Creation advocates start campaign to ‘question evolution’

Why would I question these when, as a 10th grade student, I already can answer every one of them (seriously, feel free to challenge me on this)? It isn’t a coincidence that you people don’t understand evolution: you obviously haven’t had any education past middle school.

It would seem to me that while these are good questions to ask, one thing that must be addressed is one giant assumption: how life began in the first place. Evolution has nothing to do with the beginning of life, just the continuance of life. Evolutionists have no idea how life originated, and while they have various hypotheses, none have been validated through scientific experimentation. The fact is that the simplest single-celled bacterium contains more complexity than the world’s top scientists can replicate, yet they claim that it happened by chance, on accident no less.

Many evolutionists do not realize how much of a leap of faith they are actually making.

@John
1) Abiogenesis is NOT a theory; it is pure speculation, and has already been disproved twice already: once by Pasteur and again by Redi. However, Evolutionists still cling to it b/c it is the very foundation of their position. Evolutionists also like to hide behind the “Evolution makes no claim to explain the origins of life” shield b/c they know that their position would fall apart otherwise, so they have to pick a more hospitable starting point.
2) See above.
3) You didn’t answer the question.
4) Again, you evaded the question.
5) Yet again, you evaded real question. The question was not how long did it take, but how did the pathways originate.
6) Regardless of how much an organism looks like it had been intelligently designed, evolutionists (without even sounding embarrassed) will insist that natural selection has the power to make it look like it was designed, even though it wasn’t. The Evolutionist literature is replete with phrases that imply design. For example, many scientists inform us that evolution uses a “strategy” in order to find a “solution” to some problem. They know in their hearts that life was no accident but they have to intentionally deny it.
7) And again, you evaded real question, but you at least conceded the point. It’s interesting that you admit the lack of proof but you still believe it anyway. That’s called “faith”. Oh, and no one is saying that “all science is wrong”. In fact, science *when properly interpreted* supports the creation argument, which is why Creationists are all for science.
8) See 7 above.
9) This was Darwin’s position as well, but guess what? Darwin had some huge problems. He found that the lowest fossil-bearing rocks were filled with vast numbers of complex marine fossils that lacked any hint of their origin or transitional forms from one kind of creature to another. What is now called the “Cambrian Explosion” was wedged into Darwin’s thoughts on gaps. Such a sudden appearance of so many different groups of marine invertebrates, Darwin lamented, was “inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument” against his theory.
10) Living fossils are an embarrassment to Evolutionists, so when one is discovered they backpedal and play the “this creature was already well adapted” card. Oh, and I found you choice of words interesting – “evolution will not attempt to fix it.” This is the fallacy of reification: attributing a concrete characteristic to something that is abstract, such as “natural selection guided”.
11) You’re right about chemistry, but then you stopped short. True, there are physical laws that govern the universe, but where did those laws come from, and why do they continue to operate? It makes sense that God would create an orderly universe governed by laws that are maintained consistently, rather than chaos. The Bible teaches that God made the universe and the human mind, so we would expect these two things to “go together.” This is also what makes science possible by the way. If chemistry were truly random then we wouldn’t be able to do science at all since we would get random results every time we tried to run an experiment. That means that science can only be performed if Creation were true. In other words, you must assume that creation is true in order to attempt to logically argue against it. :-)

Regarding morality, the idea of a moral code goes back to biblical creation. If people were just complex chemicals and our decisions were just chemical reactions, then people wouldn’t have any genuine choice in what they do. If we were not created by God, then any moral code invented by people would just be arbitrary opinion.
12) Just-so stories are where scientists basically tell fairy tales as if they were fact. Put another way, they find a fossil or something and then construct an elaborate story around it based not on any evidence, but on assumption and presupposition. And no, Genesis is a historical account of events that actually happened, where God (who was there as eyewitness) inspired men to document details of those events. If you reject that, then you’re left with taking the word of men who were NOT there, yet who talk and act as if they were.
13) FALSE. You are committing the fallacy of equivocation, aka “bait and switch”, by conflating “evolution” (change within a population) with Evolution (descent from a common ancestor). A true statement would be that many advances have been made in biology as a result of evolution research, but NONE have been made as a result of Evolution research, namely b/c Evolution has NEVER BEEN OBSERVED, is UNTESTABLE, and is HISTORICAL science as opposed to OPERATIONAL science.
14) ??
15) Evolution IS inherently atheistic and it does have its own dogma. The entire foundation is based on the non-existence of God. If you disagree then I dare you to even suggest to your professor (or whomever) that Evolution just might not be true and/or there just might be a God and see what happens.

