Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism

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Introduction

Not for over a century has there been any scientific controversy over creationism. Having no science to offer, contemporary advocates of creationism opt instead to press their views through lawsuits and campaigns of misinformation, seeking to bypass the scientific community altogether and directly indoctrinate the next generation of students with fraudulent objections to science. Although creationist legal maneuvers have thus far resulted in one spectacular failure after another, the creationist PR effort has enjoyed more success. The only hope for those who care about science is to match misinformation with information: to invest as much time and money into educating the public as creationists do into misleading it. The Internet contains many good resources for those who wish to defend science, including the links to the left. This Defender's Guide is my own small contribution, in which I try to offer brief and readable analyses not only of nominally "scientific" creationist assertions, but of moral, philosophical, and theological ones as well. This is a one-man project and a part-time effort, so it has definite limitations, but I hope it will serve you well. I encourage you to send me feedback, particularly on anything missing from this guide—I may not have the opportunity to respond to you personally, but I will take your questions or criticisms into account in future revisions.

Assertions Analyzed

I: Cosmology and astronomy

Objections to Big Bang theory

• [18JUL2010] Big Bang theory must be false, because something cannot come from nothing.
• Big Bang theory must be false, because explosions are destructive, not creative.
• Big Bang theory contradicts the first law of thermodynamics.
• Big Bang theory contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
• Einstein's general theory of relativity is just a theory.

Objections to natural astronomical processes

• The second law of thermodynamics forbids the formation of galaxies and solar systems.
• If the solar system condensed from a gas cloud, the sun would contain more than 2% of the angular momentum of the solar system.
• If the solar system condensed from a gas cloud, all of the planets in the solar system would be rotating in the same direction.

Astronomical objections to the old age of the universe and its contents

• An old moon would be covered with a deep layer of meteoritic dust.
• An old Earth would have rotated fast enough at its inception to deform itself.
• Saturn's rings are problematic for evolutionists and consistent with recent creation.

Miscellaneous

• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants proves the universe was created.

II: Geology and the age of the earth

Objections to radiometric dating

• ¹⁴C dating is unreliable because it once showed a living mollusk to have been dead for 3,000 years.
• Many types of radiometric dating have error factors of several million years.
• Evolutionists simply discard all of the results of radiometric dating tests that are inconsistent with their theory.
• Radiometric dating only seems to indicate an old Earth because Noah's Flood changed the radioisotope concentrations in the young Earth.

Geological objections to the old age of the earth

• The ages of rocks are determined by the kinds of fossils they contain, but the ages of the fossils are derived from evolutionary assumptions.
• The rate of decay of the geomagnetic field sets an upper limit of 10,000 years on the age of the earth.
• Scientific methods for dating rock strata are disproved by places where supposedly older strata rest upon supposedly younger strata.
• The erosion rate of Niagara Falls indicates an age of 7,000 to 10,000 years.
• The Mississippi River Delta is at most 30,000 years old.

Miscellaneous

• Noah's Flood was caused by the condensation of a vapor canopy which also enabled people to live hundreds of years by screening out UV rays.

III: Abiogenesis (the origin of life)

General objections to abiogenesis

• Abiogenesis contradicts the law of biogenesis.
• Science cannot solve the problem of chirality.
• DNA and proteins need one another, but could not have come about at the same time.
• There was too little time for abiogenesis after the meteorite bombardment of the early Earth.
• Cells are too complex to have come into existence all at once by pure chance.
• There are too many different combinations of amino acids and nucleic acids for a given enzyme or DNA sequence to come into existence by chance.
• The second law of thermodynamics rules out abiogenesis.
• UV light would have destroyed important prebiotic compounds.
• Abiogenesis would be like a whirlwind in a junkyard assembling the loose parts into a pickup truck.

Miscellaneous

• The panspermia hypothesis is useless because it just pushes back the question of how life originated.

IV: Evolutionary biology

Mutation

• Mutations are always harmful.
• Mutations are never beneficial.
• Mutations are rarely beneficial, so they cannot drive evolution. Would you want your house built by a carpenter who made 99 bad houses for every good one?
• Mutations never increase the amount of genetic information.
• Chromosome numbers cannot change without producing harmful effects.
• The genetic variation exhibited in microevolution was deliberately put in place by the creator in advance, and did not arise from mutation.
• There are plenty of mutations that cause birth defects, but none that cause "birth improvements."
• The rate of mutation is too small for mutation to serve as a source of variation.

Speciation

• No one has ever seen one species arise from another.
• There is no evidence for the rapid development of new species in nature.

Things that supposedly could not have evolved

• "Irreducibly complex" things could not have evolved, and scientists have not even tried to show otherwise.
• The bacterial flagellum could not have evolved.
• Evolutionists cannot explain how feathers could have evolved.
• Evolutionists cannot tell us exactly how most organisms and biological structures arose.
• Evolutionists cannot explain how butterfly metamorphosis could have evolved.
• Sexual reproduction could not have come about through evolution.

