONCLUSION
"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.

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.

"So now you think you're a geologist?"

Really, this is silly. I can read, and am well read. It doesn't take a PhD in geology to "know" that one can fold layers of soft, wet, mud, sand and silt. You can't fold a solid rock. Even if you could, how would you maintain the fairly uniform layers? Over millions of years, wouldn't you expect to find thicker deposits of newer layers at the bottom of the folds? Those sedimentary layers I mentioned are uniform in thickness were folded while they were wet and soft. I said nothing that violates physics.

'I notice everywhere you make any evidence you don't like by saying "conjecture," or "supposition."'

Well, are you able to look at a piece of evidence without viewing it through the eyes of an evolutionist? When you see a fossil, what to you see? Is your view of the existance of the fossil not affected by your presupposion of the truth of evolution?

I've already said that I see the fossil differently. I do not deny it's existance. For me, I believe the fossil got that way differently than you say it did. You are either unable or unwilling to see it as I do, but I have seen it your way and it left me with too many unanswerable questions; to many things of necessity attributed to divine "evolution".

I can see your attitude is deteriorating. If we don't stop, you'll soon be calling me names (wait a minute, there was that "professor" crack), so I suggest we end this now. I didn't hop in here to fight with you or anyone else. I've been trying to explain why we see things differently; not "convert" you. In all honesty, I don't care what you, or anyone else, believes. I was loking for a little intelligent dialouge, and I thought I had it for awhile. But, since it looks like you're dealing with multiple people which, even under the best of circumstances, can be annoying, I suppose your testiness is to be expected.

Bottom line: I will not change your way of thinking and you will not change mine. You've given me some interesting things to look at, and you may not believe it, but I do appreciate you taking the time. Nevertheless, we will have to agree to disagree on this. It's not the "facts" we clash over. Our respective worldviews are diametrically opposed to one another and that affects how we interpret the facts. It's how we divine truth. That is the problem.

Anyhow, I'll stop bugging you now.

True Christians likewise collectively share an experiential awareness of the Holy Spirit every bit as vivid and real as the "greenness" of green. You can deny that you yourself can discern or experience it, but you cannot deny this collective experiential awareness on the part of Christians themselves.

Oh, I don't deny for a moment that Christians are experiencing something, but the question is, where does that something come from? You would say it's definitely external to you, and a part of objective reality, I expect. I, on the other hand, could as easily suggest that it is entirely internal, and not really reflective of anything outside your own subjective perceptions, and your feelings that it is external are simply a collective decision, of the same sort that calls the trees green and the sky blue.

Of course, neither of us is likely to persuade the other, since neither of us can impart our perceptions to the other in a satisfactory way. All I can say to you is that the Christian notion of "God" is ultimately unsatisfying to me, and therefore I do not accept it. That has no bearing on the truth of it, of course, but neither of us can prove the rightness or wrongness of it - if we could, it would no longer be a matter of faith, would it?

The first hint that Darwin was a racist can be seen in the subtitle selected for his “Origin of Species.” The words chosen were: “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” This subtitle has been eliminated from all modern printings of the book, but it’s in bold letters on the original. If there is any doubt that Darwin was a raging racist, these words should leave no doubt: “At some future period (Darwin writes), not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes (the black race) ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

A half century later, Darwin follower Henry Fairfield Osborn writes: “The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characters, such as the teeth, the genitalia, the sense organs, but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens [light skinned races, according to Darwinists].

It should be no surprise that no less a racist villain than Adolph Hitler picked up on Darwin’s evolutionary theories. Karl Schleunes writes: “Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racist ... such struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples ... and validated the struggle between them”

Before Darwin’s works, many racists had questioned whether blacks were of the same species as whites, but they had no scientific foundation for their predjudice. Things changed once Darwin presented his racist evolutionary schema. Darwin stated that the African race could not survive competition with their white near-relations, let alone be able to compete with the white race. According to Darwin, the African was inferior because he represented the ‘missing-link’ between ape and Teuton (John C. Burham, Science, vol. 175 (February 4, 1972) p.506). It should come as no surprise that the secularist movement of the day quickly espoused Darwin’s racist evolutionary theories.

“Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities… Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science” (Larry Hatfield, “Educators Against Darwin,” Science Digest Special, Winter, 1979, pp.9ff).

“Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless” (Professor Louis Bounoure, Former: President of the Biological Society of Stassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research, writing in “The Advocate,” March 8, 1984, p. 17).

The fact that a lot of people do something is not necessarily an indication of its rightness. But it is true that better ideas tend to win out over time in the hearts and souls of people.

I would like to think so, but the near-election of Al Gore suggests that this process is erratic and unreliable. ;)

There are about a billion Christians, around a billion Hindus, nearly a billion Muslims, and if you count the Chinese, for whom the official state position is atheism, about a billion-plus athiests in the world. Simply counting heads doesn't reveal a privileged position for Christianity in this respect, I think - your town, and this country may be mostly Christian, but this is unrepresentative of the world as a whole, for which consensus is notably lacking.

