First, the Creationists argue that at best evolution is only a theory and not a fact, and that theories should never be taken as gospel if one might be permitted a metaphor. They claim that the very language of evolutionists themselves show that their ideas are on shaky grounds.
There is nothing iffy about the Copernican heliocentric theory. It is true. It is a fact. Evolutionists argue that the same is the case with evolution. When talking about the theory of evolution, one is talking about a body of laws. In particular, if one is following the ideas of Charles Darwin, one is arguing that population pressures lead to a struggle for existence, this then entails a natural selection of favored forms, and evolution through shared descent is the end result.
This is a body of general statements about life, since the s given in a formal version using mathematics with deductive inferences between steps. In other words, we have a body of laws, and hence a theory in the first sense just given. There is no implication here that the theory is iffy, that is in the second sense just given.
We are not necessarily talking about something inherently unreliable. Of course, there are going to be additions and revisions, for instance the possibility of much greater hybridization than someone like Darwin realized, but that is another matter Quammen They reply: Those that survive! Hence, natural selection reduces to the tautology that those that survive are those that survive. Not a real claim of science at all. To which evolutionists respond that this is a sleight of hand, showing ignorance of what is genuinely at stake.
Some of our would-be ancestors lived and had babies and others did not. There was a differential reproduction. This is certainly not a mere truism. It could be that everyone had the same number of children. It could also be that there is no difference overall between the successful and the unsuccessful.
This too is denied by natural selection. To say that something is the fitter or fittest is to say that it has certain characteristics what biologists call adaptations that other organisms do not have, and that on average one expects the fitter to succeed. But there is no guarantee that this must be so or that it will always happen. An earthquake could wipe out everyone, fit and unfit. Before discussing the third argument Creationists level against evolution, it is worth pausing over this second one.
Most if not all professional evolutionists argue that sometimes natural selection is not a significant causal factor. In this sense, it is false that selection is something that by definition is and always is the reason for lasting change. The fittest do not always win. It cannot be a tautology. Although, at first, this was embraced enthusiastically Dobzhansky , it soon became clear that at the gross physical phenotypic level it is at most minor Coyne, Barton, and Turelli However at the level of the gene genotype , it is still thought very important.
Indeed, it is a powerful tool in discovering the exact dates of key evolutionary events, especially those involving speciation Ayala Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, somewhat paradoxically, as Creationism has evolved! Thus can one explain the diversity of life on earth — it evolved since leaving the Ark, which contained only generic kinds. For all its supposed faults, there is a better discussion of natural selection at the Creationist museum in Kentucky than in the Field Museum in Chicago, miles north.
The bar on macroevolution remains absolute. Third, Creationists point out that modern evolutionary theory asserts that the raw building blocks of evolution, the genetic mutations, are random.
But this means that there are minimal chances of evolution producing something that works as well and efficiently as an organism, with all of the functioning parts in place. A monkey typing letters does so randomly. It could never in a million years in a billion, billion, billion… years type the works of Shakespeare. The Creationists say that same is true of evolution and organisms, given the randomness of mutation. To which evolutionists reply that this may all be well and true of the monkey, but in the case of evolution things are rather different.
If a mutation works, then it is kept and then built upon, until the next good mutation comes along. This shrinks considerably the odds of evolution producing organisms, even though the appearance of mutation is random.
Suppose you take just one phrase from Shakespeare. Twenty-six the number of letters, more if you include capitals and gaps and punctuation to the power of the number of spaces. Dawkins has a good discussion of these issues. Rather is meant that mutations do not occur according to need. Suppose a new disease appears. Evolutionary theory does not guarantee that a new, life-protecting mutation will occur to order.
Fourth in the litany of Creationist complaints, there is a perennial favourite based on paleontology. Creationists agree that the fossil record is sequential, fish to primates moving upwards, but argue that this is the result of the sorting effect of the Flood. Primates are above dinosaurs, for example, because primates are more agile and moved further up the mountain before being caught and drowning.
They also argue, however, that the fossil record ought to be continuous if evolution occurred, but in real life there are many gaps between different form — jumps from one kind of organism to another. Apes to humans would be a case in point. This spells Creation not evolution. To which the response comes that on the one hand one expects such gaps. Fossilization is an uncommon occurrence — most dead bodies get eaten straight away or just rot — and the wonder is that we have what we do have.
