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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Open Challenge to Creationists

I understand this is purely academic and there will not be one evolution denier that will accept this challenge.


First of all, there are no "Creationists." It is impossible to be a creationist. There are only evolution deniers.

Not one article I've read by a creationist, not one creationist I've spoken with, has ever come forth with an argument in favor of their position; rather, they focus entirely on knocking down evolution. Instead of pro-Creation arguments, they offer only anti-evolution arguments. When we get down to it, the only argument is "I believe in Creationism because evolution is wrong about this, this, and that.
Ladies and gentlemen, I find this to be unacceptable.

The evolution theory - whether or not you agree with it - stands completely on its own and is utterly self-contained; it does not rely on the discredit of another "theory" to be understood.Creationism, on the other hand, seems to rely soley on "disproving" evolution. It offers no positive arguments for itself, only negative arguments for the opposition. The concept of evolution is not "Creationism is wrong", so why is the Creationist argument nothing more than "Evolution is wrong"?

And so, my challenge to you:Under the following rules, construct a positive argument in defense of creationism and then stay here to defend your evidence for creationism.
Stipulations:

1. Construct your argument as positive statements for creationism, not negative statements against evolution. Science freely admits there are problems with the evolutionary model. This is why there are evolutionary scientists that continue to study the phenomenon. Off the top of my head, I could write pages about evolution without once saying "and therefore creationism is wrong" (or like-minded phrases), but I won't, because literally hundreds of people more educated than I have done so in the past 100+ years. Can you do the same with creationism?

2. No attacking Charles Darwin.Many creationists go after Darwin like a drowning man goes after air. Darwin was not the be-all and end-all of evolutionary science. He merely laid out some of the groundwork, and since then, there has been over a century of supporting evidence discovered and literature published, and still the study continues.Attacking evolution (which creationists shouldn't be doing in the first place) by picking holes in Darwin's ideas is like deciding a building is ugly by standing in the basement.(Some people are apparently also unaware that Alfred Wallace - on the other side of the planet and fully independant of Darwin - had simultaneously come to the same conclusions of evolution and natural selection.)

3. References to faith are not fair game.If your listeners are not already convinced, a faith argument is useless. One must already have faith in order for a faith argument to mean anything.

4. It is for you to provide evidence for your argument, not for your listener to disprove it.A favorite tactic of creationists is to say, "you can't prove I'm wrong, therefore my theory is just as good as yours."The burden of proof always lies on the postulant, not on the listener. I can make any outlandish claim I like - say, magic invisbile noncorporeal elves that cause rain. Will you accept this as a reasonable alternative to observed facts merely because my claim can't actually be disproven? Do you believe elves exist simply because you can't prove that they don't exist?




16 comments:

  1. Come on Dale, those hard working creationists have some great positive data:

    1) creation requires a creator
    2) coke cans don't accidentally form
    3) banana's fit like a cock in the mouth
    4) Jesus is Lord...and a bioengineer
    5) The Bible says Jesus' dad created everything
    6) The data is for everyone to see, creationists just interpret it right-the way Jesus intended.
    7) Do you want to go to Hell?
    8) I mean seriously, if you want to go to Hell, just believe in a non-creation lie.
    9) Oh, you are going to Hell, evilutionist!

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  2. Gee, Clos, I now see the clear and 100% proof for creationism.

    We might as well shut this blog down.

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  3. Clos, now that you've explained that that way, I am on my knees and have converted. I will have no more need for evils such as logic, science, and reasoning.

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  4. Just so you know - I am not afraid to post - but it I can't follow the 4 rules, so I will refrain.
    Blessings,
    Patti

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  5. Fourkid,
    Of course you cannot follow the rules because there is no empirical evedence for your beliefs.

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  6. It is truly and irrefutable obvious to anyone that everything that is complex and has a purpose is intelligently designed. One cannot look upon a car or an airplane and not appreciate that it was intelligently designed for a specific purpose. Therefore, life, which is far more complex than any human-designed artifact, must also be designed.

    In addition, we know something else about complex, purposeful designs: They were all, every one, designed by large numbers of individual designers. Even small airplanes are designed by hundreds of people—dozens of people designed the engines, dozens designed the airframe structure, dozens more designed the instruments, the radio systems, the hydraulic controls, and the seats inside. Every living being is much more complex, and has more functions, than an airplane. Therefore, life was designed by thousands or even millions of different designers.

