SIX DAYS - HOW LONG IS A DAY? THE CREATIONIST VIEW.
Creationist believe the world was created in six days as the bible said. However, within this position there are a wide range of opinions on how long this six days actually was. Some say creation was in six 24-hour days, others argue whether it was more or less than 24-hours. Some say it was thousands of years before God created the sun and stars to regulate how long was a day.
i.e. the bible has to be
very liberally re-interpreted to try and justify it in the face of scientific knowledge which disproves the literal interpretation.
One example might be food for dinosaurs. The amount of vegetation needed to support one large dinosaur is estimated to be three and a half tons of vegetation per day. However, in the places where they find dinosaur fossils, they do not find plant fossils to serve as food for the large masses of dying and repopulating species.
Utter tosh. Do you honestly expect a 1:1 fossilization record between soft plant matter and hard animal - bone - matter?
The obvious design of cell structure, and of the human body itself is so complex that it could not develop by chance. Life created by chance by non-living material is radically impossible.
Rubbish. Life did not create by
blind chance; it created by random mutations
selectected by environmental pressures (natural and sexual selection). Life created by chance by nonliving material is not impossible (it's actually outside the bounds of evolutionary theory); just see any research on abiogenesis for work done on this.
'Obvious design'? Complete idiocy - if you have a series of selection pressures that reward suitability for a purpose, then of
course it will appear well designed. You're also making another fundamental flaw in assuming that life evolved the
only way it could have, i.e. that the current form of life on earth is the only possible form, which is itself fundamentally unsound.
I'll try and come up with a simple analogy. We have a random mutation, positive or negative (the vast majority being the latter). If this mutation makes the animal survive longer, or reproduce more, then it is propagated through being a genetically dominant characteristic. So imagine, say, we have a machine that generates a sentence randomly, and we want that sentence to be a line from Hamlet. Now, what you're suggesting would be that each time that sentence is random - pure chance. That is unlikely.
But, evolution works as if we generated that sentence,
and kept letters that were correct for the next generation. And that, is not nearly so unlikely. In fact, write a simple program, and you'll find it does so in surprisingly few generations. It's not an exact analogy for evolution, but it illustrates the action of selection.
As John K. G. Kramer says in his section of "In Six Days", "Secondly, numerous pieces of evidence fit a young earth. To mention a few: The historical records, the population growth, the helium content in this world, the missing neutrinos from the sun, the oscillation period of the sun, the decline of the earth’s magnetic field, the limited number of supernovas, radioactive halos, the mitochondria DNA pointing to one mother, and the increase in genetic diseases, etc."8 (John F. Ashton)
Love how you don't define any of these.
Ok, I'll try and guess. Historical records and population growth are rather meaningless, because you give no way in which these aren't accounted for by known human development and the extinctions within the fossil record. I'll try to be brief, because there are a myriad of scientific faults to address here and my arms are tired.
Helium content; my understanding is that this is based on the helium-4 content in the atmosphere (created by regular radioactive decay), and the assumption it cannot escape from the atmosphere. Unfortunately (well, for you) both the polar wind and magnetic pole reversals contradict this. Specifically, the loss rate due to the polar wind has been recorded to be about the same as the accumulation rate used in the 'young earth' arguement.
Missing neutrinos; the 'shortage' has been provatively documented to be the result of neutrino oscillations (namely, collisions that convert neutrinos to different particles); this is proven by the SNO measurements of the sun, which detected neutrino particles (mau and one whose name I forget) only created by collisions (as documented in particle accelerator experiments). Additionally, all the suns current colour, luminosity & helioseismology characteristics are all grossly inconsistent with a young star.
Supernovas; the arguement is that there are not enough supernova remnants to account for anything other than a young galaxy (these calculations being a classic example of picking the result you want first). It's also based on wrong figures; the wrong estimation of both the rate of supernova and also the wrong calculations of which percentages of each stage supernovae should be visible. The calculations also used the theoretical lifetime of the supernova, not the
observable lifetime, and ignores a vast number of events which hinder the ability to see a supernova (remanants that have faded away, merged with other remnants or become noise, supernovas that are hidden by other radiation sources, that not all of the sky has been surveyed to the same extent, the technological limitations restricting the ability to observe supernova, etc). i.e. it overestimates (badly) the number of expected supernova, and then ignores the restrictions upon finding them.