On the other hand argue evolutionists, the record is not that gappy. There are lots of good sequences — lines of fossils with little difference between adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or in more detail the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to the modern horse on one toe.
Moreover, in refutation of Creationism, we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood. For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never found down with the dinosaurs.
Those brutes of old expired long before we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this. Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down — entropy increases, to use the technical language.
Energy gets used and converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service. But organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law. This would be impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind evolution meaning change without direct divine guidance of organisms from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like humans. There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous intervention to produce functioning life. To which argument the response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy from elsewhere.
And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while. Eventually the sun will go out and life will become extinct. The second law will win eventually, but not just yet. Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law that is, unguided law , especially not by blind evolutionary laws. They must have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional.
In fact, today the fossil record for humans is strong — we evolved over the past four million years from small creatures of half our height, who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we. There is lots of fossil proof of these beings known as Australopithecus afarensis.
Perhaps it is true that we humans are special, in that as Christians claim we uniquely have immortal souls, but this is a religious claim. It is not a claim of science, and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls. There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution, but this is the nature of science.
No branch of science has all of the answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true of their branch of science. Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the cultural context. First, as a populist movement, driven as much by social factors — a sense of alienation from the modern world — one would expect to find that cultural changes in society would be reflected in Creationist beliefs.
This is indeed so. Take, above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was very popular because it was thought to justify slavery Noll Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends making people into the property of others — the Bible elsewhere seems to endorse slavery. Remember, when the escaped slave came to Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey him.
Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist circles well into the twentieth century. Price, for instance, was quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites. By the time of Genesis Flood , however, the civil rights movement was in full flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully. They explained in detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as inferior. The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy Scriptures.
Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato or Aristotle. Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons, Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright opposition to evolution of all kinds.
We find in fact then that although Creationists were and are adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be called evolution!
This said, Creationists were convinced that this change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists would allow. Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during the days of Creation. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that Creationism is purely an epistemological matter — a matter of facts and their understanding.
Moral claims have always been absolutely fundamental. Nearly all Creationists in the Christian camp are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last Judgement.
They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era. Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus — hence, we should engage in social action and the like. Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others.
For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family sanctity which today encompasses anti-abortion , sexual orthodoxy especially anti-homosexuality , biblically sanctioned punishments very pro-capital punishment , strong support for Israel because of claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End Times , and so forth.
It is absolutely vital to see how this moral agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods and Arks. Ruse discusses these matters in much detail. Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful, and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris particularly and his coworkers and believers — notably Duane T.
Particularly effective was their challenging of evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with bold statements provocatively made most often by Gish about the supposed nature of the universe Gilkey ; Ruse ed. This all culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for state legislatures, that would allow — insist on — the teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools.
In the biology classes of such schools, that is. By this time it was realized that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the Constitution that which prohibits the establishment of state religion , it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution from such schools. The trick was to get Creationism — something that prima facie rides straight through the separation of church and state — into such schools. The idea of Creation Science is to do this.
The claim is that, although the science parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as good science. In , these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was passed and signed into law — as it happens, by a legislature and governor that thought little of what they were doing until the consequences were drawn to their attention.
William Clinton was governor from to , and again from to his winning of the presidency, in The law was passed during the interregnum. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, the geneticist Francisco Ayala, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and as the philosophical representative Michael Ruse appeared as expert witnesses, arguing that Creationism has no place in state supported biology classes.
Hardly surprisingly, evolution won. The judge ruled firmly that Creation Science is not science, it is religion, and as such has no place in public classrooms. In this whole matter was decided decisively in the same way, by the Supreme Court, in a similar case involving Louisiana. See Ruse ed. Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial was less theological or scientific, but philosophical.
Paradoxically, the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand. The Creationists had started to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing philosopher Karl Popper As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable.
By this, Popper meant that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world. If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be rejected — or at least revised. The Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a science than Creationism.
To his credit, Popper revised his thinking on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was a genuine scientific theory; see Popper Part of the testimony in Arkansas was designed to refute this argument, and it was shown that in fact evolution does indeed make falsifiable claims.