At the very least, a curious and open mind would want to know why so many people follow it, and what they get from it.

I, of course, have theories in this matter, which I suspect diverge wildly from your theories in this matter. Faith is certainly a comforting position, I expect - one has the security of knowing (or thinking that you know, anyway) what life and the universe are all about, and how you fit into it. And in some ways, choosing a faith, any faith, is the path of least resistance. That's not always and everywhere true, but it's certainly true that being a Christian in a largely Christian society is easier than choosing some other path. It was easier to worship Jupiter in Rome around AD 100 than it was to be a Christian, and now the roles are reversed - it's easier to be a Christian than to be some other way in this society.

That's not to say that people choose it because it's easier, but that most people never really choose it at all - it's simply handed to them by their parents and society, and the only conscious choice often comes in the form of a choice to reject it, rather than to embrace it.

They love to make bald statements of fact they cannot back up. When challenged, they pretend not to hear the question, or they employ personal and private definitions that "make" their assertions true.

Cleaning up. I missed your post in the exchanges. Yes, very true but only the half of it. Ad hominem is probably the most used tool. The old worn out post of "I said so" links is another ineffective tactic. They can post from talk-origins where Eugenie Scott advertises for NCSE, a Darwinian mouthpiece. But make the mistake of using a link to ICR or some other Christian site even when posting a supporting non-Christian site and you'll be defending every viewpoint expressed on the Christian site whether you espouse it or not.

Sorry, my Windows machine was "going South" quickly so I saved my reply-in-progress, rebooted, & then went and made dinner. General_re said most of what I say below, though I propose a solution to the question of who's merely delusional & who's experiencing something real:

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I believe people who claim to have experienced "green" are delusional. And, as general re sagely points out, the fact the 5 billion people claim to have experienced the color green isn't persuasive. . . . . something about 5 billion flies having a taste for manure.

LOL! No, I can't describe the experience of "green" to you, except that I can say it's similar in kind to your pre-existing experience of "red" and "blue". If you don't experience any colors at all, or indeed if you are blind, then I don't know how I'd describe it to you.

But you think this is analogous to your and my sister's experiencing the Holy Spirit. I have no doubt at all that you firmly believe that you are in contact with a supernatural being. Same with my sister. I know for a fact that sis firmly believes that this supernatural being talks right back to her through mental telepathy. (He even gets her great airplane tickets when they're all filled up, but again I digress...) But to believe that she really is talking telepathically to a supernatural being is the kind of leap of faith that's in a whole class by itself compared to the claim that some people directly perceive a color that I can't perceive. And yet, trivial claim or unbelievable claim, if they're true then we should be able to detect whether it's "all in your minds" or whether it corresponds to everyone's shared experience of mundane reality.

There was a segment on 20/20, I think it was, that showed people who for whom each letter of the alphabet always shows up in a particular color. Other people taste different tastes when they hear different sounds - different people's voices or words or musical styles. And there were other combinations of stimulus & sensation that other people had. They've had these perceptions since childhood, and they're as basic to these people's experience as the color red & blue are to you & me. The godless materialist scientists, of course, claimed their brains merely had their wires crossed.

They interviewed 2 people who always saw letters in color. One person described the colors she saw for several different letters. Then they interviewed the 2nd woman. She insisted the 1st woman was in error: Her colors for the letters were all different than the 1st one!

That tells me that their perceptions of colors tied to specific letters really is "all in their minds" and not tied to any external reality that only they are able to perceive.

OK: Now you tell me you experience God just like I experience Green. How would we test whether your experience has any correspondence to reality outside your mind? I say we get you & my sister in separate rooms & ask you both to ask God a question - like "what number is my colleague showing the person in the other room?" We'll see if He gives you both the correct answer. Ah, but you'll say that wouldn't prove anything ... because _______?

Kevin is right, JennyP. Nobody who is Christian in the sense that they take the teaching of Christ seriously could have committed such atrocities. Those who did so were Christian in name only.

Really? I'm sure they thought they were saving their souls. Or saving untold thousands (millions?) of souls from the depredations of these few evil pagans. Just like the Taliban created their totalitarian society purely out of love for their subjects: They didn't want their subjects (whom they loved dearly) to be damned for eternity.

In both cases there's that problematic belief that our lives in this - obviously existing - world is just an audition for being able to live in the "real" world to come - ironically the one world for which there is no evidence.

Anyway, this is a side-issue of a side-issue. The real side-issue is your contention that most Christians are Christians because there's something inherently true about Christianity.

Also, still waiting to here how your machine will find rolled up dimensions.

That's a good question. Let's see whether I can explain it in a way that makes intuitive sense.

