Views From the Other Side: Archive of Creationist Articles

[General Mung Beans]

For purposes of convenience I think it would be easier if we posted particularly interesting creationist articles in one thread and perhaps the mods could sticky this. This article is entitled "Humanistic Religion and the Origin of Life" by Rev. John F. MacArthur a clergyman in many areas who I deeply respect. Some of the arguments are theological and thus probably of no interest to most members here (though it may be to religious members) but he presents some scientific arguments too. http://teampyro.blogspot.com/

PyroManiacs: Setting the World on fire. `Is not My word like a fire?` says the LORD (Jeremiah 23:29).
23 June 2010
Humanistic Religion and the Origin of Life
by John MacArthur

[Coming to Grips with Genesis]

The following article is taken from John MacArthur's foreword to Terry Mortenson and Thane H. Ury, eds. Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth. The book is a festschrift in honor of Dr. John Whitcomb.


he apostle Paul closed his first epistle to Timothy by urging the young pastor to guard the deposit of truth that had been entrusted to him, "avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge" (1 Timothy 6:20-21). In the King James Version, the text famously speaks of "science falsely so called."

[Coming to Grips with Genesis] Over the course of human history, all kinds of speculative ideas have been falsely labeled "science" and mistakenly accepted as true and reliable knowledge by otherwise brilliant people. The now-discredited dogmas of older scientific theories are numerous—and in some cases laughable. They include alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold); phrenology (the Victorian belief that the shape of one's skull reflects character traits and mental capacity); astrology (the pagan belief that human destiny is determined by the motions of celestial bodies); and abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances). All those false beliefs were deemed credible as "science" by the leading minds of their times.

Consider just one of those—abiogenesis. Popularly known as "spontaneous generation," this idea has long been, and continues to be, one of the archetypal expressions of "science falsely so called." It is also one of the most persistent of all demonstrably pseudoscientific fictions. The notion that aphids arise naturally from dew on plant leaves, mold is generated automatically by aging bread, and maggots are spontaneously begotten by rotting meat was more or less deemed self-evident by most of humanity's brightest intellects1 from the time of Aristotle until 1861, when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.

It is one of the great ironies of scientific history that the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published exactly two years before Pasteur's famous experiments proved that life cannot arise spontaneously from non-living matter. The publication of Darwin's book marked the apotheosis of evolutionary theory, and it was rooted in the basic presupposition that under the right circumstances, life can spring on its own from non-living matter.

In other words, two years before abiogenesis was scientifically debunked, it was in effect canonized as the central dogma of modern secular belief about the origins of life. The discovery that fleas don't magically form out of decomposing dander on the backs of dirty dogs did not dissuade most in the scientific world from embracing the theory that all life in the universe arose by itself out of nothing. The belief that life spontaneously came from non-life remains to this day the great unexplained (albeit easily disprovable) assumption underlying the dogma of evolution.

The irony of that is utterly lost on many in the scientific community today, where evolution has become an article of faith—unshakable faith, it turns out.

Evolutionists have conveniently "solved" the problem of abiogenesis by repeatedly moving their estimates of the earth's age backward toward infinity. Given enough time, it seems, anything is possible. Trying desperately to keep the biblical concept of eternity at bay, evolutionists have thus devised an alternative kind of infinitude. Every time a challenge to current evolutionary theory arises, geologists and astronomers dutifully tack billions and billions of eons onto their theories about the earth's age, adding however many ancient epochs are deemed necessary for some new impossibility to be explained.

In the introduction to my 2001 book, The Battle for the Beginning, I suggested naturalism had become the dominant religion of contemporary secular society. "Religion is exactly the right word to describe naturalism," I wrote. "The entire philosophy is built on a faith-based premise. Its basic presupposition—a rejection of everything supernatural—requires a giant leap of faith. And nearly all its supporting theories must be taken by faith as well."2

[Which came first? Scripture tells us.] Here, then, is a classic example of what I was talking about: the typical evolutionist's starting point is this notion that life arose spontaneously from inanimate matter sometime in eternity past. That requires not merely the willful suspension of what we know for certain about the origins of life and the impossibility of abiogenesis—but also enough deliberate gullibility to believe that moving-target estimates of the earth's antiquity can sufficiently answer all the problems and contradictions sheer naturalism poses.

Meanwhile, in the popular media, evolutionary doctrine and ever-expanding notions of prehistory are being promoted with all the pious zeal of the latest religious sect. Watch the Internet forums, programs on the Discovery Channel, interviews and articles published in the mass media, school textbooks, and books aimed at lay readers—and what you will usually see is raw assertions, demagoguery, intimidation, and ridicule (especially when the subjects of biblical theism and the Genesis account of creation are raised).

But question the dogma that all life evolved from a single spontaneously-generated cell, point out that the universe is full of evidence for intelligent design, or demand the kind of proof for evolutionary origins that would ordinarily pass scientific muster, and the ardent evolutionist will simply dismiss you as a heretic or a bigot of the worst stripe. What they are tacitly acknowledging is that as far as they are concerned, evolution is a doctrine that must be received with implicit faith, not something that can be scientifically demonstrated. After all, the claims of true science can always be investigated, observed, reproduced, tested, and proved in the laboratory. So to insist that evolution and so-called "deep time" doctrines must be accepted without question is really just a tacit admission that these are not scientific ideas at all.

Consider these quotations from typical evolutionist writers:

* No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century. (Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., Boston: Sinauer Associates, 1986, p. 15)
* It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory. . . . All present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts. (R. C. Lewontin, "Evolution/creation debate: A time for truth," Bioscience (1981), 31:559)
* Here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design. . . . One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity's sake, let's stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact. (Richard Dawkins, "The Illusion of Design," Natural History (November 2005), 53)


But as those statements themselves show, evolution is a dogma, not a demonstrable "fact." I stand by the position I took in The Battle for the Beginning: "Belief in evolutionary theory is a matter of sheer faith. [It is] as much a religion as any theistic world-view."3

I'll go even further: science cannot speak with any authority about when the universe began, how it came into being, or how life originated on earth. Science by definition deals with what can be observed, tested, measured, and investigated by empirical means. Scientific data by definition are facts that can be demonstrated by controlled, repeatable experiments that always yield consistent results. The beginning of the universe by its very nature falls outside the realm of scientific investigation.

To state the case plainly: there is no scientific way to explain creation. No one but God actually observed creation. It did not happen by any uniform, predictable, observable, repeatable, fixed, or natural laws. It was not a natural event or a series of natural events. The initial creation of matter was an instantaneous, monumental, inexplicable miracle—the exact opposite of a "natural" phenomenon. And the formation of the universe was a brief series of supernatural events that simply cannot be studied or explained by science. There are no natural processes involved in creation; the act of creation cannot be repeated; it cannot be tested; and therefore naturalistic theories purporting to explain the origin and age of the universe are unverifiable.

In other words, creation is a theological issue, not a scientific one. Scripture is our only credible source of information about creation, because God Himself was the only eyewitness to the event. We can either believe what He says or reject it. But no Christian should ever imagine that what we believe about the origin of the universe is merely a secondary, nonessential, or incidental matter. It is, after all, the very starting point of God's self-revelation.

In fact, in its profound brevity, Genesis 1:1 is a very simple, clear, and unequivocal account of how the universe, the earth, and everything on the earth came to be: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That is not an ambiguous statement. Until Darwinian evolution undertook a campaign to co-opt the story of creation and bring it into the realm of naturalistic "science"—and especially before modernist skepticism began to seep into the church—no one who claimed to be a Christian was the least bit confused by the Genesis account.

