Reaction to Reaction over Creationist Museam

I normally avoid creationism vs. evolution debates but I got sucked into one on the CJ Forum. I'm very much a Faith is Faith and Science is Science and never the two shall cross kind of guy. Creationist are so unreasonable though and they always say stuff like "If you would just look at the evidence objectively...." all the while pointing fingers at the other side saying "THEY do it too". Its the whole "secular humanist fundamentalist liberal" conspiracy idea that scientist will ignore the "Truth" just because it doesn't agree with the "dogma" that is driven into them by the "ivory tower liberal elites" or if they do agree they are afraid of the repercussions for questioning "the party line".
That I find really ironic, because as a young man in a fundamentalist church, I was made to feel guilty about questioning things in the Bible, not stuff like creation or even Noah's flood, but more like why does the Bible say THIS here and THAT there. Nope, those questions come from pride or an unwillingness to accept the Holy Spirit, or even the devil himself.
I guess they were probably the source for my arguments in this debate as well.

Some Guy with the Handle of 4Him:

A crystal glass cover, springs, screws, nuts, cogs, sprockets and 100 other indiscriminate parts fall off of the table and suddenly become a man's Rolex wristwatch.

or

Several trillion molecules just happened to come together one by one by one over millions of years until they form a living breathing, thinking functional human life?

Which is more plausible? Which is more complex?

Use all the evolutionary science you want but some things are just inexplicable until you add the concept of Intelligent Design. Specifically, a Creator. God Almighty.


"Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom." Isaiah 40:28

Here was my response:

I think 4Him grossly distorts the argument with the watch or trillion molecules question. Only creationist assert that the non-creationist view is one of "Several trillion molecules coming together over millions of years" or worse as a totally random process that just happened to produce all life as we know it or frame it as supposedly the results of mutations. This totally ignores how natural selection optimizes the process so that life does not evolve from random happenings but from having advantages over ones competitors.

Other creationists like to claim how there are no missing links when actually there are plenty, when one is found creationists just insist on finding the new missing link between the old missing links. The natural conditions for fossilization are actually quite rare and in certain climates and locations would be impossible to form. So gaps there are aplenty.

Still others use the old "Nobody has ever seen one species turn into another" argument, which is kind of like saying "Nobody has actually seen the exact time when a child becomes an adult". The time scale we are talking about here is staggering. A million years is 100 times longer than almost all of recorded history. Yet it is only alluded to by creationist as part of the "ridiculousnous of it all".

A dog is pretty much the same thing genetically as a wolf, but even if you used the "Young Earth" creationist age of the planet, the immense variation in dogs are the result of radically altering the selective traits the dogs would pass to their offspring in a mere few thousand years. This variation was caused by man and progressed to where dogs are today fairly quickly in historical terms. I'm pretty sure there were no dachshunds on Noah's Arc. But in a relatively few years, we get dachshunds from what genetically is a wolf, which a dachshund can even impregnate should it be so inclined and most likely assisted.

Creationist look at that and say, "See, you can't make a new species", where the nonCreationists see that and think "Look how much that animal was able to change through a couple hundred generations, in a million years it won't even be the same species". I don't see what is so crazy about thinking that over time the genes of dachshunds and wolves will drift more and more over time, and they will share less and less until one day dachshunds and wolves will no longer be able to breed. But I wouldn't expect to see it in my lifetime.

I am no atheist, but I figure if I was an omnipotent God whose chosen people were really bugging me to tell them where they came from, and the answer involves tiny things they can't see, time periods they cannot fathom, and even some scientific principles they as a people hadn't matured enough to handle, I'd probably give them the short story and let them figure out the rest on their own.

Here is a good article on the subject. Got the link from BoingBoing.