The Bible plainly teaches the earth is NOT flat: Isaiah 40:22, Job 26:10.

Also, this “religion vs. science” talk represents the fallacy of bifurcation, meaning that it implies an either/or choice, when in reality there is a third option: you can be a Christian AND do science, as many have and do. Are you saying that people like Newton, Kepler, Pasteur, Faraday, et.al. were not “real” scientists. I certainly hope not.

Lastly, I seriously question whether or not you are truly a Christian given these answers you gave. Either you’re lying, or you have no idea what you believe and why you believe it. I suggest you spend some time gaining a better understanding of the Creation (not “Creation-ism”) position. You can start by reading Romans 1:18-25 to see if that describes you.

@WarriorMonk
For starters, I would remind you that it is not in keeping with the teachings of Christ, nor in keeping with a good faith effort to keep a civil and productive tone to impugn another’s character and faith simply for disagreeing with you.

I am not a biologist, nor do I claim to be. Where my answers are deficient, I would ask the thoughtful reader to look for more information elsewhere. The gaps in my knowledge are many, but this is not evidence in and of itself that evolution is wrong. However, in the interest of a healthy debate, I will attempt to answer all questions as best I can, and with a civil, friendly tone.

The theory of evolution makes no claim as to the process of abiogenesis. It simply does not concern itself with such, and instead is concerned with speciation, that is to say, the origin of species. Abiogenesis is not required, nor relevant to the theory of evolution, as evolution already takes the existence of life as given. Attempts to change the meaning of the theory to claim that it has something to do with abiogenesis is ignorant at best, and often times, dishonest. Theories of abiogenesis are a different thing entirely than the theory of evolution. Abiogenesis has not been proven impossible, even in the experiments mentioned. Pasteur was concerned with the spontaneous generation of life, which while certainly similarly sounding to the concept of abiogenesis, is not the same thing. The theory of evolution also does not describe the creation of DNA, that theory would be called something different. When evolution was first proposed, people did not know that DNA existed yet, nor what it was made of, nor what it looked like, or how it functioned. DNA came after the theory of evolution. Claiming that the theory of evolution has to cover these things, or doesn’t cover them as a sort of shield, is similar to claiming that evolution must also explain how the Sun converts hydrogen into helium.

Biology does make any claim that life is random or an accident. It is clearly guided by the laws of chemistry and physics, in addition to natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, adaptive pressures from the environment et alia. Life can certainly appear to be designed, but appearance of design and actual conscious design are two different things. In order to prove the latter, one must prove the existence of a designer. Such evidence is still forthcoming, and has been for thousands of years. Since evolution proposes a pathway for the adaptation of life into these seemingly-designed forms, it seems more reasonable (requiring fewer unproven assumptions) to give the process of evolution credit for these changes than any deity or supernatural method.

The Cambrian explosion is not a nail in the coffin of evolution, and there are many, many explanations for the sudden appearance of new, complex life, from the appearance of an enriched oxygen environment, to more complex organs developing (such as the eye), thus allowing for predator/prey relationships to evolve much faster. If fossils mammals were ever found in rock from the Cambrian era, that would pretty much end the theory of evolution. This evidence has not arrived in the past 150 years.