First, I call your attention to some simple Newtonian physics. Let's suppose I had two particles scattering off each other in three dimensions. Both energy and momentum are conserved. If I project the collision of the particles onto a two-dimensional screen, momentum and energy is also conserved in the projection, but each particle in the projection behaves as if it had more mass than it did in three dimensions. The "extra mass" is proportional to the momentum that I projected out for each particle. Momentum in the extra (third) dimension behaves as a mass term in the two dimensional universe.

Now, we live in a three (space) plus one (time) dimensional universe. The reason for supposing that there are extra physical dimensions is to solve what's known as the "heirarchy problem": why is gravity so much weaker than the other forces? One solution is to suppose that matter particles and the three gauge forces are constrained to operate on a 3+1 dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional space, while gravity is permitted to propagate through the "bulk" (the rest of the space). Gravity, it is supposed, is every bit as strong as the other forces, but we only see a tiny slice of a force that is diluted through a far larger volume.

These extra dimensions, it is supposed, are "compactified". That is, if you travel a miniscule distance in one of these extra directions, you get right back to where you were. Compactified dimensions are also called "Kaluza-Klein" dimensions.

Gravitons, of course, are themselves massless. (If they weren't, gravity wouldn't obey an inverse square law.) But remember two things I said: gravitons are permitted to travel through the bulk, and momentum in an extra dimension appears as mass, when projected onto any subspace of the bulk. With the right kind of machine, I can kick a graviton off in an orthogonal direction, and it will appear in my lab as a hugely massive particle. A linear electron-positron collider is such a machine.

Gravitons are quantum particles, of course. As a result of the compactification scale of the extra dimensions, I can't simply give a graviton any old momentum in the orthogonal direction. The momenta are quantized. (In a semi-classical picture, I must fit a half-integer number of wavelengths around the compactified dimension.) This means that I will have a series of discrete states corresponding to the normal modes of the graviton in the extra dimension. This series is called a "Kaluza-Klein graviton tower", and it's analogous to the series of (electromagnetic) spectral lines that are produced by atoms.

The expected energy scale of the first K-K graviton tower may be in reach of the next generation linear collider that is on the drawing boards.

You need a new user name. The real Patrick Henry was a CREATIONIST!

You posted this identical piece to me in another thread a day or two ago. I replied politely. Now it appears that you're a "reflex poster" and you're just dumping the same thing into any thread where you find me.

As I told you before (without making a dent in your reflexive posting mechanism), here's the scoop -- but this time it's not for your benefit, it's for the others on the thread:

The real Patrick Henry lived and died before Darwin published his work, and back in those days, virtually everyone was a creationist.

Science doesn't claim to be a source of the truth; science is "merely" a good way to filter out the false. (I put merely in quotes because, of course, it's not merely at all.)

I think that was what I was saying. Science is a technique to discern the physical world.

However, outside the physical world, too often the "scientific method" is used to distort reality to the ideology of the so called "scientist". Eugenics would be an example, as would much of what passes for "social science". Darwin, by deciding to frame his theory as an argument against the need for God, was being unscientific. Evolution itself goes against the law of entropy, implying there is something in evolution that pushes toward complexity. In the PC days of Darwin, they called this the "life force". I remember being taught cells had this magic "protoplasm" that allowed cells to divide. Now things are more complicated. Similarly, these bozos are arguing an evolutionary theory that has magical qualities versus an evolutinary theory that has theological qualities. This makes it a religious arguement.

And since it ignores the basic philosophical premises, it is a bad argument from a philosophical standpoint. Essentially it is an argument by one set of semi ignorant religious fundamentalist against a set of semi ignorant irreligious fundamentalists.

A crude strawman. I am around scientists every day. I have never in my career heard anybody make this claim, ever. It would be a foolish claim to make, since anyone with even a peripheral connection to science sees previously accepted results being overturned regularly

That was precisely my argument. TRUE scientists are pragmatists. Alas some who claim they are scientists use "science" to promote their ideology. Galton and eugenics, leading to the Nazis, is one example. Much of what passes for "social science" similarly is more based on ideology than science, since they ignore complex parameters that contaminate their data.

Evolution neither denies nor affirms a Creator. It is a scientific observation.

Darwinian evolution, however, uses an observation and inserts religion into it's thesis. (Darwin started his search with the question of how things could exist without God: Not as an indifferent scientist).

Darwin insists blind chance was behind evolution. But evidence shows there is a tendency toward complexity in nature. Systems evolve into complex systems in leaps, not gradually. This tendency toward complexity is not necessarily due to a god. But it could be. That is why Darwinians continue to ignore more modern theories like information theory or Chaos theory.

Similarly, like other ideologues, this author is using "science" to destroy a belief system-- to destroy religion. Sorry, but science has neither proven nor disproven the existence of God. As Rummy would say: the absence of evidence is not the same as the evidence of absense. There has so far been no adequate experiment devised to detect if God exists or not. On the other hand, things like beauty, absolute truth, and love cannot be proven scientifically to exist.

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