On Creationism

Arguments Against When looking at creationist web sites for arguments against common descent, the first thing that becomes apparent is that creationists conflate common descent with evolution. For example, from here : Common Descent (Darwinism)–Science or Pseudoscience? REVIEW HOW COMMON DESCENT (MACROEVOLUTION) HOLDS UP WHEN USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF TESTING AN HYPOTHESIS As far as these people are concerned, common descent, macroevolution and Darwinism all mean the same thing! Also here : Several of the criteria said to distinguish the scientific status of naturalistic evolutionary theories (hereafter "descent") from admittedly nonnaturalistic theories of creation or design (hereafter "design") will be examined. This example was written by a philospher of science (Stephen Meyer), who really should know better. But, then again, he is a creationist... Many of the arguments presented against common descent are really arguments against something else, s...

What Does Common Descent Explain? A scientific claim needs to make testable predictions, but it also needs to be useful, to help explain the world we see. The Distribution of Eyes There are various sorts of eyes in the natural world, such as the compound eye of the insect, the camera eye of vertebrates eye and the alternative camera eye of octopodes and squids. According to common descent, the eyes that a creature gets depends on their ancestry. If you are descended from the first organism to evolve a rudimentary compound eye, you get a compound eye. Thus, while fish and squid live in the same environments, fish have retinas wired one way, squid have retina wired the other. One is, presumably, better in that environment, but who gets what is determined by their evolutionary history, not their current needs. See here: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/the_eye_as_a_contingent_divers.php Creationists sometimes say that the designer equipped each "kind" with t...

Pretty much everyone accepts some degree of common descent; creationists generally believe that all canines (the dog "kind") evolved from a single species. However, I am talking here about universal common descent, the claim that all living things are related, and are descended from a common ancestor. When I say common descent on this blog, I mean universal common descent, rather than limited common descent. Let me say up front that there are issues in science revolving around that common ancestor. It may be that there was actually a whole bunch of ancestors that appeared independently, and subsequently exchanged genes. It was a very long time ago, and the evidence available today is scant. So the argument can be summarised as the claim by mainstream science that humans and (say) bananas share a common ancestor, and the claim by creations that they do not (and indeed, usually that even humans and chimps do not share a common ancestor). Common descent is consistent with t...

This is prompted by a post by the Discovery Institute: Once Again, Why Intelligent Design Is Not a "God-of-the-Gaps" Centuries ago, man had a poor understanding of nature, and attributed all sorts of natural forces, such as lightning, earthquakes and even the seasons to their gods. Over time, people have come to realise that there are mundane (i.e., not supernatural) reasons for these things, and slowly gods or God is being removed from our understanding of how the universe works. God (in one view) is left as lord of the gaps in our knowledge, and as science progresses, those gaps get ever smaller. Intelligent Design is "God-of-the-gaps" exactly because it exploits those gaps. Ancient man could not explain lightning, so assumed a supernatural intelligent agency was responsible. Modern man cannot the origin of life (not well enough for certain people anyway), so IDists feel they can assume a supernatural intelligent agency was responsible. No Positive Eviden...

Satan, Lucifer and the snake in the Garden of Eden: All these things have been corrupted by Christian to become something that in the Old Testament they are not. I have discussed the snake elsewhere. Lucifer appears in Isaiah, and if you read the context, is about a Babylonian King, and the text makes that very clear. Isaiah 14:3 On the day the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and turmoil and from the harsh labor forced on you, 4 you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: Satan and Job This page is about Satan, and will look especially at Satan in Job. Was Satan opposing God when the events in the Book of Job occurred? The usual Christian belief is that he was, but the evidence suggests otherwise... According to here and here and here in the original Hebrew, whenever satan is mentioned in Job, it actually says " the satan"; this indicates that "satan" was a title or position, rather than a specific individual. The satan is an angel ...