[Recycled from 5 November 2004]
The biggest objection I've always had to creationism is that I just can't believe that this world we see around us is too orderly, too unified, to be nothing more than a collection of happenstance and coincidence.
[Typo corrected: What I meant to say was, "I can't believe that this world we see around us is nothing more than a collection of happenstance and coincidence. It is too orderly, too unified, for that."]
You have seven bones in your neck. So does a giraffe. So does a pygmy shrew, thought its neckbones are too small to pick up without tweezers. So edoes every mammal. Why? A biologist will say, "All mammals descend from a common ancestor that had seven neckbones. There are patterns everywhere in nature, and those patterns have meaning." A creationist is reduced to shrugging and saying, "God just felt like doing it that way. Just coincidence, nothing more. Any pattern you see is either blind chance or divine whim. If God had so chosen, cats would have six legs and feathers, while dogs had three legs and green leaves."
Actually, creationism strikes me as evidence of Satan at work in the world. Satan loves to create false dilemmas and dichotomies. It sounds exactly like him to whisper in someone's ear, "If the stars are older than the Earth, then there is no God!"
//The Magic 8-Ball says, "A false premise will never lead to a correct conclusion."\\
10 comments:
This could be a typo, but your post doesn't make sense.
You can't believe that "this world is too orderly to be nothing more than coincidence".
So you think either the statement in quotes above is wrong, (the world is not that orderly); or that it is a poor argument for creationism, and the creationists would be better saying that Satan is partly responsible as well.
But the middle paragraph seems to argue that creationsim is just plain wrong as a theory anyway.
Which is it?
Hey Joh, I wrote an article dealing in part with Creationism called "500 Channels of Heresy" Its on my blog.
Nice work here, keep it up.
As I said, the doctrine of creationism presumes that the unity we see in nature is merely a whim of its manufacturer, and not the working out of natural forces. In fact, creationism presumes that there is no such thing as "nature": the universe, from subatomic particles to galaxy clusters, is all artifice.
In the creationist's world, the interconnections we see are merely the false patterns imposed Rorschach-fashion by our own minds on an unconnected, atomistic world.
I prefer to take the world at face value, and believe that the connections and relationships we see all around us are real, not illusory.
Eek, I finally see the typo.
Yes, what I meant to say was, "the orderliness of the universe is too great to be mere happenstance, as Crationism requires".
Ah, I get it now. And I agree. I find it hard to imagine a God who got bored halfway through the Creation process and said "Sod it, I'll make all the mammals from this basic skeleton, I can't be bothered to keep inventing new types". Equally, if God were omnipotent, why would he need to build in evolution? Why not just design the perfect ecosystem from the outset?
No, it makes much more sense if everything just gradually evolves to suit the local environment and changing conditions. Darwin 1, God 0.
If everything evolved from the same prototype, why didn't we evolve the same way?
For scientific theory to hold (and the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is held to be a scientific theory), you must be able to take the same original object, subject it to the same forces, and result in the same end product.
That doesn't seem to be the case here -- we still have apes, shrews, giraffes... why didn't we all end up the same (or extremely similar)?
-kb
Um - because the ancestors of humans, shrews, fish, etc., weren't all subject to the same pressures. The individuals on whom evolution acts have different random mutations, inhabit different habitats, suffer different disasters, enjoy different windfalls, encounter different competing and cooperating organisms, etc.
Those people (and living in Texas, I meet a lot) who belived Creationism is science suffer from a basic misunderstanding of what science is. Creationism starts with the answer and structures all the questions to support it. Science starts with the questions and structures all the answers to lead the way to the next question. God can create the world in a way that looks like random chance if he/she/it wants to - the presumption that there's an entity in charge of everything leads to no new questions and is scientifically irrelevant.
At a sociological level, if creationism were science, I would meet Catholic, Jewish, Wiccan, and Buddhist creationists. I don't. They're all conservative Protestants. The amount of outright lying done in support of creationism by people who supposedly guide their lives by the 10 commandments is appalling. For an excellent and detailed account of what goes on, see
http://members.aol.com/paluxy2/paluxy.htm - Glen Kuban cares about this stuff a lot!
This is Peni, who thinks that if you believe something because you want to, you don't in your heart believe it
Hi Peni,
I think you're missing a few of the basic tenets of creationism. It boils down to this: that a being outside of our realm of concrete knowledge created the universe.
This belief is held by the majority of religions and the creation accounts in the religious scriptures are scary-close to each other. So, if you meet a Jew who doesn't hold to creationism, that Jew doesn't believe in the tenets of Judaism. Same with Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and a myriad of other religious groups.
I realize it's hard to grasp -- the concept of a six-day creation (where man was created on the sixth day), especially given the scientific evidence that seems to say otherwise.