Christians should not be intimidated by dogmatic naturalism. We do not need to invent a new interpretation of Genesis every time some geologist or astronomer declares that the universe must be older than he previously thought. Nor should we imagine that legitimate science poses any threat to the truth of Scripture. Above all, we must not seek ways to circumvent the clear meaning of God's Word, compromise our trust in the Creator, or continually yield ground to every new theory of falsely-so-called science. That is precisely what Paul was warning Timothy about.

[Smell the coffee] Sadly, it seems evolutionary thinking and qualms about the Genesis account of creation have reached epidemic levels among professing Christians in recent decades. Too many Christian leaders, evangelical schools, and Bible commentators have been willing to set aside the biblical account of a relatively young earth in order to accommodate the ever-changing estimates of naturalistic geologists and astronomers. They have thrown away sound hermeneutical principles—at least in the early chapters of Genesis—to accommodate the latest theories of evolution.

When I encounter people who think evolutionary doctrine trumps the biblical account of creation, I like to ask them where their belief in the Bible kicks in. Is it in chapter 3, where the fall of Adam and original sin are accounted for? In chapters 4-5, where early human history is chronicled? In chapters 6-8, with the record of the flood? In chapter 11, with the Tower of Babel? Because if you bring naturalism and its presuppositions to the early chapters of Genesis, it is just a short step to denying all the miracles of Scripture—including the resurrection of Christ. If we want to make science the test of biblical truth rather than vice versa, why would it not make just as much sense to question the biblical record of the resurrection as it does to reject the Genesis account? But "if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! . . . If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable" (1 Corinthians 15:17-19).

John MacArthur's signature

1: Alexander Ross, an early seventeenth-century Scottish writer and intellectual, harshly criticized Sir Thomas Browne for questioning the dogma of spontaneous generation. Under the heading "Mice and other vermin bred of putrefaction, even in mens bodies," he wrote: "He doubts whether mice can be procreated of putrefaction. So he may doubt whether in cheese and timber worms are generated; Or if Betels and wasps in cowes dung; Or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shel-fish, snails, eeles, and such like, be procreated of putrefied matter, which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it is by the formative power disposed. To question this, is to question Reason, Sense, and Experience: If he doubts of this, let him go to Egypt, and there he will finde the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of [the Nile]." Arcana Microcosmi, (London: Newcomb, 1652), book 2, chapter 10, 156.

2. The Battle for the Beginning, Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2001, p. 11.

3. The Battle for the Beginning, p. 12.
Labels: evolution, John MacArthur, merciless beatings
3 comments
Posted by Phil Johnson on Wednesday, June 23, 2010

BTW, does anyone have links to any good videos of evolution vs. creation debates on Youtube? Thanks.

[Dalton]

...are you at all aware of the views of creationism on this board? No, this won't get a sticky. In fact, you just dumped a bucket of chum into shark-infested waters.

[Morilore]

For purposes of convenience I think it would be easier if we posted particularly interesting creationist articles in one thread and perhaps the mods could sticky this. This article is entitled "Humanistic Religion and the Origin of Life" by Rev. John F. MacArthur a clergyman in many areas who I deeply respect. Some of the arguments are theological and thus probably of no interest to most members here (though it may be to religious members) but he presents some scientific equivocating bullshit arguments too. http://teampyro.blogspot.com/

I could go through this point-by-point, but 1) who cares and 2) Mike Wong's creationism site (along with approximately eleventy billion other websites and every biology textbook written in the last century) has done all the hard, pointless work already.

So I'll just ask; what, if anything, do you, General Mung Beans, find convincing or thought-provoking about this clergyman's arguments?

[Invictus ChiKen]

Might wanna see about moving this to the Christian subform OP

[Serafina]

Since this shark has to sharpen her teeth for an eventual debate and is debating some trekkies on evolutionary biology already, i'll rip this apart.
Yummy!

[Coming to Grips with Genesis] Over the course of human history, all kinds of speculative ideas have been falsely labeled "science" and mistakenly accepted as true and reliable knowledge by otherwise brilliant people. The now-discredited dogmas of older scientific theories are numerous—and in some cases laughable. They include alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold); phrenology (the Victorian belief that the shape of one's skull reflects character traits and mental capacity); astrology (the pagan belief that human destiny is determined by the motions of celestial bodies); and abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances). All those false beliefs were deemed credible as "science" by the leading minds of their times.

(emphasis added)
None of those were science - modern science had not yet been developed. Hence, his tangent is at best useless and at worst a strawman.
However, i suspect it is the latter, given that he includes abiogenesis - while early ideas of the origin of live (such as spontaneous generation and heterogenesis) have been disproved, those were again not founded on science.
He tries to claim that abiogenesis has been disproved, but since abiogenesis is a topic of inquiry and research, it can not be disproved.

Consider just one of those—abiogenesis. Popularly known as "spontaneous generation," this idea has long been, and continues to be, one of the archetypal expressions of "science falsely so called." It is also one of the most persistent of all demonstrably pseudoscientific fictions. The notion that aphids arise naturally from dew on plant leaves, mold is generated automatically by aging bread, and maggots are spontaneously begotten by rotting meat was more or less deemed self-evident by most of humanity's brightest intellects from the time of Aristotle until 1861, when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.

Here, he continues the previous tangent.
Again, the idea of spontaneous generation was not developed by scientists and disproved by them. Furthermore, Abiogenesis (where does life come from) has now vastly improved theories, which have not been disproved.

It is one of the great ironies of scientific history that the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published exactly two years before Pasteur's famous experiments proved that life cannot arise spontaneously from non-living matter. The publication of Darwin's book marked the apotheosis of evolutionary theory, and it was rooted in the basic presupposition that under the right circumstances, life can spring on its own from non-living matter.

In other words, two years before abiogenesis was scientifically debunked, it was in effect canonized as the central dogma of modern secular belief about the origins of life. The discovery that fleas don't magically form out of decomposing dander on the backs of dirty dogs did not dissuade most in the scientific world from embracing the theory that all life in the universe arose by itself out of nothing. The belief that life spontaneously came from non-life remains to this day the great unexplained (albeit easily disprovable) assumption underlying the dogma of evolution.

The irony of that is utterly lost on many in the scientific community today, where evolution has become an article of faith—unshakable faith, it turns out.

He makes the classic creationist mistake and assumes that Evolution explains the origin of life. It doesn't. Life could have come by any means - including magical creation - evolution just explains the diversity of life and how it arose from a smaller number of species.

He, again, claims that abiogenesis was "debunked". This is, again, not true and a blatant lie.

He also fails to understand that, if Evolution would require an explanation for the origin of life and Pasteur's experiments had indeed proven that life did not arise by natural means (which they did not), then that would have been a serious blunder, most likely destroying the young theory of Charles Darwin.
He essentially tries to imply that Evolution was already dogma, even tough it was not yet fully accepted by the scientific community, and no possible conspiracy could yet have developed (not that it ever did).

Evolutionists have conveniently "solved" the problem of abiogenesis by repeatedly moving their estimates of the earth's age backward toward infinity. Given enough time, it seems, anything is possible. Trying desperately to keep the biblical concept of eternity at bay, evolutionists have thus devised an alternative kind of infinitude. Every time a challenge to current evolutionary theory arises, geologists and astronomers dutifully tack billions and billions of eons onto their theories about the earth's age, adding however many ancient epochs are deemed necessary for some new impossibility to be explained.

While the age of the earth has indeed been increased, it was already estimated to be several hundred million years old before Darwin wrote his theory.
Furthermore, biologist (who actually study evolution) had nothing to do with the now higher age of the earth - indeed, new discoveries such as radioactive decay did that, along with astronomic discoveries.

