Creationist Arguments

From SkepticWiki

1 Introduction
2 Claims of Design
3 Age of the Earth
4 Creationists and Dinosaurs
5 Cosmology
6 Failing to Understand the Theory of Evolution
7 Creationists versus Genetics
8 Denying the Evidence
9 Miscellaneous Arguments
10 Some creationists
11 Discussion
12 Links

[edit] Introduction

A couple of frames from Jack Chick's justly famous creationist cartoon, "Big Daddy".

This page is a partial collection, still in progress, of creationist arguments used by Creationists, either in favor of the creationist hypothesis, or, more usually, against the theory of evolution or other well-verified aspects of science. Arguments not dealt with here will almost invariably be dealt with, though perhaps rather briefly, in one of the sites listed in the Links subsection at the end of this article.

[edit] Claims of Design

Argument from Design

Irreducible complexity

Bananas: The Atheist's Worst Nightmare

Eyes

Darwin on Eye Evolution

Neck of the Giraffe

Symbiosis

Crocodile Birds

Camouflage and Mimicry

The Venus Fly-Trap

Chirality

Fine Tuning Argument

Fine Tuning of the Earth's Orbit

Triple Alpha Process

[edit] Age of the Earth

Young-Earth Arguments

Noah's Ark Remnants

Missing Solar Neutrinos

NASA Discovers a Missing Day in History

Comets

Cosmic Dust on the Moon

The Earth created with age ("Omphalos")

Carbon Dating Doesn't Work

The Creationist Bedding Blunder

Polystrate Fossils

Population Growth

Lord Kelvin's Blunder

Creationists and Leap-Seconds

[edit] Creationists and Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs in Rock Art

Bishop Bell's Dinosaurs

Soft Tissues in Dinosaur Bones

[edit] Cosmology

Angular Momentum of the Solar System

Angular Momentum of the Sun

Comets

Cosmic Dust on the Moon

Fine Tuning Argument

Missing Solar Neutrinos

NASA Discovers a Missing Day in History

Triple Alpha Process

[edit] Failing to Understand the Theory of Evolution

Getting the Theory of Evolution Wrong

Evolution is an atheist theory

Evolution is just a Theory

Evolution and Falsification

Evolution and Complexity

Why Are There Still Monkeys?

Living Fossils

Coelacanths

Survival of the Fittest

Competition

Punctuated Equilibrium

Mitochondrial Eve

Kent Hovind's Bogus Challenge

Ray Comfort's Bogus Challenge

Crocoducks

[edit] Creationists versus Genetics

Creationists and Genetics

Mutation and Evolution

Mutations and Information

"No Beneficial Mutations"

Werner Gitt and "Information Theory"

Creationists and Kimura

[edit] Denying the Evidence

Creationists versus the Scientific Method

Creationism and Falsification

Intermediate Forms

No New Species Have Been Observed

Peppered Moths

Vestigial Structures

Creationists versus Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx a Hoax?

Reproducibility

"No Beneficial Mutations"

[edit] Miscellaneous Arguments

Evolution is losing support among scientists

Evolution is unpleasant

Hitler and evolution

Evolution and Eugenics

Evolution Violates The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Haeckel's Embryos

Darwin's Confession

Front-Loaded Evolution

Flood Myths

"Looking at the Same Evidence"

Cambrian Explosion

Teach Both Theories

Evolution and Epistemology

Rivers flowing through mountain ranges

Missing Links

Darwin's Finches

Creationists versus the Scientific Method

Hydrological Sorting

No Free Lunch Theorem

[edit] Some creationists

[edit] Discussion

The arguments of creationists defy a brief summary, because they do not form a coherent system of thought but a collection of disparate mistakes.

