Tilting at Straw Men

Matt Jones discusses a more than usually clueless Creationist’s attempt at rational discourse.

Previous thoughts on the subject can be found in this post.

Let’s examine the post that Matt responds to:

Evolutionists believe in 6 different kinds of evolution:
1. Cosmic Evolution – the origin of time, space, and matter. This is the big bang.
2. Chemical Evolution – the origin of higher elements from hydrogen. (If the Big Bang produced hydrogen and some helium, how did we get the others?
3. Stellar and planetary Evolution – the origin of stars and planets. (No one has ever seen a star form. What you see is a spot getting brighter and you assume a star is forming. It could be the dust is clearing and there’s a star behind it. No one has ever proven the formation of a single star. Yet it’s estimated that there are enough stars for every person on earth to own 2 trillion stars.)
4. Organic Evolution – the origin of life. Somehow life has to get started from non-living material. (But spontaneous generation was proven wrong 200 years ago.)
5. Macro Evolution – Changing from one kind of animal into another. (Nobody has ever seen a dog produce a non-dog. Big or small it’s still a dog. Dog, wolf, and coyote may have had a common ancestor, but they’re still the same kind of animal.)
6. Micro Evolution – Variations within kinds (big dogs and little dogs). Only this one has been observed.

It is not clear whether or not these reflect the original thought of the poster or the study series they she mentions. In any case, they are so full of misrepresentations, misunderstandings and confusion they are, in Pauli’s famous phrase, not even wrong.

The fundamental trick that Creationists use in their debate is to insist on combining the ideas of evolution, which simply means “change”, and random or self causation. That is, they insist that if you say that the number and kinds of species of living things on Earth have changed over time, that that change must have been purely random and causeless.

This trick is dishonest because the first idea is simply an observation about nature, and the second is a philosophical assumption that is not necessarily implied by the first.

It is true that the non-religious often cite the observation that things have changed over time as evidence that it’s all random, but that’s just as dishonest. The idea of evolution can say nothing about origins or reasons for change.

That said, let’s examine each of the statements above:

1. Cosmic Evolution – the origin of time, space, and matter. This is the big bang.

It is ironic that when the Big Bang was first proposed, many non-religious scientists opposed it on the grounds that it was far too creationist, in that it implies a definite beginning in time for the universe. As Matt Jones says, this is not just an airy-fairy theory out there; there are dozens of multiple lines of evidence that come together to suggest that our universe began in a singularity some 14 billion years ago.

Note that this does not imply anything about the origin of this singularity. I happen to assume that God caused the singularity. The non-religious will assume that it caused itself (note that recent inflationary theories that attempt to explain origins simply push the question further back). These speculations regarding cause have nothing to do with the observation that the universe itself, however it got there, began 14 billion years ago and has developed into what we see today. See Hugh Ross’s work for more on this.

2. Chemical Evolution – the origin of higher elements from hydrogen. (If the Big Bang produced hydrogen and some helium, how did we get the others?

This is simply dishonest. As Matt Jones says, this is simple nuclear physics — inside stars, which start out all hydrogen, nuclear fusion produces heavier and heavier elements, until the star explodes and spreads those elements out into the universe, where it eventually collects into planets and puppies and butterflies. In fact, we can easily reproduce this in labs, in nuclear weapons, and even in the comfort of our own workshops.

3. Stellar and planetary Evolution – the origin of stars and planets. (No one has ever seen a star form. What you see is a spot getting brighter and you assume a star is forming. It could be the dust is clearing and there’s a star behind it. No one has ever proven the formation of a single star. Yet it’s estimated that there are enough stars for every person on earth to own 2 trillion stars.)

This is dishonest as well. As Matt Jones says, we see stars in various stages of formation all over the place, AND changing over time. Astronomical records going back hundreds and thousands of years have contributed to our models of stellar formation.

4. Organic Evolution – the origin of life. Somehow life has to get started from non-living material. (But spontaneous generation was proven wrong 200 years ago.)

This is also dishonest. The “spontaneous generation” thing is a shibboleth among creationists, but it’s utterly a non sequitur. Because Ben Franklin put some meat in a bell jar 200 years ago and it didn’t develop maggots, this means that there is no way that life could develop from non-life. Utterly ridiculous. We have not quite yet developed a comprehensive account of the development of life, but we are close, and progress is continually being made on that front.

In computer science we see that self-organizing and replicating systems arise spontaneously from all kinds of simple systems all the time. In other words, it is almost trivially easy to write a computer program that simulates some simple initial conditions which spontaneously evolve into self-replicating systems. It’s almost as if there were something about the universe that encouraged the development of life…

Note that the post’s author neglects to mention Avida, the most famous of these computer programs.

5. Macro Evolution – Changing from one kind of animal into another. (Nobody has ever seen a dog produce a non-dog. Big or small it’s still a dog. Dog, wolf, and coyote may have had a common ancestor, but they’re still the same kind of animal.)
6. Micro Evolution – Variations within kinds (big dogs and little dogs). Only this one has been observed.

I put these two together because they reflect a false dichotomy perpetuated by Creationists. Biologically there is no difference. Creationists tend to define the former as being the production of new species, which generally happens when the new species cannot interbreed with the old (although the definition of species and speciation is fuzzy). However, there are many instances of speciation observed in the wild, thus rendering the Creationists’ argument invalid! In Creationist terms, we have observed “macro evolution” in the wild.

In addition, anyone who looks honestly at the fossil record can see a continuous progression of forms. St. Augustine himself, observing the indications of branching families in nature, proposed that animals had evolved from a few initial forms.

Furthermore, the study of genetics shows clearly that we have evolved from earlier forms. We can track individual genes in the genome over time and observe how the various families in nature have developed with mutated versions of those genes, and how some families’ genes contain retroviral DNA that was inserted as a result of infection. The genome is like a palimpset containing layers and layers of overwritten data that can be easily read, just like we can see the development of planets, stars and galaxies as we look out into space (and back in time) until we get a glimpse of the fire of creation itself — the 3 degrees Kelvin background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

The fundamental issue I have with Creationists is honesty. To insist that the abundant evidence of evolution in the universe must be coupled with a belief in its randomness is simply dishonest, for both Creationists and naturalists alike.

I can, in fact disprove it with a simple statement: I believe that God created the universe. I believe that that creation consists of the evolutionary processes we observe throughout the universe today. Therefore, it is demonstrably false that to believe in evolution must mean I don’t believe in God’s creation.

It is a scandal that some loudmouths in the church continue to cling to their own human-inspired interpretations in the face of all the abundant evidence in the natural world, which, as Scripture says, reflects the invisible qualities of the Creator who created it.