On Creationism

The first few chapters of Genesis are the bedrock of creationism, so I thought I would examine chapter 1 (and a bit of chapter two) in some detail. Day One 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Creationists sometimes like to draw a parallel here to the Big Bang, particular verse 3. Does that work? In what sense was the Big Bang when light got divided from the darkness? In fact most commentators believe the separation of dark and light refers to the cycle of day and night, as verse 5 makes clear. Hmm, does that work any better? Day and night are a result o...

A common fallacy among creationists is that Pasteur disproved abiogenesis. Here are some examples: One of Pasteur’s first major scientific contributions was disproving the supposed spontaneous generation of living things (such as bacteria) from non-living organic matter. (However in spite of this disproof, spontaneous generation is now considered to be the foundation of the evolutionary view of the origin of life if “millions of years” are added). http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v4/n1/creation-germ-theory Louis Pasteur destroyed the belief that life could be created from inanimate substances. http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/short_history_02.html However, Louis Pasteur was in the very process of proving that spontaneous generation of cellular life was even more illusory than the flat earth. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v23/n1/life The Law of Biogenesis is real, and accepted as true by all scientists. Evolution cannot be true, because it is agai...

Irreducible Complexity (IC) is the idea that certain systems are made up of a number of integrated parts, such that the removal of one of those parts will prevent the function of the system. This could mean that a system also has parts that can be removed without losing the primary function, but it has an IC core of parts that are necessary. A car would be an example; you can remove a windscreen wiper and it will still go. Remove the battery, and it will not. The battery is part of the IC core. The concept of IC was first presented by Michael Behe in 1996 in his book Darwin's Black Box (though he had previously discussed an embryonic form of the argument in the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People ). He defined it : By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex syst...

Although I was raised as a Christian, I was never really a part of the faith, and as I went though my teens, it was the Problem of Evil more than anything else that persuaded me the Christianity is wrong, so this is an interesting and important issue for me. Definitions Here is how I understand some terms. All-loving: Love could be (perhaps inadequately) described as a strong positive emotion of regard and affection. If you love someone, you want the best for him or her, you care for and respect that person. From Wiki we also see this: Agape: In the New Testament, agape is charitable, selfless, altruistic, and unconditional. It is parental love, seen as creating goodness in the world; it is the way God is seen to love humanity, and it is seen as the kind of love that Christians aspire to have for one another. John said (1 John 4:16): God is Love This gives us some idea of the degree of love that God supposedly feels for all his children. All-knowing: God knows all that...