Comment by basil-rash
3 years ago
It’s funny, because the creationists generally feel the exact same about evolutionists.
Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.
No, evolution is not faith based. If you want something faith based, which creationism purports to resolve, it would be if someone has a strong belief on how abiogenesis actually happened, since that is something that is still not well understood. But, we see evolution happening all around us, all the time.
It most certainly is. Evolutionists believe in the time invariance of the laws of physics with no proof, creationists believe the processes by why things have changed in the universe (“physics”, broadly) have changed over time, also with no proof. That there is some external influence that we cannot directly observe that has some massive impact on the development of the universe in ways we cannot explain.
(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)
Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.
The reason we believe in time invariance of the laws of physics is based on observation of old structures in the universe (at least we only have to look back about 4 billion years to the beginning of evolution on earth). So far we have not found any convincing evidence that the laws have changed (either new or different interactions, or the strength of the interactions).
I will say all of science is based on faith- the faith that the human mind can perceive the universe as it truly is, using rational thought and experimental data collection. For some reason this really bothers some scientists and they like to treat science as an unquestionable objective truth, but realistically, we can't exclude any number of hypotheses, but merely state them as improbable based on our understanding.
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Oh they really aren't. Its sort of a tired rhetorical ploy pitting them as faith based beliefs on equal intellectual footing though.
Both are theories about the world. 'Creationism' as a theory really only became pure faith very recently as most specific claims attributable to it have been disproven or better explanations have been found. For a long time it was a perfectly cogent theory.
This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.
Creationism doesn't explain anything.
You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have.
DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.
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Could you show us an experiment that would demonstrate creationism is a better explanation than evolution (and random chance) for the formation of cells? If you can't come up with an actual experiment, there's really no way to say that creationism "explains" something.
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Do you believe that the Bible is the literal and inspired word of God, correct in every detail?
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That's cool and all, but do you give an equal amount of credit to Young Earth Creationists and regular creationists? Because both are equally based in faith. It is equally possible some holy being made fake dinosaur bones 6000 years ago to fool us, and no amount of scientific rigor can compete with a being with the foresight to know exactly how we would test the bones. At what point is "umm we obviously have evidence these bones are over 6000 years old" thinking in absolutes? In the meantime, I'm willing to be disrespected for thinking both forms of creationism are equally woo-woo in comparison to evolutionary theory.
It’s important to understand why we think the bones are over 6,000 years old, and especially consider what assumptions we make in determining that age. Most importantly, the time invariance of physics.
Really it boils down to whether you believe the laws of physics we observe now have been constant throughout time. If you do you’re called an evolutionist, if you don’t you’re called a creationist. Neither side has any proof, nor is any proof fundamentally possible.
Then please provide a consistent with observations theory on how physics has changed with time. Or do you have to throw thermodynamics out the window because you've gone and screwed causality? One side has a whole bunch of consistent observational evidence. The other side has a lot of frantic handwaving and inconsistent data points.
The point being is, creationists have zero idea why they think 6,000 is some magic number in this case, other than bob said so in a book. But yea, books are written by men and men are liars. Even looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years.
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Sheesh someone had fun flagging nearly every single post in this thread… cc @dang for notes?
God designing us in an emergent manner or through a static blueprint are the same thing. Someone had to create the laws, the genetic algorithm idea itself and all of these components and the environment for it to operate within never mind things like colors, matter etc. Evolutionists cant see the forest for the trees.
Then that's not believing in creationism, that's believing in evolution. You wouldn't "not believe in fusion theory" because you believe God created the sun through the process of inventing a universe that sustains nuclear reactions. You would just believe in fusion, as a part of God's creation.
> Someone had to create the laws
This is unknown and a quite anthropomorphic view on the universe. Just because we can create things doesn't mean we ourselves were created, even in the way you're talking about in the First Mover argument.