In the introduction to my 2001 book, The Battle for the Beginning, I suggested naturalism had become the dominant religion of contemporary secular society. "Religion is exactly the right word to describe naturalism," I wrote. "The entire philosophy is built on a faith-based premise. Its basic presupposition—a rejection of everything supernatural—requires a giant leap of faith. And nearly all its supporting theories must be taken by faith as well."2

Given that the supernatural is never observed, science must exclude it for the same reason as all other fairytales.
If something supernatural would interact with the world, we could and would measure it's effects - however, so far nothing has been found that can not be explained and predicted perfectly by purely natural means.
His claim of bias is false, and a blatant lie.

[Which came first? Scripture tells us.] Here, then, is a classic example of what I was talking about: the typical evolutionist's starting point is this notion that life arose spontaneously from inanimate matter sometime in eternity past. That requires not merely the willful suspension of what we know for certain about the origins of life and the impossibility of abiogenesis—but also enough deliberate gullibility to believe that moving-target estimates of the earth's antiquity can sufficiently answer all the problems and contradictions sheer naturalism poses.

Ah, repeating lies seems to be fun to him, especially if he can use them to build strawmen.

Indeed, the typical evolutionary biologist doesn't concern himself with the origin of life at all, given that he studies evolution and not abiogenesis.
As i explained previously, abiogenesis is not disproved, and todays models do not require spontaneous generation.
Rather, already existing organic molecules (these arise due to simple chemistry) combine into simple self-replicating bubbles of fatty acids. These can "ingest" single strand of aminoacids, which can help them with growth and replication.'
These are not yet living organism, and they work by simple chemical laws: That which has the greater chemical attraction absorbs the most resources, growing larger and replicating more successful.
It's the combination of fatty acids and aminoacids that will eventually lead to true life: Given sufficient temperature (which is present at volcanic regions on the seafloor), single strands of aminoacids can combine into longer strands.
They do not yet code for any information, but several different combinations have different properties:
Some use more common aminoacids, some replicate easier, some are more resilient.
The bubble of fatty acids continues to take on more single-strand aminoacids, which can be used to replicate the multi-strand aminoacids (which are too big to leave the membrane).
Eventually, the amino-acids start to perform the function of enzymes (like modern RNA), which allow yet further growth and more complext transport vessels by incorporating other chemicals (i.e. incorporating several chemicals to harden the surface).

We can observe all these processes today. We see that organic molecules form due to basic chemistry. We see that fatty acids form bubbles. We see that aminoacids can enter, combine and replicate. And we see that they can act as enzymes.

That's a short, incomplete overview about abiogenesis.

Meanwhile, in the popular media, evolutionary doctrine and ever-expanding notions of prehistory are being promoted with all the pious zeal of the latest religious sect. Watch the Internet forums, programs on the Discovery Channel, interviews and articles published in the mass media, school textbooks, and books aimed at lay readers—and what you will usually see is raw assertions, demagoguery, intimidation, and ridicule (especially when the subjects of biblical theism and the Genesis account of creation are raised).

He provides no evidence for this, or why this should be wrong.

In the end, it boils down to evidence: Abiogenesis and evolution have lot's of it, while Creationism relies on nitpicking them.

But question the dogma that all life evolved from a single spontaneously-generated cell, point out that the universe is full of evidence for intelligent design, or demand the kind of proof for evolutionary origins that would ordinarily pass scientific muster, and the ardent evolutionist will simply dismiss you as a heretic or a bigot of the worst stripe. What they are tacitly acknowledging is that as far as they are concerned, evolution is a doctrine that must be received with implicit faith, not something that can be scientifically demonstrated. After all, the claims of true science can always be investigated, observed, reproduced, tested, and proved in the laboratory. So to insist that evolution and so-called "deep time" doctrines must be accepted without question is really just a tacit admission that these are not scientific ideas at all.

Evolution has a wealth of evidence, which he arguably could not even begin to tackle if he tried. It explains why species have the features they have, why they share them with some others and not with all others, why they are dispersed over the planet like they are, the fossil record, how bacteria and other organisms adapt to their enviorments and much more.
Creationism relies on the argument that "things look designed", by claiming that everything that is complex must be designed. This is failure of basic logic and not backed up by any evidence.

Consider these quotations from typical evolutionist writers:

* No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century. (Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., Boston: Sinauer Associates, 1986, p. 15)
* It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory. . . . All present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts. (R. C. Lewontin, "Evolution/creation debate: A time for truth," Bioscience (1981), 31:559)
* Here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design. . . . One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity's sake, let's stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact. (Richard Dawkins, "The Illusion of Design," Natural History (November 2005), 53)


But as those statements themselves show, evolution is a dogma, not a demonstrable "fact." I stand by the position I took in The Battle for the Beginning: "Belief in evolutionary theory is a matter of sheer faith. [It is] as much a religion as any theistic world-view."3

Yes, no one would bother to label a paper "new evidence for evolution" - just like no one would label a paper "new evidence for gravity".
Just like all scientist agree on gravity, all scientists agree on evolution.

I'll go even further: science cannot speak with any authority about when the universe began, how it came into being, or how life originated on earth. Science by definition deals with what can be observed, tested, measured, and investigated by empirical means. Scientific data by definition are facts that can be demonstrated by controlled, repeatable experiments that always yield consistent results. The beginning of the universe by its very nature falls outside the realm of scientific investigation.

To state the case plainly: there is no scientific way to explain creation. No one but God actually observed creation. It did not happen by any uniform, predictable, observable, repeatable, fixed, or natural laws. It was not a natural event or a series of natural events. The initial creation of matter was an instantaneous, monumental, inexplicable miracle—the exact opposite of a "natural" phenomenon. And the formation of the universe was a brief series of supernatural events that simply cannot be studied or explained by science. There are no natural processes involved in creation; the act of creation cannot be repeated; it cannot be tested; and therefore naturalistic theories purporting to explain the origin and age of the universe are unverifiable.

Ah, the good old "no one was there" argument.
It fails simply because that is NOT the definition of science - and because evolution has laboratory evidence.
Furthermore, fossils are obviously observed, as is the earth, universe etc.

Think of it like a crime scene (say, a murder). You were not there, but you can still draw conclusions from what you observe. Some will fit better with the evidence, some not so good. Eventually, it is possible to get a good explanation.
Unlike a murder scene however, we have vastly more evidence to draw our picture with - it is way more accurate.

In other words, creation is a theological issue, not a scientific one. Scripture is our only credible source of information about creation, because God Himself was the only eyewitness to the event. We can either believe what He says or reject it. But no Christian should ever imagine that what we believe about the origin of the universe is merely a secondary, nonessential, or incidental matter. It is, after all, the very starting point of God's self-revelation.

By his logic, it should be a contest of religions, since all of them have a creation story.
We should therefore examine which creation story fit's the available evidence best.
It will NOT be the bible, since it involves flat-out impossible, contradicted and even self-contradictionary things - such as the two different accounts for creation, which are not compatible.

In fact, in its profound brevity, Genesis 1:1 is a very simple, clear, and unequivocal account of how the universe, the earth, and everything on the earth came to be: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That is not an ambiguous statement. Until Darwinian evolution undertook a campaign to co-opt the story of creation and bring it into the realm of naturalistic "science"—and especially before modernist skepticism began to seep into the church—no one who claimed to be a Christian was the least bit confused by the Genesis account.

And what about the second creation account? Which one should we believe?