As we have already seen, natural selection is no tautology. If one could show that organisms did not exhibit differential reproduction — to take the example given above, that all proto-humans had the same number of offspring — then selection theory would certainly be false. Likewise, if one could show that human and dinosaur remains truly did occur in the same time strata of the fossil record, one would have powerful proof against the thinking of modern evolutionists.
This argument succeeded in court — the judge accepted that evolutionary thinking is falsifiable. Conversely, he accepted that Creation Science is never truly open to check. On-the-spot, ad hoc hypotheses proliferate as soon as any of its claims are challenged. It is not falsifiable and hence not genuine science. They argued that in fact there is no hard and fast rule for distinguishing science from other forms of human activity, and that hence in this sense the Creationists might have a point Ruse ed.
Not that people like Laudan were themselves Creationists. They thought Creationism false. Their objection was rather to trying to find some way of making evolution and not Creationism into a genuine science.
Defenders of the anti-Creationism strategy taken in Arkansas argued, with reason and law, that the United States Constitution does not bar the teaching of false science. It bars the teaching of non-science, especially non-science which is religion by another name. Hence, if the objections of people like Laudan were taken seriously, the Creationists might have a case to make for the balanced treatment of evolution and Creationism. Popperian falsifiability may be a somewhat rough and ready way of separating science and religion, but it is good enough for the job at hand, and in law that is what counts.
Evolutionists were successful in court. The history of science, however, clearly shows that scientific theories do not remain forever unchanged. The history of science is not the history of one absolute truth being built upon other absolute truths. Rather, it is the history of theorizing, testing, arguing, refining, rejecting, replacing, more theorizing, more testing, etc.
It is the history of theories working well for a time, anomalies occurring i. Of course, it is possible for scientists to act unscientifically, to be dogmatic and dishonest. But the fact that one finds an occasional oddball or charlatan in the history of science or a person of integrity and genius among pseudoscientists does not imply that there really is no difference between science and pseudoscience.
Because of the public and empirical nature of scientific debate, the charlatans will be found out, errors will be corrected and the honest pursuit of the truth is likely to prevail in the end. This will not be the case with pseudosciences, where there is often no method of detecting errors much less of correcting them. Some theories are so broad or vague that they predict just about anything. They can't be refuted, even in principle. Everything is consistent with them, even apparent contradictions and contraries!
Other theories allow definite predictions to be made from them; they can, in principle, be refuted. They can be tested by experience and observation.
A religious cosmology, such as that offered in Genesis and accepted as a literal account of the origin of the universe by fundamentalist Jews and Christians, is of the former type of theory.
Evidently a river flood simply overwhelmed a herd of small rhinoceros. Question: Yes, but creationists note that the Cumberland Bone Cave in the limestone mountains of Western Maryland contains the bones of animals of many different climates mashed together in one pile. How do you answer that one? Answer: The creationists do not describe the cave very accurately.
Once we understand the evidence, we find that the bones accumulated in tranquil circumstances during the Ice Ages. From Franklin Folsom , we learn that this cave has two openings, a horizontal shaft going into the side of the ridge, and a vertical one on the top of the ridge extending down. In the vertical shaft, pioneers hiding from Indians left their rifles, where they were found in this century. By this very same route, the animals one by one brought their bones to be fossilized.
During the ice ages, an animal would every so often get killed falling down the vertical shaft, and rot away, leaving disconnected bones. After tumbling down a stepped slope one by one, the bones landed in a pile at the lowest point of the cave. As dripping water dried, it left calcite that cements the bones together. Today we can distinguish distinct layers of bones of cold-weather animals from the glaciations from layers of warm-weather animals from the interglacial periods; the alternation of these layers is hard to explain if the biblical flood story is literal history.
As Mohr and Sloan point out, rats gnawed on these bones, leaving their tooth marks; this fact is rather hard to reconcile with the catastrophist theory that first a tidal wave from the tropics and then a tidal wave from the arctic smashed animal carcasses into the mouth of this cave. Question: Creationists often argue that many fossils look as though they were buried alive and writhing in their death agony.