Magnetic field; utter claptrap. There is irrefutable evidence that the electromagnetic field periodically reverses, making any decay-based measurement meaningless. I believe this arguement also makes fundamentally unfounded assumptions that the internal magnetic field (vast majority of energy) of the earth shares the same fluctuations as the observable field.
Radioactive halos; An arguement that halos generated by polonium decay indicates a youn earth. Numerous studies have shown there is no good evidence for this (or that these halos - ring shaped discolouration - are due to decay atall). The research behind this also followed fundamentally unsound procedures, including selective use of evidence, faulty design, basic mistakes in geology and physics, and unscientific principles of investigation and arguementative style.
Mitochondria DNA; I believe this is the 'Mitochondrial Eve' hypothesis that claims one individual is the ancestor of all people and a recent ancestor, etc. Except that ME is
the most-recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent; not the ancestor of all, ever. This does not actually rule out other ancestors, either; it only refers to the matrilineal line of inheritence. It's quite complicated, but consider this (which I won't bother to paraphrase);
[q]# Let us now see how the title of Mitochondrial Eve can change hands.
Consider an extremely prolific woman living today. She has many daughters and takes a vacation to a remote Carribean island for a week. During the same week a plague of a mutated Ebola virus sweeps the Earth and drastically decreases the fecundity of all living women. Not only that, the viral infection also changes the genome of these women so that the daughters they give birth to will inherit this reduced fecundity. This means that far more than average of their fetuses will undergo abortions (or, in a somewhat kinder scenario, their female fetuses will be aborted more often than male ones).
Only this one woman and her daughters who were off in this Carribean island are safe from the viral plague. Also assume that the viral plague consumes itself within that fateful week. This woman and her daughters are now free to breed in a world where their reproductive potential far outstrips that of every other woman alive (and to be born of these women). Soon, almost every one on Earth will be related in some fashion to this one woman. Finally, when the last woman who was born to one of the matrilineal descendents of an infected woman dies, the non-infected Carribean tourist takes on the title of the new Mitochondrial Eve. Every human alive on Earth at that point in time is now related via the mitochondrial line to her.
But consider this new twist. Suppose a group of astronauts (men and women) were sent off into space during the infection week, and were thus not infected themselves. After many centuries in a Moon or Mars colony, they returned to Earth. At that time, suddenly, the title of Mitochondrial Eve would revert back to our own ME. The humans alive on the Earth at that time would all share their mitochondrial DNA with an earlier common ancestor.[/q]
Genetic diseases; I have no idea what you're on about here.
WHY DID WE NOT EVOLVE? CREATIONIST VIEW.
A common factor in DNA, cells, and all living things, is orderliness and design. You can’t have design without a designer. Orderliness tells of intelligence to make order, some other being or force out there; God. DNA carries the information necessary to tell the cell how to duplicate, feed, and how to cooperate with other cells. All in all, to become a complex living being. There is no way that could ever occur by chance. Cells and DNA are extremely complex and orderly, as a certain cell is used for a certain task. And the DNA cell tells which cells to be what and do what, and passes the necessary information to each cell in full, become a living organism. There is no order in chance, or luck. This order, or design, points to a creator, God.
Again, this is a wrong assumption of chance. Also it ignores the theory of DNA and protein evolution.
Clearly, DNA which coded a cell to sit and die, is not going to be propagated very far.
Remember, we started as single celled organisms, and that cell structure evolved. Multi-celled organisms came thereafter and, again, structures which were not beneficial would have been culled by natural selection.
NATURAL SELECTION AND MUTATIONS.
Evolutionists believe that when the big bang occurred it also created ameba’s, which over millions of years mutated into living animals. Those animal species eventually faced catastrophes and intolerable climate changes, which led to mass extermination and few survivors. Those survivors either adapted and lived, or became immune to the event and they developed slightly changed characteristics. Those characteristic traits were passed down, to their descendants, which were immune from birth to the event that killed a lot of the pervious species. [/colour]
Evolutionists do
not 'believe that when the big bang occurred it also created amoebas'. This is wrong. Firstly, abiogensis is a seperate topic to evolution, and does not predict spontaneous life - the opposite (for one thing, you need the stars and earth to accrete).
Also, extinction as the driving force of natural selection/evolution is completely and utterly wrong. Evolution does not require any form of catastrophe or climatic change.