Christians should not be intimidated by dogmatic naturalism. We do not need to invent a new interpretation of Genesis every time some geologist or astronomer declares that the universe must be older than he previously thought. Nor should we imagine that legitimate science poses any threat to the truth of Scripture. Above all, we must not seek ways to circumvent the clear meaning of God's Word, compromise our trust in the Creator, or continually yield ground to every new theory of falsely-so-called science. That is precisely what Paul was warning Timothy about.

Indeed, all you need to do is accept Genesis as an allegoric, non-literal account. No further changes are necessary.

[Smell the coffee] Sadly, it seems evolutionary thinking and qualms about the Genesis account of creation have reached epidemic levels among professing Christians in recent decades. Too many Christian leaders, evangelical schools, and Bible commentators have been willing to set aside the biblical account of a relatively young earth in order to accommodate the ever-changing estimates of naturalistic geologists and astronomers. They have thrown away sound hermeneutical principles—at least in the early chapters of Genesis—to accommodate the latest theories of evolution.

Actually, most non-reborn christian scholars agree that Genesis is not literal solely on it's literary style and history. It was clearly not written to be taken literary, unlike later books in the Old Testament.

When I encounter people who think evolutionary doctrine trumps the biblical account of creation, I like to ask them where their belief in the Bible kicks in. Is it in chapter 3, where the fall of Adam and original sin are accounted for? In chapters 4-5, where early human history is chronicled? In chapters 6-8, with the record of the flood? In chapter 11, with the Tower of Babel? Because if you bring naturalism and its presuppositions to the early chapters of Genesis, it is just a short step to denying all the miracles of Scripture—including the resurrection of Christ. If we want to make science the test of biblical truth rather than vice versa, why would it not make just as much sense to question the biblical record of the resurrection as it does to reject the Genesis account? But "if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! . . . If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable" (1 Corinthians 15:17-19).

Why does your believe-system hinge on the literal interpretation of the bible?
Most religions in the world do not think that their holy books are literal. Indeed, a literal reading takes away most of the meaning and belittles the text itself.


All in all, this is hardly special. It's your standard attack on empiricism and naturalism, coupled with appeals to the bible.
Even the rare claim that abiogenesis is disproved due to spontaneous generation is not new, merely rare due to it's stupidity.
That's why we do not need an archive - debunk a couple of creationists, and you have debunked them all due to them using the same arguments over and over again, for more than 150 years now.

[Samuel]

I'll give this a shot.

alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold);

It is possible to transform one element into another. I don't believe gold is on the list, but fission and fusion do take one kind of element and turn it into another. It just isn't possible using chemical means, which alchemists attempted.

abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances)

That is spontaneous generation. Abiogenesis is the belief that life can be created from non-living substances under the right conditions.

None of those were science - modern science had not yet been developed.

The victorian idea did occur after the development of modern science. However it was eventually rejected by scientists on the grounds that it didn't qualify as a science,

when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.

No, his experiments showed that bacteria do not form from non-living matter (although there were the annoying abberations caused by bacteria that can survive boiling water). To prove abiogenesis false would be to prove a negative, which is impossible.

and it was rooted in the basic presupposition that under the right circumstances, life can spring on its own from non-living matter.

False. Designed lifeforms can evolve just like everything else (which is why many experiments are done with bacteria that cannot live outside the petri dish).

Every time a challenge to current evolutionary theory arises, geologists and astronomers dutifully tack billions and billions of eons onto their theories about the earth's age, adding however many ancient epochs are deemed necessary for some new impossibility to be explained.

http://es.ucsc.edu/~rcoe/eart206/Patter ... Acta56.pdf

The age of 4.54 billion years for the Earth was estimated in 1956.

After all, the claims of true science can always be investigated, observed, reproduced, tested, and proved in the laboratory. So to insist that evolution and so-called "deep time" doctrines must be accepted without question is really just a tacit admission that these are not scientific ideas at all.

Actually we can show you evidence for evolution. You take a vial full of bacteria (that have a common ancestor) and their food, pour them onto seperate petri dishes in equal amounts and then apply antibiotics. Each petri dish will have a different number of surviving colonies because the mutation that protects against the antibiotic is random.

Deep time is a bit harder to show due to the reliance of radiometric dating. Which isn't as accessable and requires alot of foundational work first (figuring out the rate of decay, origional proportions, etc).

The beginning of the universe by its very nature falls outside the realm of scientific investigation.

Unless we can replicate the conditions of extreme heat and pressure. You know, with particle colliders.

It did not happen by any uniform, predictable, observable, repeatable, fixed, or natural laws. It was not a natural event or a series of natural events. The initial creation of matter was an instantaneous, monumental, inexplicable miracle—the exact opposite of a "natural" phenomenon.

That sounds like quantum flux... which happens all the time. You know, the fact that particles wink in and out of existance in a vaccum to explain why the casmir effect exists.

[LadyTevar]

Might wanna see about moving this to the Christian subform OP

I think not. The Knights Astrum Clades are not blind Fundies nor YEC.
Besides, sending to a private member-only forum would mean not as many people able to rip it apart.

[General Mung Beans]

For purposes of convenience I think it would be easier if we posted particularly interesting creationist articles in one thread and perhaps the mods could sticky this. This article is entitled "Humanistic Religion and the Origin of Life" by Rev. John F. MacArthur a clergyman in many areas who I deeply respect. Some of the arguments are theological and thus probably of no interest to most members here (though it may be to religious members) but he presents some scientific equivocating bullshit arguments too. http://teampyro.blogspot.com/

I could go through this point-by-point, but 1) who cares and 2) Mike Wong's creationism site (along with approximately eleventy billion other websites and every biology textbook written in the last century) has done all the hard, pointless work already.

So I'll just ask; what, if anything, do you, General Mung Beans, find convincing or thought-provoking about this clergyman's arguments?

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

[General Mung Beans]

Since this shark has to sharpen her teeth for an eventual debate and is debating some trekkies on evolutionary biology already, i'll rip this apart.
Yummy!

I thought the Trekkies only had trouble on not accepting physics-while there are some Trekkie creationists don't most of them still accept evolution?

[Ilya Muromets]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

Oh, come on. Dude, seriously?

"Why would the Koran be inaccurate if Allah inspired it?"

"Why would the Pope's decrees be inaccurate if he's the Vicar of Christ and, thus, God inspired it?"

"Why would the Four Noble Truths be inaccurate if Gautama Buddha wrote it after attaining Nirvana?"

"Why would the Vedas be inaccurate if they are apaurusheyatva (they just are, they weren't authored by humans or the divine)?

"Why would the Book of the SubGenius be inaccurate if Slack inspired it?"

And so on. Seriously. You have no factual basis to claim that god is ultimate, unassailable truth other than your own belief. Which means jack fucking shit since you can't prove it any more than other people who claim that what ever religion they believe is ultimate, unassailable truth. If you even think about getting involved in a truly scientific debate, then we need OBJECTIVE data. I don't care about your beliefs, if there's no objective proof backing it up then you have no business talking science.

[Channel72]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit

This argument has no merit, because it's obvious that God didn't inspire the creation account, for two important reasons.

1) The ~6,000 year old cosmos described in Genesis is contradicted by the findings of modern astrophysics and geology. Additionally, the manner in which life appeared on Earth, as described in Genesis, is contradicted by modern biology. So the creation account is simply wrong, at least if taken literally, and therefore unlikely to have been inspired by an actual Creator God.