In some ways, yes, the existence of god certainly makes sense, especially as a first cause for the formation of the universe. This runs into the problem of the teleological fallacy, in that just because something makes sense does not mean that it happens to be true. There is a face validity to the idea that the sun orbits the Earth, after all, it certainly looks that way upon first observation. Further evidence however proves this doctrine to be bullshit, despite the face validity of it.

Taken at face value, it makes sense that some sort of supernatural warden would be responsible for the establishment of all the laws of the universe, but there’s no evidence for this, which makes it an assumption. Assumptions are dangerous things, because an assumption can force the evidence to fit the theory as opposed to the theory being made to fit the evidence. Science does not assume the existence or nonexistence of any deity, from God, to Zeus, to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If Genesis is a literal account of the creation of the universe, and God is the eyewitness to these events, God is made an unreliable narrator. Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 contradict each other in multiple, irreconcilable ways. Then come the problems of poor story logic. So if God knows all that will ever come to be, God knows that Adam and Eve will eat the fruit of forbidden knowledge, yet God places the tree right in front of them, and then still gets pissed at them for it. God warns them that if they eat the fruit of forbidden knowledge, they will surely die. Well, if nothing has ever died in the garden of Eden before that, Adam and Eve had no concept of death to begin with, which seems a little unfair since they couldn’t have comprehended their punishment to begin with. Lastly, the fruit of forbidden knowledge doesn’t given any useful knowledge, like geometry or chemistry, but instead teaches what is evil and how to be evil. Why God felt it necessary to make that extremely useless piece of information the “forbidden knowledge” he’s going to place in front of the people he knows will eat it, yet cannot comprehend the ramifications of eating it, is a big enough of a plot hole cast the whole “literal account” bit as nonsense. Genesis as a metaphor makes a whole lot more sense, and many biblical scholars agree.

Doctor Richard Lenski’s 20 year E. Coli experiment involved getting E. Coli, a bacterium known for not being able to process citrate, to evolve and gain the ability to process citrate. He accomplished this task, thus proving evolution as observable, testable and repeatable science. I would make some similar claim that your lack of knowledge on this part makes you “woefully uninformed”, but like Christ, I try not to be a dick.

To claim that evolution is right about change in a species population, but that the theory is wrong about descent from a common ancestor opens up all kinds of questions that must be then answered. If there is no common descent, why does all life as we know it have such a remarkable genetic overlap? Why are chimps and people so similar? How come people share an absurd amount of genetic information with a banana? Why does the fossil record seem to suggest common descent for so many organisms that exist today?

I do not mean to imply that someone cannot be a theist and a scientist at the same time, only that the two deal with non-overlapping realms. Science does not make any claim about the existence or non-existence of any supernatural or paranormal event, God(s) included. Likewise, religion should not make claims on what is true or false about science, especially due to the dangers of religion being proven wrong. I should also point out that your claim that I cannot be a Christian and believe in the theory of evolution is tantamount to what you accuse me of in the paragraph before.

Geocentrism has nothing to do with a flat earth. Given that a round earth was accepted as fact for most, if not all cultures at the time, it isn’t shocking or revolutionary that the bible expresses the same belief. The bible is notably silent on the fact of our heliocentric solar system however, and at a certain point seems to suggest that the value of pi is 3.

As for why people believe what they believe, we do not find the truth to be pleasurable just for being the truth, and in fact, often times we believe what we believe is true because we find these ideas to be pleasurable to us. The truth is not ascribed qualities of being pleasurable, but pleasurable things are almost always ascribed qualities of truth. You are as guilty of this as I am.

Lastly, I’ll just copy and paste part of the Wikipedia entry on Miller-Urey:

“After Miller’s death in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller’s original experiments. That is considerably more than what Miller originally reported, and more than the 20 that naturally occur in life.[7] Moreover, some evidence suggests that Earth’s original atmosphere might have had a different composition than the gas used in the Miller–Urey experiment. There is abundant evidence of major volcanic eruptions 4 billion years ago, which would have released carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. Experiments using these gases in addition to the ones in the original Miller–Urey experiment have produced more diverse molecules.[8]”

In Christ,
John