Questions I'd Love to See a Creationist Answer

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You mean like pi being equal to 3.0?

I do NOT believe in creationism yet I wonder about evolution.

A rabbit can run faster than other rabbits so he lives to breed. That is evolution.

But how did creatures develop eyes or wings or teeth?

This is NOT an overnight thing or an evolutionary thing.

Wings are no good unless you can fly and have the light bone structure and muscles to go with it.

Did some creature who had slightly longer arms survive because of that?
I don't think so.

They say that millions of years ago there were no bees and no flowers.

So which came first? The bees who need flowers or the flowers who need bees?

Don't tell me that some plants "evolved" flowers before bees existed.

Haha, some context would have been nice, but I've heard that one before. Have a look at this article:
http://creation.com/does-the-bible-say-pi-equals-30

Orwell, there you go as an example of falsifiability. If the Bible gave the wrong value for pi, it would make the Bible errant and therefore cause major problems - either God didn't oversee the writing of the Bible or He's (rather flippantly in this case) lying.

I agree that general intelligent design (but not strict Biblical creationism) can't be subject to the scientific method. Logically, it can be assumed true if all other options are falsified, but can't be disproved if an alternate explanation is possible. However, I'm interested by your statement that you believe evolution is disprovable. What would it take to convince you personally that evolution did not create life as we see it? It seems to me that the unlikelihood of evolution (statistically negligible as I see it) can be compensated for with numerous hypothetical theories (none of them disprovable) like multiple/infinite universe theory. How unlikely does it have to be before it's disproven?

Well, if Biblical creationism can be falsified simply by finding a contradiction in its description in the Bible, then we can toss it right now.

Compare the creation tale in Genesis ch 1, and the tale in Genesis ch 2. The first one claims that water and plants predate man, the second that man was created first. They can't both be right...

I still have yet to see any creationist answer my question, however. Why are you calling God a liar? Either the universe really is fourteen billion years old (whether created at that time by Divine decree or something else - nobody claims to know what caused the Horrendous Space Kablooie) and God lied in Genesis (supposed to be Divinely inspired, remember?), or God made up all the evidence, and lied in His creation. (Please note: The above only applies to young-Earth creationists, who by necessity are also Biblical literalists, as that's where they get their "evidence" - the counting of Biblical generations.)

It is, of course, trivially simple to resolve the dichotomy - just abandon Biblical literality, accepting that God could not possibly have explained "fourteen billion years" to a tribe of itinerant goatherds around 3000 BC or so, and abandon the young-Earth concept, for which there is absolutely no corroborating information. Then it becomes immaterial whether the Big Bang was caused by vacuum fluctuation and universal inflation, or some supernatural deity intoning, "Let There Be Light!" - the scientific evidence would look the same either way.

I don't understand why you give this as an example of falsifiability. Are you saying the bible has been falsified in this case? Or are you saying the argument in your link shows that the bible could have been falsified, but wasn't?

Let's see what the argument is. Creation.com offers two:

So this says it could be a rounding error, if the real values are judiciously chosen.

The next one says that perhaps the diameter and the circumference were measured in different places and so they are not measurements of the same circle:

So if I just make the right assumptions, I can make the bible fit to what I know to be the correct result, and that proves the bible is reliable.

The nice thing about this method is that I can get a wide range of other results. I could take a wine glass, measure the circumference around its stem, measure the diameter across the rim, and I'd find a ratio of circumference to diameter not just a little smaller than pi but a lot smaller than 1. If I measure the circumference around the widest part of a bottle and the diameter across its mouth, I can get a ratio a lot larger than pi.

Where is the falsifiability in this?

There is also some fun to be had in an entry for endogenous retroviruses (http://creation.com/large-scale-function-for-endogenous-retroviruses). Do you want to pick it apart yourself or do you want to wait until I have more time?


First of all, check again what the theory of biological evolution aims to explain. A hint is in my answer to your question: If phylogenies inferred from independent sets of traits were uncorrelated. Or if front loading had occurred. Front loading is the name of the notion that all developmental programs were already present in the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes and all evolutionary history comes from activating some parts and possibly losing others. No new information is supposed to have come in since the moment front loading occurred. If that were true, there would be a lot less left for evolution to explain, and it would not explain the front loading event itself.


How do you calculate that?


Like in the link to why the bible doesn't claim pi to be 3?

Questions for creationists: Who or what created God, and when? Alternatively, what is the origin of God?

Just a few things. First of all, in the article entitled "What's this all about?" on that web site, it says that evolution undermines morality. This is false because evolution has nothing to do with morality, it just describes the proliferation and diversification of life. Secondly the statement in that same article that says that a belief in evolution leads to atheism is also false. I've recently got my my masters in astrophysics and have some friends who are well aware of the evidence for the big bang and also believe in evolution. But they are also Christians. Even the Roman Catholic Church has accepted evolution.