2) Far from being inspired by God, the account in Genesis is merely a monotheistic variation of earlier, Babylonian creation myths. Specifically, the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, incorporates many elements found in Genesis, such as the initial watery void (the Deep), as well as the division of the firmament between the "waters above" and the "waters below". The primary difference is that the Enuma Elish is a polytheistic myth where many gods play an active role in the creation, whereas the Hebrew version found in the Old Testament is a monotheistic myth, which incorporates only a single God. Regardless, there's no reason to believe either of them are anything more than mythology.

[General Mung Beans]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

Oh, come on. Dude, seriously?

"Why would the Koran be inaccurate if Allah inspired it?"

"Why would the Pope's decrees be inaccurate if he's the Vicar of Christ and, thus, God inspired it?"

"Why would the Four Noble Truths be inaccurate if Gautama Buddha wrote it after attaining Nirvana?"

"Why would the Vedas be inaccurate if they are apaurusheyatva (they just are, they weren't authored by humans or the divine)?

"Why would the Book of the SubGenius be inaccurate if Slack inspired it?"

And so on. Seriously. You have no factual basis to claim that god is ultimate, unassailable truth other than your own belief. Which means jack fucking shit since you can't prove it any more than other people who claim that what ever religion they believe is ultimate, unassailable truth. If you even think about getting involved in a truly scientific debate, then we need OBJECTIVE data. I don't care about your beliefs, if there's no objective proof backing it up then you have no business talking science.

I know-this is a question for theologians and other religious believers to ponder and pore over.

[LadyTevar]

I know-this is a question for theologians and other religious believers to ponder and pore over.

No, its for everyone to discuss, not just for those in ivory towers. If you restrict it to 'just' theologians, you retreat to the days when the Priest told you what the Bible said you should believe. You have a Brain, a God-given Brain, so Use It.

After all, even Jesus spoke out against the Priests and Scribes telling people how to worship...

[Morilore]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

Everyone's covered the "God inspired" part, so I'll try a different angle: why would a God inspire a scientifically-accurate creation story? What would the point be? For most of the Bible's history, no one had the scientific background to understand the scientific understanding of our universe's history - people thought the sun went around the Earth and the stars were pinpricks in a giant blanket. Furthermore, for most of the world's history, no one had the requisite mindset to appreciate the value of knowing, for instance, that we can calculate the age of the universe by measuring the speed and acceleration at which all galaxies are receding from us, and we can measure that by how blue they are. It's just totally meaningless, useless information to a medieval sheep-herder or etc.

[mr friendly guy]

I'll give this a shot.

alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold);

It is possible to transform one element into another. I don't believe gold is on the list, but fission and fusion do take one kind of element and turn it into another. It just isn't possible using chemical means, which alchemists attempted.

I remember in high school physics one of the nuclear reaction questions we had involved turning lead into gold. This article mentions some examples (unfortunately they don't go into the equations). From what I understand its not worth the effort energy wise to change lead into gold. And even if you liked the gold it will be radioactive anyway and transmute to some other substance.

[Samuel]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

Everyone's covered the "God inspired" part, so I'll try a different angle: why would a God inspire a scientifically-accurate creation story? What would the point be? For most of the Bible's history, no one had the scientific background to understand the scientific understanding of our universe's history - people thought the sun went around the Earth and the stars were pinpricks in a giant blanket. Furthermore, for most of the world's history, no one had the requisite mindset to appreciate the value of knowing, for instance, that we can calculate the age of the universe by measuring the speed and acceleration at which all galaxies are receding from us, and we can measure that by how blue they are. It's just totally meaningless, useless information to a medieval sheep-herder or etc.

Because the truth is more valuable than falseholds. And just because they don't understand it now doesn't mean it won't help- it clues them into how the universe works.

[Simon_Jester]

I find the argument "Why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it?" to have merit-far more so than the scientific arguments actually on theological grounds as a Christian.

Oh, come on. Dude, seriously?...

And so on. Seriously. You have no factual basis to claim that god is ultimate, unassailable truth other than your own belief. Which means jack fucking shit since you can't prove it any more than other people who claim that what ever religion they believe is ultimate, unassailable truth. If you even think about getting involved in a truly scientific debate, then we need OBJECTIVE data. I don't care about your beliefs, if there's no objective proof backing it up then you have no business talking science.

I know-this is a question for theologians and other religious believers to ponder and pore over.

WARNING: Philosophical Pomposity Follows:

Nonsense! There is no need to ponder or pore over this question! The answer is perfectly obvious to any competent mind that gives the matter a moment's thought.

Claims of divine origin for a work, individual, concept, story, or other thing carry no weight in rational argument, unless they can be supported by things that do carry such weight. The claims of divine origin may be true or false, but no reasonable person should expect them to convince anyone. Nor should they be permitted in debate as if they were valid counters to scientific facts, even among believers; if your religious beliefs directly contradict a scientific fact, then you should revise your beliefs to until they no longer contradict the science, not the other way around.

Thus, I do not allow the fact that the Biblical value of pi is three to convince me that pi is not 3.141592... I do not even consider the possibility. If anyone seriously proposed that this was true, I would laugh in their face and ignore their suggestion. If they claimed that "π=3" must be true because it is a divinely inspired claim, I would continue to laugh, and denounce them for having accepted an absurd lie as divine truth.

I mean really. If the Bible said that the sky you now see is green, would you take that as evidence that the sky is in fact green, as opposed to more normal colors such as blue, gray, or black? Surely you would not. No such absurd lie could possibly be a divinely inspired truth, because it fails the basic condition of being true. Therefore it deserves no respect as a religious belief, and should be laughed out of the court of opinion.

Thus, the question "why would the creation account be inaccurate if God inspired it" is silly: Clearly, if the creation account is inaccurate, God did not inspire it as an accurate statement. There are many explanations for this. Perhaps God inspired it for some other reason, and did not expect you to take it as literal truth. Perhaps God did not inspire it at all, and it was slipped into the text by some random fool. Perhaps God is lying. Perhaps God does not exist. Pick your own explanation.

But in any case, if the creation account is untrue, then God did not inspire it as a divine truth, on account of it not being true.

And I repeat, this should be obvious to any competent mind, and should not require poring and pondering by theologians unless those theologians are incompetent.

[Kristoff]

BTW, does anyone have links to any good videos of evolution vs. creation debates on Youtube? Thanks.

Check out users: AronRa, Thunderf00t, C0nc0rdance, cdk007, DonExodus2, potholer54.

[Serafina]

C0nco0rdance: Good information about science in general, [urlhttp://www.youtube.com/user/C0nc0rdance#p/c/6468ADC338D57BA8]critical thinking[/url] and the so-called "Intelligent Design Study Institute Discovery Institute (who don't actually do any studies or research).

AronRa is most notable for his series on the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, which is excellent. He also has other very interesting videos, most notably a brilliant rebuttal concerning YEC based on archeology.

cdk007 offers information about the Origin of Life, what science Creationists must deny and general Evidence for Evolution.

Don Exodus offers good information about how evolution works.

ExtantDodo offers a very critical rebuttal of the famous creationist Kent Hovind. Warning: These videos are very long, but worth watching.

Potholer54 offers a good series that explains the origin of the universe and life and evolution in simple terms. He also has the Potholer54debunks channel, which, well, debunks creationist claims quite understandably and successfully.

Tunderf00t is perhaps the most famous champion of Evolution and Science on Youtube. He offers the excellent series Why do people laugh at Creationists - both informative and funny.
He also engaged Ray Comfort in Debate.
Furthermore, he has a lot of other excellent videos about a wide range of topics.


All these are not really debates - you will rarely find qualified debates, mostly because there are no qualified creationists.
However, you could try to watch the Rational Response Squad vs Ray Comfort & Kirk Cameron (the latter being creationists), where they try to prove the existence of god without the bible or faith - i.e. with science. The first part is here
You can also watch this documentary about the Dover Trial where it was shown that Intelligent Design is no different from Creationism, and that both have absolutely no scientific evidence.