Whilst an adaptation that allows an animal to survive a catastrophe would be an obvious one, the vast majority of mutations are negative. Those few positive, can be very minor - like having 5% better vision and being able to avoid predators more easily (or conversely, catch prey). Also, it depicts adaptation as a reactionary event, which is wrong; adaptation is not reactonary (mutations are random), but selection is (that is, it down to environment).
This is the theory of Natural Selection. It may also be known as survival of the fittest. A species either died off, or a new species came from them. Traits and characteristics changed and allowed the current generations to adapt and survive. Species sometime derived into two species, instead of just one. So that’s how the many different species of animals today came to be. They kept mutating into what we see today. Foxes and Dogs and Wolfs all are similar species of the Canine Family. From the similarities, they say that they all came from the same ancient ancestor.
You've forgotten sexual selection. And also mischaracterised the pace of evolution IMO.
Creationists believe that God created all animals and living things at Creation. Though they may have changed since God created the universe, they didn’t change by natural selection or mutation, but changed within fixed limits. Not nearly as extreme as the Evolutionists believe. So the animals we see today are mainly how God created them at Creation.
Contradicted by fossil evidence. Also fails to explain why God would create something that needed to be changed - isnn't His creation supposed to be perfecT?
MAN - APE OR NOT?
Evolutionists believe that by natural selection and mutation, over millions of years, man evolved from apes and apes from previous species. There was no special plan or design, just survial of the fittest. They believe also that the path of evolution of species is all by chance, that there is no guiding force. That the big bang and the creation of life from non-living material was chance and luck, same as the evolution of all species was.
Again, the incorrect use of 'chance' referring to evolutionary progress; a fundamental error and an complete misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Survival of the fittest again ignores sexual selection.
Finally, consider this; if the big bang and life evolve by chance, what are the odds? One in a trillion? More?
Well, there are billions of planets in this universe. So we only need a one in a billion chance of life forming to justify it here. Not good enough? How do we know there isn't an jnfinite number of big-bang/big-crunch style chains, in parallel or sequential? That'd be infinite opportunities.
Here's another thing - how likely is it that an omnipotent and omniscent being just pops into existence, creates the earth, places stuff in the Earth contradicting the story he, she or it tells people, waits several thousand years before making itself known (and allowing the likes of polytheistic Greek, etc religions to toddle on), and makes such a botch job that they need to keep coming back and wiping out or modifying animals?
Creationists believe God created man in one day, not over millions of years. Man today came from previous men who all are decendents of Adam and Eve, the first male and female. Some Christians believe that God made the universe and left it. Others believe he directs it, or directs the evolution of the universe.
FOSSILS MILLIONS OR THOUSANDS OF YEARS?
Evolutionists believe that the fossils are an accumulation of years of dead animals and extinct species spanning a great amount of time (millions of years). These are found through several layers of the earth’s crust. Though there are gaps in the fossil record, it is to be expected, as it is a natural and hard process for a fossil to be created by nature. In order for a fossil to be produced, the dead carcass has to first be buried quickly, and then several layers of sediment and earth has to cover it. Then it lies in wait forming the fossil, until someone finds it and uncovers it. Wind and rain and other natural forces can destroy fossils when exposed and uncovered, so it reduces the number of fossils we are able to find.
Creationists believe that at a time when man and animals were many in number God caused the Noachian Flood, also called The Great Flood, to happen. Sonder says, "Perhaps the Flood had been caused by a sudden shift of the Earth’s axis that had spewed up massive amounts of underground water. First, smaller animals had been swept away, and they had settled into the mud according to their specific gravity, or, roughly, their weight. Fish had died and floated to the water’s surface. Larger animals and humans ran to hilltops and mountain tops to escape the flood, but finally it reached them. They drowned and where covered with sediment in the years that followed. In other words, the fossils in the strata were not the remains of organisms that lived at different times. All had perished together in the Great Flood." 6 (Ben Sonder)
This is wrong; I mentioned earlier that history and geology proves the flood didn't happen, so lets just address fossils. How can the strata be so perfectly sorted? Why aren't brachiosaurs mixed in with elephants? How could a large mammal move faster than a small one? Why do all these fossils happen to be nicely organised in a way that shows a continuity of physical features? Fluid mechanics says small animals should be at the top, not bottom of any soft strata - so why are small organisms lower down? Why is there different pollen in different strata - did the flood water also sort pollen so each layer of strata had different climatological data? (fossilized pollen is used to determine climatic history). Why are there fossilized forests standing perfectly upright despite these vast tonnages of soil & sediment? (although there isn't actually any sediment deposits to support the flood).
