Mike-Ward.Net

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

This is an article from the July 2002 issue of Scientific American and still remains in my mind one of the best summaries of the issues to date. Anyone interested in the debate between Evolution and Intelligent Design would do well to read this.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common “scientific” arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest
3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils–creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features–at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels–that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution

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