Enjoy!


Edit: Oh, and quite a number of the above (AronRa, C0nc0rdance, Thunder00t) are actual scientists, and others might be too IIRC.

[General Mung Beans]

I know-this is a question for theologians and other religious believers to ponder and pore over.

No, its for everyone to discuss, not just for those in ivory towers. If you restrict it to 'just' theologians, you retreat to the days when the Priest told you what the Bible said you should believe. You have a Brain, a God-given Brain, so Use It.

After all, even Jesus spoke out against the Priests and Scribes telling people how to worship...

I agree which is why I said "other religious believers".

[Ilya Muromets]

I know-this is a question for theologians and other religious believers to ponder and pore over.

No, its for everyone to discuss, not just for those in ivory towers. If you restrict it to 'just' theologians, you retreat to the days when the Priest told you what the Bible said you should believe. You have a Brain, a God-given Brain, so Use It.

After all, even Jesus spoke out against the Priests and Scribes telling people how to worship...

I agree which is why I said "other religious believers".

Wow. You just missed the point so much you went into orbit.

It's not just for theologians or other religious believers. It's for everybody, religious or otherwise, to THINK about. You or any other religious person makes a statement on something, especially on on scientific subjects and/or rational discourse, then the burden of proof is upon you to find objective data or properly-constructed theoretical models based on objective data to back said statement up. People should think about any such statements, and question their veracity. Subjectively saying you think it's worth more because of your belief doesn't mean a damn thing if you can't back it up.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I remember in high school physics one of the nuclear reaction questions we had involved turning lead into gold. This article mentions some examples (unfortunately they don't go into the equations). From what I understand its not worth the effort energy wise to change lead into gold. And even if you liked the gold it will be radioactive anyway and transmute to some other substance.

We'd sooner filter sea water for gold before we started turning lead into the stuff. On a related point, the use of VULCAN laser technology to transmute high grade nuclear waste to lower grade stuff for disposal and storage is a more beneficial use of this capability.

To be honest, I stopped reading this article when I skimmed and found the use of "evolutionist" and "dogma". The only dogma in my classes was the central one in molecular cell biology. There is NO faith in evolution, my friend of the cloth.

[dworkin]

No understanding of what science is. Check.
No real understanding of On the Origin of the Species. Check.
Accusations of science being a religion. Check.
Outright lies. Check.
Blatent lies. Check.
Barefaced lies. Check.

Move along, nothing to see here.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I just have to be doing actual work and did not hit this sooner...

[Coming to Grips with Genesis] Over the course of human history, all kinds of speculative ideas have been falsely labeled "science" and mistakenly accepted as true and reliable knowledge by otherwise brilliant people.

Yes. Like the Homunculus. You know, the debate between ovists and spermists was primarily a religious one...

The now-discredited dogmas of older scientific theories are numerous—and in some cases laughable. They include alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold)

Not science at all.

; phrenology (the Victorian belief that the shape of one's skull reflects character traits and mental capacity);

True

astrology (the pagan belief that human destiny is determined by the motions of celestial bodies);

Religious, not science.

and abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances).

I love this. Abiogenesis is not what is being referred to here. Rather, Spontaneous Generation is.

All those false beliefs were deemed credible as "science" by the leading minds of their times.

No, they were not.

Consider just one of those—abiogenesis. Popularly known as "spontaneous generation," this idea has long been, and continues to be, one of the archetypal expressions of "science falsely so called." It is also one of the most persistent of all demonstrably pseudoscientific fictions. The notion that aphids arise naturally from dew on plant leaves, mold is generated automatically by aging bread, and maggots are spontaneously begotten by rotting meat was more or less deemed self-evident by most of humanity's brightest intellects1 from the time of Aristotle until 1861, when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.

Yes. Science can be wrong. We do not make claims regarding infallibility. Science is a process, not a collection of facts.

Also, specifically Pasteur proved that complex life forms like bacteria or flies cannot do so. A very very very simple celled organism can under certain conditions. Those conditions however are just not present on the earth at this time.

It is one of the great ironies of scientific history that the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published exactly two years before Pasteur's famous experiments proved that life cannot arise spontaneously from non-living matter.
The publication of Darwin's book marked the apotheosis of evolutionary theory, and it was rooted in the basic presupposition that under the right circumstances, life can spring on its own from non-living matter.

Except that Darwin was not talking about flies. He was referring to something far more primitive. This stawman argument is hilarious.

In other words, two years before abiogenesis was scientifically debunked, it was in effect canonized as the central dogma of modern secular belief about the origins of life. The discovery that fleas don't magically form out of decomposing dander on the backs of dirty dogs did not dissuade most in the scientific world from embracing the theory that all life in the universe arose by itself out of nothing. The belief that life spontaneously came from non-life remains to this day the great unexplained (albeit easily disprovable) assumption underlying the dogma of evolution.

A lot has happened since 1861. We do for example know that conditions on earth were far different 3 billion years ago, and that phospholipid vesicles filled with nucleotides meat the criteria for being a VERY simple living organism and can form spontaneously under conditions present in the early earth.

Evolutionists have conveniently "solved" the problem of abiogenesis by repeatedly moving their estimates of the earth's age backward toward infinity.

No. Advances in technology and our own knowledge have done that. Is this person seriously putting forth the Great Conspiracy idea? Either way our estimates have been in the low billions for some time now.

Given enough time, it seems, anything is possible. Trying desperately to keep the biblical concept of eternity at bay, evolutionists have thus devised an alternative kind of infinitude. Every time a challenge to current evolutionary theory arises, geologists and astronomers dutifully tack billions and billions of eons onto their theories about the earth's age, adding however many ancient epochs are deemed necessary for some new impossibility to be explained.

Um... No. When challenged we tend to point out how you are either ignorant of or misrepresenting reality. Sort of like you are doing right now.

In the introduction to my 2001 book, The Battle for the Beginning, I suggested naturalism had become the dominant religion of contemporary secular society.

Do you even know what Naturalism is?

"Religion is exactly the right word to describe naturalism," I wrote. "The entire philosophy is built on a faith-based premise. Its basic presupposition—a rejection of everything supernatural—requires a giant leap of faith. And nearly all its supporting theories must be taken by faith as well."2

You mean that it is an article of faith to say that something cannot be both extant and not extant at the same time? At least with QM those things are expressed in probabilistic terms. If something exists, we can measure it, see it, or otherwise detect it through some method. We can test for it. If it does not meat these criteria, it does not exist or might as well not. How exactly does that take some sort of faith to hold true?

[Which came first? Scripture tells us.] Here, then, is a classic example of what I was talking about: the typical evolutionist's starting point is this notion that life arose spontaneously from inanimate matter sometime in eternity past.

Fossils constrain that. We know how old the earliest life forms were that we can detect.

That requires not merely the willful suspension of what we know for certain about the origins of life and the impossibility of abiogenesis—but also enough deliberate gullibility to believe that moving-target estimates of the earth's antiquity can sufficiently answer all the problems and contradictions sheer naturalism poses.

What? So moving an estimate of something when you prove to be wrong is bad? Those are moving targets? So tell me, is the entire field of mechanical engineering suspect because engineers find ways of doing things that work better that give better results and allow cars to move faster, more safely and with higher fuel efficiency? Are the laws of motion suspect because it took full application of Calculus to solve multi-body problems and these applications did not exist LaPlace used them?

