Stumble it!If you start with false premises…
posted in Creationism by themaiden |… and reason illogically from those premises, you are going to end up with the wrong answer. Hell, even reasoning logically from the wrong premises is going to give you the wrong answer, barring some staggering luck.
I reject the theory of evolution because it is based on several faulty premises which are clearly contradicted by observation. Evolution implies chaos and meaninglessness. Creation implies order and value.
Evolution might possibly imply meaninglessness depending upon how a person assigns meaning to life, but not chaos. Evolution describes and predicts a fair amount of order based upon a few agonizingly simple rules. Chaos is patternless. Evolution is pattern rich. Even so, how is the meaninglessness of evolution ‘clearly contradicted by observations’. I know of absolutely no way at all of observing ‘meaninglessness.’
Certainly creation implies order and meaning, at least on the surface. Consider what might happen however, were the creator psychotic. A religious mind wouldn’t think such thoughts, of course, but we are all scientists here aren’t we? And we have to think such things. In other words, a creator, especially an omniscient one, could intentionally create a world of utter chaos. Creationism doesn’t imply order. Order is a second assumption.
That creationism implies value is a bit iffie as well. There is no real guarantee that a creator embedded ‘value’ in the creation. There is no guarantee that the creator built the world for any reason other than ITS own amusement. Whatever characters may be animated within the structure need have no more value than chess pieces– an idea not too far from Christian doctrine of the recent past.
The natural world contains incredible evidence for design. Every system is regulated by laws which can be described verbally or through mathematical relationships.
Which implies design exactly how? One can throw dice and describe the results mathematically. Does that mean the results were designed? Not at all. One can drop a tomato off of a building and then verbally describe the splatter. Does this mean the mess was designed? Hardly.
Evolutionary theory states that the earth and all life began as a gas several billion years ago and through random processes became more complex with time.
Sigh! Evolution is a theory about how species change over time. The end. Evolution does not apply to gas clouds in space. It does not apply to anything past 4.5 billion years ago and on Earth, as far as we know. Lumping evolution in with cosmology is like reading a cookbook and thereafter claiming that quantum theory is part of the theory of baking. Honestly, lumping lots of disparate things together is nothing but a way to distract the listener. It is good debating, bad logic, bad manners, and shows a lack of integrity.
… and through random processes became more complex with time. Man is the final result of billions and billions of chance mutations of genetic material as the earth aged
It is fair is it not to accurately present an opponent’s position? I understand that people, being people, often distort their enemy’s viewpoints and arguments, but is this fair? Not at all.
Creationists, when making this particular point, consistently omit several major components of evolution. These components greatly reduce the randomness of the process. It is not a crap shoot, as creationists like to portray it.
If, for example, you had to guess a 1000 digit numeric password the chances of getting it within your lifetime is virtually zero. However, if you had an assistant who knew the password and could tell you when you had a correct digit your chances of guessing the answer are certain, given enough time. Simply guess the first number. If you are wrong, at worst you will only be wrong 8 more times. Then you can move on to the next number. In no time, you’ll have the whole number. The creationists would have people believe that the evolutionary process is akin to one’s having to guess the whole number at once, when in fact it is more akin to guessing it with the help of a friend on the inside. It works like this.
Take an animal– say, a cat. Assume the cat has 1,000,000,000 base pairs in its DNA. This number isn’t at all accurate but is chosen to make thinking about it easy. Creationists would have people believe that to get the cat we have to assume that a billion die were rolled and landed just so, producing a cat. The odds are astronomically against. But it doesn’t work like that. The die were not rolled all at once, nor is every roll kept in the mix.