How do you reply? Answer: Adrian J. Desmond explains that dead animals often become contorted when they dry out. The dried-up ligaments contract and distort the body. If an animal's body dries out in the hot sun a month before a flooding river buries it in sediments, its fossil would look as if it had been buried while still in pain. Question: Creationists like Dr. Rupke, a geologist of the State University of Groningen in the Netherlands, claim that certain fossil trees which they call "polystrate fossils" extend vertically through many meters of strata.
Rupke says they are found in such coal-producing areas as the Ruhr region of Germany, Lancashire in England, and Joggins in Nova Scotia. Answer: The creationists again mishandle their sources. The evidence shows that the vertical trees were really buried by flooding rivers. For instance, Scientific Creationism p.
Broadhurst , p. It is clear that trees in position of growth are far from being rare in Lancashire Teichmuller, reaches the same conclusion for similar trees in the Rhein-Westfalen Coal Measures , and presumably in all such cases there must have been a rapid rate of sedimentation.
However, Broadhurst has some evidence that river floods buried these trees, evidence that the creationists do not mention. He continues:. This sedimentation occurred, without doubt, in water that could not have been fast-flowing, since the trees were left in a standing position. It is possible that the land surface with its trees was inundated by flood water possibly on numerous occasions from adjacent waterways, the flood water bringing with it large amounts of sediment.
He goes on to say that fossil polystrate trees are found only in the coarse-grained rocks, but not in the fine-grained ones. The reason is that the sediments of the latter probably did not settle fast enough to bury the trees before they rotted away:. The most likely explanation of the apparent absence of such trees from these sediments is that the latter accumulated too slowly; any trees decayed and collapsed before they could be enclosed by sediments.
Hence the river flood theory can explain why the trees are found upright and why trees were preserved in some rocks but not others; the creationist catastrophe theory cannot. Their point is simply this: Every so often one or more river floods would bury a forest of lycopsid plants up to ten meters deep in sediment.
After each flood, a new lycopsid forest would grow out of the newly deposited sediments. Eventually, as the tops of the trees rotted away, the pulpy interior of the trees would also rot away, leaving the more resistant outer wood surrounding a pit as deep as ten meters. Primitive reptiles fell into these pits, died of starvation there, and were buried when fresh flood sediments and plant matter filled the pits.
Superficially, these trees look as though they support the Noachian flood theory, but ordinary geology explains the evidence much more easily. Question: Creationists say the permafrost in the river deltas and offshore islands of Siberia is loaded with the bones of thousands of mammoths.
Even more of a surprise is the fact that many mammoths have been found frozen intact, such as the Berezovka mammoth. These animals had subtropical plants like buttercups in their stomachs, and their flesh is so perfectly preserved that some adventurer's club once held a banquet on the meat of the Berezovka mammoth.
Can you explain the evidence without assuming that some huge catastrophe overwhelmed and froze the mammoths instantly while changing the climate from subtropical to arctic overnight? Answer: William R. Farrand has investigated claims like these, and laid many of the exaggerations to rest.
In particular, he proves that these animals were arctic animals, and he proves that the Berezovka mammoth was really rather putrified. He gives a chart of the plants found in the stomach of the Berezovka mammoth: they are all arctic plants like conifers, tundra grasses, and sedges. The mammoths had a thick insulating underwool beneath their shaggy coat of hair to shield them from the arctic cold. Ice age cave artists painted pictures of mammoths in their caves, a fact that should settle once and for all that the mammoths were arctic creatures.
Besides, Farrand shows that the Berezovka mammoth took several days to freeze. Predators had had a chance to mutilate it before this happened. The excavators found the stench of the partially rotted Berezovka mammoth unbearable; even the earth in which it was buried stank. Histological studies of the flesh showed "deep penetrating chemical alterations as the result of very slow decay. These facts alone do not disprove Flood Geology, but they should answer once and for all the more extravagant claims of some catastrophists.
Question: But how do you explain how all those bones got into the river deltas and how all those mammoths got frozen? Answer: Actually, the cold Siberian rivers could easily wash carcasses of the mammoths to the river deltas during the spring thaw. I'm sure there were thousands of spring thaws which could cause this. But it should be noted that there is really very little frozen mammoth flesh lying around in Siberia.