The absence of coherence in creationist thought is well demonstrated by the fact that many of their arguments are mutually contradictory. Consider, for example, Archaeopteryx. The creationists are desperate that it should not be an intermediate form. So half of them declare that it has "all the anatomical features of a modern bird" (ignoring things such as the bony jaw, semilunar carpal, lack of pygostyle, lack of a keeled sternum, etc) or they declare that it was faked by adding feather impressions to a dinosaur (ignoring the fact that its skeleton has wings). You will notice that these two views are completely incompatible, since one requires the poor beast to have the skeleton of a modern bird, and the other to have the skeleton of an extinct dinosaur. This doesn't stop both mistakes having currency in the Creationist community, nor, even, from both being touted by the same person on the same website. [1] [2]

Or take the question of speciation. Impossible and never observed, declares the Institute for Creation Research. [3] But "New species have been observed to form. In fact, rapid speciation is an important part of the creation model," says the Internet ministry "Answers in Genesis". [4]

How were fossils created? During the flood, in Genesis 6 - 9, if you believe Henry Morris [5] ; in the beginning, in Genesis 1, if you believe Victor Pearce [See Pearce, The Origin and Destiny of Life]; and after the flood, according yet other creationist groups [6]. There are, of course, no facts which allow creationists to place fossil formation with respect to a purely mythological event, so the one thing they can agree on is that real science is wrong.

Again, shown an ape-human intermediate form the creationists must declare it either an ape or a human. But which? Some creationists will call it an ape, some will call it a man, and some will change their minds on the issue within a matter of years[7] without, apparently, going through any intermediate stage.

Creationists cannot decide such matters because the facts, of course, give them nothing to go on. On what basis, then, could they agree? They have no coherent view of nature except that real science must be false: and this alone doesn't give them any hint as to what they should believe to be true about any specific question of fact.

Nonetheless, it is possible to make a few general remarks about creationist arguments. In science, the way to test a theory is to compare the consequences of the theory with the facts. Consequently, for a man to believe that he has overturned a theory which is in fact true, he must do at least one of three things: get the theory wrong; fail to grasp the consequences of the theory; or get his facts wrong.

The first of these errors is overwhelmingly the most popular among creationists. So, for example, the meaningless, self-contradictory phrase "evolved by chance" appears on countless creationist websites [8]. The advocates of ex nihilo creation are also eager to explain that the theory of evolution says that "everything came out of nothing", a phrase absent from science textbooks. A sample from the prominent creationist Kent Hovind:

I can’t believe these guys think there are scientifically credible arguments for the idea that all life came from nothing, 18 billion years ago.

We also do not believe that "these guys" (scientists) think that there are "scientifically credible arguments" for any such thing. This, we suppose, is why no scientist ever argues for any such notion.

This nonsense is not a mere temporary lapse into rhetoric on Hovind's part: a search of his website shows that it contains only one article which uses the words "natural selection", and that it was written by someone other than Hovind, whose lifelong obsession with evolution has not led him to learn the first thing – literally the first thing – about it. His followers and imitators are, unfortunately, legion. We suspect that such people are usually sincere in thinking that the theory of evolution is what they say it is: but they might have taken the trouble to look it up. Instead, they battle gamely against a strawman of their own construction.

The second way to think you've disproved the theory of evolution is to fail to grasp its consequences, or to ascribe to it consequences it does not have. Arguments of the form "I can't see how X evolved", usually fall into this class. So too do demands for forms of "proof" which the theory of evolution predicts will never be observed, e.g. "a cat turning into a dog", and such similar fatuities.

In practice, this sort of mistake shades into the first category. When, for example, a creationist demands "If men are evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?", he does not present a line of reasoning from what he thinks the theory of evolution is to the incompatibility of men and monkeys, and so it is not possible to tell whether he's making an error of the first or the second kind.

The third way to "disprove" the theory of evolution is to get the facts wrong. Examples include creationists' staggering series of blunders over the neck of the giraffe, or their mistakes about moondust.

As for positive arguments in favor of fiat creation, creationists would appear to have little save the Argument from Design and that old standby, "God says so". As a substitute for positive arguments, most of them seem to subscribe to the false dichotomy that if only they could find something wrong with evolution, they could believe with a clear conscience in the story with the magic fruit and the talking snake.