There's a few "gotcha's" to the arguments used against creationism, though:
1. the Hebrew (the original language of the Old Testament and Jewish Torah) word translated into English as "day" is better translated "period of time" -- it can mean anywhere from a literal day to an "age" (yes, that's a very large span of time!)
2. the techniques used to prove dates (such as carbon dating, fossil records, etc.) suffer from a great deal more variables than even the experts know (they know the variables are there, but they don't know what they are). This means that they are unreliable at best and a flat-out stab-in-the-dark at worst.
Now, also, to say that the different species are the same and were simply subjected to different environments begs the question: how? If they came from one being originally, they would have been in the same environment as each other. Also, In the time frame that we've been able to observe evolutionism, how long would it have taken for us to evolve from primordial soup to humans?
Also, to claim the scientific path means showing a cause-effect relationship with the process involved. What *caused* something to come out of the primordial soup? And the next phase... what *caused* that? To say "randomness" suggests we have a world created by random "trial and error" and we start running out of time since the earth's beginnings even before we get to ape.
I would suggest reading Lee Strobel's book Case for a Creator. It might open your eyes to the actual complexity of the creationist stance -- it really isn't a "take-it-on-faith" stance! :-)
-kb
Peni again. You have missed my point completely. I, and science, have nothing whatsoever to say about the existence or non-existence of a creator. It's not a disprovable assumption.
The scientific method leads us backward in time several million years, forever postponing the ultimate question - how does anything exist, anywhere, at all? It has given us a rich, diverse, and endlessly fascinating universe. When it leads us down a blind alley, it also allows us a means to back out of it - or to find the secret door that will lead us to a wider world beyond. The practical effect on the non-specialist is to encourage us to ask questions, follow the current scientific debates, and apply present scientific knowledge to public policy and our personal lives as best we can. Many scientists and interested laymen believe in God; many do not; many, like me, do not have an opinion.
The creationist assertion that "God did it" provides no impetus to seek farther - unless, indeed, someone attempts to investigate (how?) the question: Where did God come from? Now, the effect this has on you I am not qualified to say; but it has had no marked beneficial effect on anyone I know personally, and has a marked deletrious effect on many of them, as their lack of curiosity leads to short-sightedness and vulnerability to pseudoscientific claims, such as "miracle diets," that cater to their hope rather than their reason.
Your claim that every religious person is necessarily a creationist is a shocking one - my mother, the Methodist minister, certainly is not a creationist, and she certainly is religious; ditto, my husband, the Southern Baptist. The only way I can see to make this assertion true is to shift the ground of our understanding of the word. Creationism could theoretically be applied to any belief system that presumes an original creator, but in practice and as everyone in this conversation up to this point had evidently been using the term, it refers specifically to the denial of evolution. You in fact immediately return to this usage. This bit of sophistry will not stand and I hope it was a momentary abberration.
As I said originally, God can create using what appears to our finite human minds as a random chance method if he/she/it wants to. If we want to understand the world thus made, however, we need to come to grips with the appearance of random chance, not spend our energies trying desperately to change its appearance. The nitpicks of creationist toward the results of science are mote-in-the-eye stuff, tending to misrepresent the strength of science - its self-correcting capacity - as a weakness.
If you find this convincing, that's you and I suppose cannot be helped and may lead you someplace useful; but not one discovery has ever been made in pursuit of creationist theories, except those which eventually led directly away from it; whereas "challenges to evolution" consistently lead back to it or choke on their own weaknesses (such as dishonesty; cf those Glen Rose footprints). Evolution is a fruitful theory, even if in the long run it proves inadequate (like Newtonian physics); creationism is an unfruitful theory, even if it eventually proves, by use of methods we can't even imagine now, to be essentially correct.
Assuming your belief in creationism is, like my belief in evolution, an honest one involving your best reasoning capacity, then you have no more choice about it than I do. However, the public face of creationism is the face of a pseudoscience, involving a mixture of dishonesty, self-delusion, and poor reasoning skills. The prevalence of this belief system in America today is rooted less in Christianity (to which evolution poses no challenge whatever, since it has nothing to say about the divinity of Jesus) than in poor science education. When, as is too often the case, science is presented as a body of knowledge rather than as a process, only the most motivated people learn to distinguish between good scientific reasoning and leaps of faith.
Not everything is subject to scientific investigation; not everything that will be scientifically investigated can be at this time. There's no need for religion to feel so inferior to science that it must masquerade in the discipline's old rags.
Let's consider this question, combining what I started with and kb's contribution:
Are we here on this Earth by the grace of God, or as a natural part of it?
My own answer, for what it's worth, is an emphatic "Yes."
If you think there is something wrong with my answer, please read the question again.
And remember what I said at the beginning about asking the wrong question.
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