Gathering new information, admitting you are wrong, and then advancing knowledge and revising your estimates is something adults do. Something a mental child does is stick to their guns for a thousand years about the age of the earth, despite written history being found that is older than your estimates.

Meanwhile, in the popular media, evolutionary doctrine and ever-expanding notions of prehistory are being promoted with all the pious zeal of the latest religious sect. Watch the Internet forums, programs on the Discovery Channel, interviews and articles published in the mass media, school textbooks, and books aimed at lay readers—and what you will usually see is raw assertions, demagoguery, intimidation, and ridicule (especially when the subjects of biblical theism and the Genesis account of creation are raised).

Because that is all that those ideas merit.

But question the dogma that all life evolved from a single spontaneously-generated cell, point out that the universe is full of evidence for intelligent design, or demand the kind of proof for evolutionary origins that would ordinarily pass scientific muster, and the ardent evolutionist will simply dismiss you as a heretic or a bigot of the worst stripe.

Or we bombard you with evidence you dont understand. I am a scientist. When does this happen? When exactly have we done anything but provide evidence to you people? We may ridicule you simultaneously, but that is beside the point.

What they are tacitly acknowledging is that as far as they are concerned, evolution is a doctrine that must be received with implicit faith, not something that can be scientifically demonstrated.

We have demonstrated it. Over the course of the last 150 years.

After all, the claims of true science can always be investigated, observed, reproduced, tested, and proved in the laboratory.

Done. Evolution has been observed, tested, and proven beyond reasonable doubt in the lab. We cannot reproduce exact old effects because that takes time, and there is some stochasticity involved.

So to insist that evolution and so-called "deep time" doctrines must be accepted without question is really just a tacit admission that these are not scientific ideas at all.

Except that we dont do that. Have you ever talked to a scientist?

Consider these quotations from typical evolutionist writers:

* No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century. (Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., Boston: Sinauer Associates, 1986, p. 15)

That is because the question is settled, and has been settled by the accumulated weight of testing and evidence. We are arguing over minutae now.

* It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory. . . . All present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts. (R. C. Lewontin, "Evolution/creation debate: A time for truth," Bioscience (1981), 31:559)

A case in point...

* Here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design. . . . One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity's sake, let's stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact. (Richard Dawkins, "The Illusion of Design," Natural History (November 2005), 53)

And we have established the lineages of modern organisms through the weight of evidence That is fact. We know that all life is related. The Theory of Evolution is the explanation as to how and why this has occurred in the way it has.

But as those statements themselves show, evolution is a dogma, not a demonstrable "fact." I stand by the position I took in The Battle for the Beginning: "Belief in evolutionary theory is a matter of sheer faith. [It is] as much a religion as any theistic world-view."3

Sorry bitch. We have fossils and DNA...

Science by definition deals with what can be observed, tested, measured, and investigated by empirical means. Scientific data by definition are facts that can be demonstrated by controlled, repeatable experiments that always yield consistent results. The beginning of the universe by its very nature falls outside the realm of scientific investigation.

No... Are you aware that we can and have taken pictures of the beginning of the universe?

To state the case plainly: there is no scientific way to explain creation. No one but God actually observed creation. It did not happen by any uniform, predictable, observable, repeatable, fixed, or natural laws.

Well, a few miliseconds prior to where we can measure that may be true. For now. Physicists are working on it.

It was not a natural event or a series of natural events. The initial creation of matter was an instantaneous, monumental, inexplicable miracle—the exact opposite of a "natural" phenomenon.

Just because we do not know something, does not mean God Did It.

And the formation of the universe was a brief series of supernatural events that simply cannot be studied or explained by science. There are no natural processes involved in creation; the act of creation cannot be repeated; it cannot be tested; and therefore naturalistic theories purporting to explain the origin and age of the universe are unverifiable.

Repeating yourself does not make it true.

In other words, creation is a theological issue, not a scientific one. Scripture is our only credible source of information about creation, because God Himself was the only eyewitness to the event.

Who's scripture?

In fact, in its profound brevity, Genesis 1:1 is a very simple, clear, and unequivocal account of how the universe, the earth, and everything on the earth came to be: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That is not an ambiguous statement. Until Darwinian evolution undertook a campaign to co-opt the story of creation and bring it into the realm of naturalistic "science"—and especially before modernist skepticism began to seep into the church—no one who claimed to be a Christian was the least bit confused by the Genesis account.

Actually, even Aquinas said it should be taken literally...

Christians should not be intimidated by dogmatic naturalism. We do not need to invent a new interpretation of Genesis every time some geologist or astronomer declares that the universe must be older than he previously thought. Nor should we imagine that legitimate science poses any threat to the truth of Scripture. Above all, we must not seek ways to circumvent the clear meaning of God's Word, compromise our trust in the Creator, or continually yield ground to every new theory of falsely-so-called science. That is precisely what Paul was warning Timothy about.

What happens when someone points out that pi is greater than 3?

[Smell the coffee] Sadly, it seems evolutionary thinking and qualms about the Genesis account of creation have reached epidemic levels among professing Christians in recent decades. Too many Christian leaders, evangelical schools, and Bible commentators have been willing to set aside the biblical account of a relatively young earth in order to accommodate the ever-changing estimates of naturalistic geologists and astronomers. They have thrown away sound hermeneutical principles—at least in the early chapters of Genesis—to accommodate the latest theories of evolution.

Good

When I encounter people who think evolutionary doctrine trumps the biblical account of creation, I like to ask them where their belief in the Bible kicks in. Is it in chapter 3, where the fall of Adam and original sin are accounted for?

It can easily be taken as allegory for the corruption of individuals and resulting suffering. Oh, but that would require actual thought.

In chapters 4-5, where early human history is chronicled? In chapters 6-8, with the record of the flood? In chapter 11, with the Tower of Babel?

You mean that section of Genesis that has been proven wrong by everything from archeology to linguistics? That?

Because if you bring naturalism and its presuppositions to the early chapters of Genesis, it is just a short step to denying all the miracles of Scripture—including the resurrection of Christ.

So tell me, did Mary reproduce via parthenogenesis?

[Rye]

For purposes of convenience I think it would be easier if we posted particularly interesting creationist articles in one thread and perhaps the mods could sticky this. This article is entitled "Humanistic Religion and the Origin of Life" by Rev. John F. MacArthur a clergyman in many areas who I deeply respect. Some of the arguments are theological and thus probably of no interest to most members here (though it may be to religious members) but he presents some scientific arguments too. http://teampyro.blogspot.com/

That's an interesting definition of scientific argument. He either purposefully or ignorantly misrepresents all sorts of science (geology, biology, chemistry, physics, even the documented historical evolution of various ideas), likely because if he were more knowledgeable, he wouldn't be a creationist. If he is knowledgeable, he's a terrible liar, then again, he is clergy and creationist, so that's almost to be expected. I'll try and get this down to brass tacks to avoid the quote-response fugliness, excising all the more worthless biblical references that are only there to bolster the faithful with nonsense and OCD obeisance.

[Coming to Grips with Genesis] Over the course of human history, all kinds of speculative ideas have been falsely labeled "science" and mistakenly accepted as true and reliable knowledge by otherwise brilliant people. The now-discredited dogmas of older scientific theories are numerous—and in some cases laughable. They include alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold); phrenology (the Victorian belief that the shape of one's skull reflects character traits and mental capacity); astrology (the pagan belief that human destiny is determined by the motions of celestial bodies); and abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances). All those false beliefs were deemed credible as "science" by the leading minds of their times.