    Positing a great number of designers sweeps away many of the problems with conventional intelligent design theory. Conventional ID has a hard time explaining predation: why some animals chase and eat other animals, why bacteria infect us with diseases. “Multiple designer theory” has an obvious answer. Just as, say, airplanes may be designed in one country to attack tanks designed in another country, lions, having been designed by one group of designers, wish to destroy antelope, which were designed by another group.. Why do different animals compete with each other for resources? For the same reason that Chryslers compete with Fords—because they were designed to do so by different intelligences. Why do plants and animals go extinct? Why do automobile models disappear, to be replaced by others? Because different designers have different ideas as to what will survive in the market, as in the environment. Because new designers invent new ways to design and manufacture them. Why were life forms simpler and fewer in the past than today? Because there were fewer designers, and they were not as proficient.

    Darwinists claim that the similarity of features of different organism are evidence for common descent. Balderdash. When Boeing designs an airliner, it doesn’t design the engines. These are designed by specialists at General Electric or Rolls Royce, who then sell them to many different aircraft companies. In the same way, one group of designers may design, say, cellular ribosomes or bone structures or eye modules for use by the designers of different animals. This is why eyes are so similar in diverse animals. Why do we see vestigial organs? If only a single designer generated the plan for the entire animal, this would be considered incompetent. But suppose that one group of designers produces an intestinal tract, and shops it around to many other groups. The intestine designers must satisfy several different client designers. Thus, for example the appendix that is unnecessary in humans does have a function in other animals who can otherwise acquire the design. Many different kinds of digital watches all use exactly the same chip; the cheaper models merely leave certain of the chip’s features unconnected. .

    Just as it is glaringly obvious that all life forms were intelligently designed, it is also obvious that different plants, animals, and their organs and cells were designed by multitudes of different designers. Further, this extension to intelligent-design theory has far more explanatory power than does the conventional ID variety having only a single vastly overworked intelligence.

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  7. olorin said: "It is truly and irrefutable obvious to anyone that everything that is complex and has a purpose is intelligently designed."

    Stop. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

    Fail.

    What justification do you have that anything in the natural world has a purpose? What's the purpose of the Grand Canyon? What's the purpose of an elephant? What's the purpose of Ray Comfort? (Don't answer that.)

    This is one of the biggest logical fallicies that the anti-evolution (or should I say, anti-science and anti-reason) people fall for. By stating that anything in the natural world has a purpose (that is, a function that it was designed to fulfill), then you've already presupposed an outside entity that has determined that purpose. Do you get it? You're begging the question, in the same way that claiming that a creation requires a creator is begging the question.

    Clear so far? The rest of your argument can be dismissed as your fundamental premise is unsupportable.

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  8. No, Charles, you failed. You failed the exam on Poe's Law. Sorry :-)

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  9. olorin,
    well done. I was going to post before charles did, but then I thought, what the fuck is he saying? He's just making the exact same claim with one changed sub-assertion, and it still makes no more sense. So I decided that this was just a little bit too strange to be the real deal. I knew someone would bite though.
    I haven't tried to really Poe someone, so please tell me, does it hurt much to write that stuff?
    I wont ask if the same in book length would make money, because we already know it does.

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  10. Olorin,
    You are are Poe-diatrist. :>

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  11. The motivation for Multiple Designer Theory (tm) was to take the false but pervasive analogy with human-designed artifacts, and push it in a direction that creationists would find logical but horrifying.

    They want a Designer, let's give them more than they want. This is not an original idea. The Romans, for example, even had names for their multiple Designers: Zeus, Diana, Cupid, Neptune, Venus, Bacchus, and many more.

    A future project for MDT's research arm, the Creological Institute, is to name and classify at least some of the Designers. They could then be placed in a family tree, complete with begats.

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  12. I'm no learned scientist myself, so I'm not able to start busting out with scientific answers with all the big words and such, but I know how to find a good article that is pro-creationsist (with evidence!) yet not anti-evolutionist. May I do a cut and paste job?

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  13. Actually, I take my last comment back, there is an anti-evolution slant to it. It can be edited out, however, and then the article would present just the creation evidence.

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Unlike Ray we don't censor our comments, so as long as it's on topic and not spam, fire away.

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