Farrand points out how only 39 mammoths have been found with some of their flesh preserved; of these, only four have been found more or less intact, including the Berezovka mammoth. But on top of all this, there is additional evidence that a literal Flood of Noah could not have deposited these mammoth remains.
Farrand points out that we find no other species of frozen animals in Siberia except mammoths and wooly rhinoceri. Since these animals were so big and clumsy, they had trouble crossing crevices in the earth's surface, just as modern elephants do. This evidence fits well with the theory that mammoths fell off cliffs and were killed, fell into holes, were buried in landslides, or were caught and buried in ways that more mobile animals like horses and bison were able to avoid.
Yet, if the Flood of Noah were literal history, we would expect to find many different species of frozen animals, not just the mammoth and wooly rhinoceros.
Also, the radiocarbon dates taken from various frozen mammoth remains span the time period from 11, to 39, years before the present, and I dare say, 27, years is a little long for Noah's Flood. I can understand how ordinary geological processes can account for the frozen mammoths, but it is hard to see how such animals could stay afloat for one year in Noah's Flood with their last meal in their stomachs and only partially rotting before landing in their final frozen resting places.
Question: Creationists often criticize geologists for assigning different ages to different parts of the same rock formation while assigning the same age to different rocks in the same region.
They maintain that geologists cannot explain huge rock formations like the Saint Peter Sandstone that cover much of the country. They claim the fossils give the "illusion" of an evolutionary sequence only because the simple round immobile animals sank faster and deeper than the complex light mobile ones during Noah's Flood.
How do you reply to these arguments? Answer: The creationists who make such arguments don't know the first thing about sedimentary facies. I shall explain them here in detail. Common sense alone will tell you that when sediments are washed into an ocean or lake, the larger heavier sediment articles will settle out closer to shore, and the finer fluffier current-wafted particles will settle out further from shore.
So, if the sand settles out in the river deltas, the clays further out, and perhaps calcareous muck the furthest out of all, then you're going to have different types of sedimentary rock forming all at the same time. Various processes can make the different zones of sediments shift back and forth and vary in width. If the land subsides, the beds of sediment will move to keep up with the receding shore.
If the subsidence stops, then the beds of sediment will move away from the land as the coastal flood plains and river deltas build their way into the sea or lake. As the rainfall varies, and as the mountains erode away or get uplifted, the amount of sediments that get into the sea will vary, and hence so will the width of the bands of sediments.
Thus, if you could stick a huge knife vertically into the Earth, slice the surface from the ocean to the land, and examine the cross-section of the sediments, you would see the zones of sand, clay, and carbonates deeply interfinger with each other. Therefore after percolating ground waters cement the sands, clays, and carbonates into sandstone, shale, and limestone respectively, and after uplift and erosion expose them all to view, different zones are formed which the geologist calls "facies".
Different parts of the same facies are of vastly different ages, yet different facies on the same level were all deposited at the same time. Answer: I could give you hundreds of examples, but I'll settle for three. Let's start with the early Paleozoic strata of the Grand Canyon.
As John S. As the land surface subsided beneath the ocean, the western ocean moved eastward covering the land. The limestone far out to sea, the shale closer to shore, and the sandstone right by the shore were being deposited all at the same time. Your weird grammar is bewitching. But your grasp of physics is not. The Second Law of Thermodynamics roughly states that energy can only flow from a hot body to a cold one in a closed system, and that the measure of this is called entropy, which only ever increases.
Alas living things are not closed systems. Your problem here is really with physics. Can you take it up with those guys please? Christ alive, to be excluded from that club for being a bit dim is harsh. Are you in the wrong list? What about cheese? Or pottery? Or tiny tiny bats? Can you remember when you last had it?
The best-fit theory currently is in white smoker hydrothermal vents around four billion years ago, where an energetic disequilibrium provided by proton gradients swirled in and out of porous serpentenised olivine submarine rock. More details in Creation , by me, out now! Thanks for asking! Interesting theology. Decent evolutionary biologists support neither intelligent design nor panspermia.
There are literally thousands of transitional fossils — ones that show features in common with distinct later species. I like Tiktaalik the best, an ugly brute with some fishy gills, land-lubbing lungs, and some bits that were in between a wrist joint connecting to fins.
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