In section of that web site called "Refuting Evolution", which seems to be an on-line version of a book. In Chapter 1, the section describing the "bias" of evolutionary leaders already makes it apparent that who ever wrote that book does not understand the scientific method. No amount of evidence can "prove" a scientific theory. Any theory can only be disproved by contradicting evidence. That is why for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, i.e. it must be possible in principle to disprove the theory by contradicting evidence. In order to to that the theory must make predictions. When the evidence confirms a given prediction, the theory survives another day. When it does not, the theory is dropped or modified. In evolution, we don't always know what evolved from what and those details still need to be worked out. However, the basic premise that natural selection drives evolution has never been contradicted by the evidence. In the section in that same chapter about the basis of modern science, it states that creationism is the basis of modern science because the pioneers of modern science were creationists. They the same scientists who, as I mentioned in another post, lived before evolution was proposed. Also the fact that they believed in creationism does not mean that creationism is correct. With regards to chapter 2 - no, genetic information originating from mutations is not contrary to information theory. Also figure one in that chapter is well supported by studies in genetics.

One more thing, in the FAQ, under dinosaurs: the article referring the the age of dinosaur bones conveniently leaves out the part that fossils can be carbon dated.

I didn't go through the whole site but based on what I saw, I came to the following conclusion. Same old, same old. There's nothing there that really refutes evolution and it uses a lot of the same creationist arguments that I've seen before.

Everything that has a beginning has a cause, such as the universe; but, unlike the universe, God did not have a beginning. Therefore, God does not need a cause. And, in addition to that, Einstein has pretty much shown that time is linked to matter and space. And so even time itself, along with space and matter, had a beginning. God by definition is the creator - the uncaused cause - of the universe and also of time, space, and matter. And since God is the creator of time, space, and matter, he is not limited by them. He is outside them, in eternity outside of time.

Prove it.

What excuses god from needing a beginning?

It's implicit in the job description, skafather; God, in order to meet the criteria for the position (including the creation of the Universe) must necessarily be a supernatural being, existing outside the Universe (how can one exist inside something that simultaneously describes all of reality, and postdates one's own existence?).

The question of "where God comes from" in theology becomes as meaningless as the question of "where life comes from" in evolution - both presuppose the existence of the principle in question. (That's something a lot of creationists miss, BTW; evolution does not concern itself with biogenesis, but rather with how life forms developed after they came into existence. That's why it's possible to understand the scientific facts of evolution, and still admit of the possibility that it's all under the control of a supernatural Creator - it merely denies the young-Earth creationist hypothesis that all life was created pretty much as we see it today, all of six thousand years ago, and that all the evidence to the contrary was placed by a God who enjoys pulling childish pranks on His children.)

Yeah, it was a loaded question, I already have read most of the arguments for and against. I just wanted to see if there were any straight-forward answers. "God has always existed" doesn't cut it for me, because: (1) If God exists, then (2) God is a thing, entity, being, power, energy, whatever...God is real, and therefore (3) must have a cause.

Your example of falsifiability is a place where you can just postulate a rounding error? Fail. Utter fail. Anyways, I asked for evidence that would specifically falsify creationism- even if the Bible were somehow refuted, creationism wouldn't be disproved.


*sigh*
I will only make this statement once more: evolution does not pertain to the origin of life. It explains only how life has proliferated and diversified. Evolution does not tell use how we get the first cell. It tells us how we get from the first cell to all life that exists today.

Now, what would disprove evolution? Plenty of things. Cambrian bunnies would do the trick. If the human and chimpanzee genomes were markedly different from each other, that would probably disprove evolution. As a matter of fact, we can line our genome up against a chimp's and find a ridiculous number of similarities- just as evolution predicted we would.

Your argument from unlikelihood is just based on false assumptions and bad math. I'm going to ignore it for now.

If you're capable of believing this, then you can just as easily say that the universe itself is the uncaused cause. It simply existed in 'eternity' (although before time's arrow started moving the concept of eternity had no meaning anyway) without a beginning or a cause, and the Big Bang (which you could also call an uncaused cause, I suppose) gave rise to the properties of time, space and matter. Actually, by Occam's Razor, this is what you must do. If you assume a First cause, you should stop simply at the universe itself rather than postulating one infinitely more disagreeable uncaused cause behind it for no reason at all other than you want it to be so. Personal bias is the only reason to do such a thing.

I think that if it is a personal bias to ask who made the universe because some simply believe that it has always been here, I should think that it is then just as bias for someone to ask who made God, since some simply believe that He has always been here as well. If the universe is not from everlasting, it needs a cause; but if the universe has no beginning, than it does not need a cause for its beginning. Similarly, if God has no beginning, than He doesn't need a cause either.

Okay- so God creates species.

How exactly does he do it?

What tool does he use?

Could it be that the tool God uses to create species is: evolution through natural selection?