Consider just one of those—abiogenesis. Popularly known as "spontaneous generation," this idea has long been, and continues to be, one of the archetypal expressions of "science falsely so called." It is also one of the most persistent of all demonstrably pseudoscientific fictions. The notion that aphids arise naturally from dew on plant leaves, mold is generated automatically by aging bread, and maggots are spontaneously begotten by rotting meat was more or less deemed self-evident by most of humanity's brightest intellects1 from the time of Aristotle until 1861, when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.

It is one of the great ironies of scientific history that the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published exactly two years before Pasteur's famous experiments proved that life cannot arise spontaneously from non-living matter. The publication of Darwin's book marked the apotheosis of evolutionary theory, and it was rooted in the basic presupposition that under the right circumstances, life can spring on its own from non-living matter.

In other words, two years before abiogenesis was scientifically debunked, it was in effect canonized as the central dogma of modern secular belief about the origins of life. The discovery that fleas don't magically form out of decomposing dander on the backs of dirty dogs did not dissuade most in the scientific world from embracing the theory that all life in the universe arose by itself out of nothing. The belief that life spontaneously came from non-life remains to this day the great unexplained (albeit easily disprovable) assumption underlying the dogma of evolution.

The irony of that is utterly lost on many in the scientific community today, where evolution has become an article of faith—unshakable faith, it turns out.

This is utter nonsense, a total misrepresentation of scientific process, organic chemistry and its associated origin of life theories.

As a minor point, you can conclusively prove that abiogenesis occurred, and it's not even particularly difficult.

1) Life is organic, i.e. carbon based chemistry.
2) Carbon didn't always exist.
3) Therefore life didn't always exist, and came into existence after carbon.

There. Abiogenesis had to happen because there was a period in the universe where life could not have existed.

Spontaneous generation is a separate concept from abiogenesis. Calling abiogenesis SG is not just asinine, but extremely dishonest, a paper-thin lie that the most cursory knowledge of the subject can deal with, and it's also incredibly anachronistic, since the ideas were from different eras with different scientific knowledge available.

Similarly, Darwin's theories do not rely on any particular origin of life, so long as it happened. It details how biodiversity appears from similar original organisms. If life is the product of a time paradox and a man goes back in time, dies and the bacteria eating his body become the model for all subsequent life, evolution would still account for the variation that occurs after that. If GOD created life, even if he created all life at species levels 6000 years ago (he didn't of course, but for purpose of argument), then Darwin would still be right about biodiversity appearing naturally. Species have naturally diverged compared to where they were 6000 years ago, some more than others, but the actual process behind the abiogenesis event is not that important, superficially to evolutionary theory.

Of course, when you get down to the nitty gritty of life, the genes and the genome, the universal common ancestry of all terrestrial life is undeniable.

Evolutionists have conveniently "solved" the problem of abiogenesis by repeatedly moving their estimates of the earth's age backward toward infinity. Given enough time, it seems, anything is possible. Trying desperately to keep the biblical concept of eternity at bay, evolutionists have thus devised an alternative kind of infinitude. Every time a challenge to current evolutionary theory arises, geologists and astronomers dutifully tack billions and billions of eons onto their theories about the earth's age, adding however many ancient epochs are deemed necessary for some new impossibility to be explained.

In the introduction to my 2001 book, The Battle for the Beginning, I suggested naturalism had become the dominant religion of contemporary secular society. "Religion is exactly the right word to describe naturalism," I wrote. "The entire philosophy is built on a faith-based premise. Its basic presupposition—a rejection of everything supernatural—requires a giant leap of faith. And nearly all its supporting theories must be taken by faith as well."2

A strawman of age of the Earth theories and how they came to be. Geologists came up with Earth age long before evolution was even discovered. Darwin was discovering fossils before he went on his voyages. This maggot deserves no respect, he's an Orwellian douchebag rewriting history for his ideology.

Also, since the supernatural, in its very definition, acknowledges the natural and distinguishes itself from it as something extra, this means that accepting the natural world is not a faith position. He knows supernature is a faith-based concept, he's just trying to accuse scientists of being as irrational as religious people, but admitting his own irrationality ought to be a pyrrhic victory. It is to any rational person, but to the religious solipsist, the great moral and epistemological relativist, it is to make all views equal so their insane beliefs get some ill-gotten justification.

There's a problem with this, though, in that the supernatural is not a coherent concept. Magic and the warp from 40k are far more coherent, and these, if you accept the concepts, are known for making people go mad from contemplating them too long. This is similar to the supernatural, which is incoherent because everything that exists has a nature. Even if reality were editable in some magical fashion, it would still be natural. There'd be no "super" nature involved.

Now, as to the rejection of the miraculous and magical, that's a subtly different concept, but again, it's not based on faith. It's based on experience, pragmatism and an understanding of human psychology. There's no metaphysical truth claims going on in the naturalist's mind, just the rejection of miraculous claims and explanations because they are a) unevidenced, b) unevidenceable, c) genuinely useless, and d) absurd, with no real-world meaning attached.

The idea that actual evidence that doesn't agree with one's pre-accepted, certain truth of a religious text, or, hell, any text, ought to be discarded and ignored is stupid. It reminds me of that story where a man is up a tree, certain that God will save him and ignores the men who come by trying to save him. While I think the story has the wrong "moral" i.e. that god works through men as well as magick, essentially rendering him irrelevant if we're honest, the point probably resonates with the religious. If men figure out that, say, agrarian society is older than the Bible says the Earth is, the Bible is wrong on that fact. You can't go round saying God will save you from the facts, certain that it must be true, if anyone is to have an honest discourse with you.

Ritual dishonesty and delusion, which is what this world-denial amounts to, to be of the world and to deny it, accepting it when it serves ideological purpose makes honest discourse impossible. Like I touched on before, this is solipsism and moral/epistemological relativism, not an objective empirical appraisal of the facts.

Meanwhile, in the popular media, evolutionary doctrine and ever-expanding notions of prehistory are being promoted with all the pious zeal of the latest religious sect. Watch the Internet forums, programs on the Discovery Channel, interviews and articles published in the mass media, school textbooks, and books aimed at lay readers—and what you will usually see is raw assertions, demagoguery, intimidation, and ridicule (especially when the subjects of biblical theism and the Genesis account of creation are raised).

But question the dogma that all life evolved from a single spontaneously-generated cell, point out that the universe is full of evidence for intelligent design, or demand the kind of proof for evolutionary origins that would ordinarily pass scientific muster, and the ardent evolutionist will simply dismiss you as a heretic or a bigot of the worst stripe. What they are tacitly acknowledging is that as far as they are concerned, evolution is a doctrine that must be received with implicit faith, not something that can be scientifically demonstrated. After all, the claims of true science can always be investigated, observed, reproduced, tested, and proved in the laboratory. So to insist that evolution and so-called "deep time" doctrines must be accepted without question is really just a tacit admission that these are not scientific ideas at all.

More lies, half-truths and well poisoning from a person who profits (prophets?) from them.

Consider these quotations from typical evolutionist writers:

* No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century. (Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., Boston: Sinauer Associates, 1986, p. 15)
* It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory. . . . All present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts. (R. C. Lewontin, "Evolution/creation debate: A time for truth," Bioscience (1981), 31:559)
* Here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design. . . . One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity's sake, let's stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact. (Richard Dawkins, "The Illusion of Design," Natural History (November 2005), 53)

All of these are quite sensible statements, though they've been divorced from their original context to give different appearances. It's called quote-mining.

E.g. "There is no God" - Psalms.

The rest is just restatement (on the internet, hilariously, not over prayer) that science and religion are roughly equal when it comes to faith and practicality. What the fuck ever.