Thousands of years back the cat’s ‘numbers’ were different. Tens of thousands of years back the cat wasn’t a house cat and its numbers were even more different. Tens of millions of years back the cat wasn’t a cat, the first true cat arriving around 30 million years ago. But that is not the beginning of cat history. Ultimately, the cat’s ancestry runs back to the very dawn of life. Now, millions of years into the past we can assume the cat’s ancestors had many fewer than 1,000,000,000 base pairs. Modern bacteria have a few million pairs, and the earliest bacteria would have likely had even fewer. But stopping even there would be premature because life can be traced back to ordinary chemistry, at least as per the theory. So now, what we have are atoms.
What are the chances that two atoms will combine, given that they are packed together as on Earth? Pretty good. It happens all the time. What are the chances that many atoms will combine to form something resembling life? Not very good, but we are not there yet. The theory of abiogenesis which deals with the origin of life from non-life (evolution technically doesn’t deal with this issue), does not postulate that bacteria, or anything similarly complex, just popped up out of the muck. First there would have been simple molecules capable of replicating themselves, or self-replicating molecules. What are the chances this would occur? Well, the chances are quite low for any given fish tank full of chemicals. However, given an Earth sized fish tank and millions of years, the chances become quite good. And this is were the friend on the inside comes into the game.
Imagine the replicating molecules as they float through fish tank Earth. As these molecules float around, other atoms and molecules will bump into them. Some of those molecules will stick. Now think about what happens next. If the new atoms, ruin a molecule’s ability to replicate that line of molecules dies out. This is like the friend telling you that you’ve chosen the wrong number. If the replicator with additions can still replicate, the line continues. This second case is like the friend telling you that you’ve picked a right number. This friend is natural selection. Certainly, there is chance involved in which molecules bond, but there is not chance involved in which ones create the next generation. The survivors are selected according to, in this case, which molecules can still replicate. A similar process of selection occurs through the millions of years until one gets back to cat, and selection is still working on the cat.
Yet, the Second Law of Thermodynamics describes a natural process which causes ordered systems to degenerate into disorder. The Second Law is undisputed by all reputable scientists and contradicts the basic premise of evolution.
But no reputable scientist believes this formulation of the second law. The second law is not about order and disorder and it certainly is not about degeneration. These are typical creationist bastardization of the concept. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is about, as the name suggests, heat transfer– thermo == heat, dynamics == movement. Heat moves from a warmer to a colder object. Eventually this was generalized to the idea that energy moves form more energetic to less energetic objects and never the reverse. A consequence of this is that everything should eventually cool to the same temperature like a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water placed into an insulated box. The hot water will emit heat, the cold water will absorb heat until the two are the same temperature. This process, or consequence, leads to the idea of entropy. According to the creationist version of the Second Law, the glass of water that was once hot can never become hot again and the glass of water that was cold can never become hot at all. Of course it can. All one needs to make it happen is an external heat source. Put the glass on the stove. Like the glass on the stove, the Earth has an external heat source. We call it the Sun.
The fossil record is considered to be the primary evidence for evolution, yet it does not demonstrate a complete chain of life from simple life-forms to complex. Many gaps are present which should not occur if evolution proceeded smoothly from one species to another.
The ancient Greeks wrote books. We have copies of them. There are gaps in those books. Do we assume that those books were written with gaps in them? No, we assume the reasonable, that those gaps are there because part of the text was lost. We know this happens and we know how it happens in general even if we don’t know in particular. We know, for example, that scribes mis-copy and that floods and fires can destroy manuscripts. Likewise, we know that not everything that dies fossilizes. That much is easy to prove. One needs only watch ants devour a lizard or an insect. Not much remains after a few hours, much less millions of years.
In fact, these discontinuities are recognized by a major part of the evolutionary community when they adopt the “hopeful monster mechanism.”
This is nothing but slander. No evolutionary biologist in the world promotes the ‘hopeful monster’ idea and none have for decades.
The most telling argument for me in rejecting evolution, however, is the meaninglessness and lack of value it signifies. If evolution occurred, then my existence is not a special event in the Creator’s plan. Yet, the Bible says I am special; I was created for a purpose.
“I’m special. God said.” This is science?
Popularity: 1%