Perhaps one of the most important issues - how does the flood explain fossil mineralization? Because, y'see, fossils aren't bones - they're replaced by minerals. We have archeological evidence from biblical and pre-biblical times that
shows there's not enough time for this to happen.
This explains how fossils got to be at different levels of the earth’s crust. The flood, which mass moved a massive amount of dirt, to account for the many layers of crust over the fossils, is why many species are extinct today. This is not the cause of natural selection, or because they were a weak species or died off due to catastrophes; but if God created the world only a few thousand years ago, the fossils could not possibly be millions of years old.
Wrong. See above.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
A faction called Intelligent Design, opposes evolution and denies Christianity at the same time. This group, which emerged in recent years, believes that there is no God or creator. They believe also that, the universe did not happen by chance, and evolution did not happen by natural selection (chance). They believe, that the complexity of a living being, of all the cells, and the path in which evolution took, did not happen by chance. In theory, an intelligent force designed it that way, and sort of guided it along. Once again, not God, but an intelligent force. Some claim this is ‘creation science’ in disguise, and that it’s just another attempt to discredit evolution and be pro-creationist. According to Dwain L. Ford, in his section in the book "In Six Days", "Evidence for intelligent design is widespread in nature. For example:
Incorrect. ID is well known and documented to be run and created by fundamentalist Christian groups. For example, the 'Pandas and People' book cited in the Dover trial (where it was ruled ID was religious) saw a number of changes between editions that included the ad-verbatim replacement of 'creationism' with 'intelligent design'.
A) The motorized rotating flagellum of some bacteria.
B) Blood clotting and its control.
C) The high degree of organization within a typical cell.
D) Cell division and its control.
E) The system for protein synthesis.
F) The human eye.
G) The respiratory chain based in the highly organized mitochondria.
H) The biosynthetic pathway in which acetyl CoA is the key compound." 7 (John F. Ashton)
Kind of getting late, so I'll be brief and say all of these can be explained by the forces of natural selection (although I think e) is again abiogensis). to take one specific case, it's been well illustrated how a human eye could evolve from a light sensitive patch in about 700,000 years, and this has been shown as well through convergent evolution (animals with different eye structures). i'll let Kara or someone do the rest.
CONCLUSION
Ben Sonder summarizes the main points of each position in his book as follows 3 (Ben Sonder) ,
"The Creationist Position
1. The universe, energy, and life were created from nothing.
2. Mutation and natural selection could not by themselves have brought about the development of all living things from a single organism.
3. The originally created kinds of plants and animals may have changed, but only within fixed limits.
4. Man and apes have separate ancestries.
5. The Earth’s geology can be explained by Catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood.
6. The Earth and living kinds came into existence recently.
The Evolutionist Position
1. Through naturalistic processes, the universe emerged from disordered matter and life emerged from non-life.
2. Mutation and natural selection are sufficient to explain the development of present living kinds from simple earlier kinds.
3. Present living kinds emerged from simple earlier kinds by mutation and natural selection.
4. Man emerged form a common ancestor with apes.
5. The earth’s geology and the evolutionary sequence can be explained by uniformitarianism. *
6. The earth came into existence several billion years ago and life came into existence somewhat later.
*Note: uniformitarianism is a doctrine stating that modern geological processes are sufficient to account for all geological changes in the past."
Though my personal beliefs say that Evolutionism is not true, everyone is entitled to their opinion. They do have some facts, though they may be flawed in some form. They have fossils but the dating is flawed. Either way you have to decide for yourself, weather you will believe in Creationism or Evolutionism. As I said at the beginning, you can’t totally prove or disprove either side; so, it comes down to if you believe in God or chance.
Actually, everything you've cited as creationist evidence is based on theories that have been scientifically disproven to be, at best, quackery (and usually formed in order to 'convince' people like you rather than in the interest of scientific endeavour). You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and action of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary theory.
Right, well this was actually a bit less than I'd like to write (because there is a lot to be corrected), but I have work tomorrow. G'night.