Counterarguments against evidence for evolution

• Homologous features do not prove ancestral relationships between any organisms, because all classifications above the species level are man-made and arbitrary.
• Structural homologies reflect a common design plan, not common descent.
• Molecular homologies reflect functional similarities, not common descent.
• The peppered moth does not demonstrate evolution because no speciation occurs.
• Supposedly "vestigial" organs actually have functions.
• Vestigial organs are evidence for degenerative evolution only.

Miscellaneous

• The perfection of structures like the human eye is proof of creation.
• Punctuated equilibrium requires macromutations.
• If evolution were true, fish would have evolved into amphibians and land animals more than once.
• Natural selection is a tautology: the fittest survive, and those who survive are the fittest.
• Given uniform population growth rates, there could not have been humans before 10,000 years ago.
• Haldane's Dilemma proves that humans could not have evolved over the time span evolutionists say they did.
• If humans had evolved from apes, there would no longer be any apes around.
• Natural selection is not sensitive enough to small changes to drive evolution.
• The rate of microevolution is too low to account for the macroevolutionary change observed in the fossil record.
• The genetic distance between bacteria and humans is the same as that between bacteria and plants.

V: Paleontology

Particular transitional forms

• [09JAN2010] There are no transitional forms between fish and amphibians.
• There are no transitional forms between amphibians and reptiles.
• There are no transitional forms between reptiles and mammals.
• There are no transitional forms between reptiles and birds.
• There are no transitional forms between humans and their nonhuman ancestors.
• There are no transitional forms between whales and their landgoing ancestors.

Miscellaneous paleontological objections to evolution

• If evolution were true, there would be more transitional fossils.
• The Cambrian explosion is proof of creation.
• Fossils are the remains of the organisms that perished in Noah's Flood.
• The fossil record shows long periods of stasis, but evolution predicts constant and gradual change.
• Some alleged transitional forms are not ancestral to any modern organisms.

VI: Morality and theology

Evolution and atheism

• Evolution is atheistic because it makes no reference to God.
• Evolution entails atheism.
• Acceptance of evolution makes one better disposed towards atheism.
• The only reason anyone accepts evolution is because of a dogmatic prior commitment to atheism.

Evolution and theology

• Evolution entails that humanity was not predestined for existence.
• Acceptance of evolution entails the denial of Christianity and Islam.
• Evolution entails that there was no Fall, and thus no need for Christ.
• The cruelty and wastefulness of evolution is inconsistent with the goodness of God.

Evolution and morality

• It is no surprise that people behave like animals, since they are taught that they come from animals.
• Evolution teaches that people are just animals.
• Evolution robs our origin of its grandeur.
• Evolution was the basis for Communism.
• Karl Marx dedicated Das Kapital to Darwin.
• Evolution was the basis for Nazism.
• Evolution was the basis for the Holocaust.
• Evolution was the basis for laissez-faire capitalism.
• Evolution was the basis for slavery.

Personal moral attacks against Darwin

• Darwin was a racist.
• Darwin beat a puppy.

VII: Philosophy and education

Philosophy of science

• Evolution is unfalsifiable.
• [24MAR2009] Theories about the past cannot be scientific, because the past cannot be observed.

Science and supernaturalism

• Electrons are as materially inconceivable as a Creator.
• Supernaturalistic hypotheses can be scientific.
• There are many unanswered questions in science, so we have to bring a god into the picture.

Education

• Evolutionists are trying to take over the school system and force their beliefs upon students.
• Creationist objections to science should be taught in school to help students develop critical thinking skills.

VIII: Miscellaneous

• [22JUL2010] Many great scientists were creationists.
• Natural processes cannot be the cause of things like love; the cause of love must itself be loving.
• There are many theories of evolution, each of which disproves the others.
• Evolution predicts that the laws of nature should evolve; creationism predicts that they should remain fixed.
• No one except God was around to observe the creation, so we have to take His word for it.
• Evolution is just a theory.
• Evolution and creationism are the only two options.
• Einstein believed evolution was impossible; he said "God does not play dice."
• Darwin never had a formal education in biology.
• 100 scientists have signed a declaration denying the evolutionary history of life.
• [17JUN2010] Ecosystems are too complex and finely balanced to have arisen by chance or to have persisted for millions of years.

Dedication

Dedicated to Dr. Douglas J. Futuyma, for his tireless efforts on behalf of the defense and advancement of science. Despite holding the three jobs of professor, textbook writer, and editor of the scientific journal Evolution, Dr. Futuyma still took the time to author Science on Trial, a fine popular response to creationism. Science on Trial, now in its second edition, was one of the first, and one of the most helpful, books I read when I first became interested in creationism, and the appendix to that book provided me with the initial inspiration for the Defender's Guide. Without Dr. Futuyma's example, this project might never have been started.

About the editor

Mark I. Vuletic received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, for a dissertation on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics.