What's My Headline?

Here's a cool web thing from the Official Brother-In-Law of the Brink. You've got a map, by continent, of newspapers across the world. Roll over the dots to see the front pages of today's paper there. Highly cool.


Newseum.org: Today's Front Pages


filed: cool.web.stuff

Answers to Creationist Nonsense?

Below is a piece in Scientific American by John Rennie, that magazine's Editor in Chief. A pretty involved and well thought-out crititique of creationism, it exposes flaws in some lines of creationist thought but also reveals weaknesses in the evolutionary doctrines it defends. For instance:

...Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

This is a valid point--how can an evolutionist prove evolutionism to a creationist? I'm not a scientist, but I can see that while two similar species would be obvious examples of evolution to an evolutionist, they would simply suggest a shared creator to a creationist. Both viewpoints are valid and possibly unimpeachable given the disparate paradigms involved. Now, examine Rennie's hypothetical suggestion of how that evolution could be disproved:

If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way.... But no one has yet produced such evidence.

How could a creationist establish the spontaneous generation of a life-form to the satisfaction of an evolutionist? Assume for a moment that a creationist found a fossil of a life-form in a stratum indicating that it appeared suddenly, with no apparent ancestor. Would the evolutionist accept it as proof of non-evolutionary creation of life? Of course not. He would simply point to the "always incomplete fossil record" and expect future discoveries to bring to light the ancestors of the "spontaneously generated" fossil. Or, the evolutionist might believe that this "later" fossil shows that the stratum in question cannot be considered as old as was thought. Either way, the evolutionist would place the same "unreasonable burden" on the creationist's evidence that he complains of the creationist putting upon his own.


Overall this article asks some pretty interesting questions that honest thinkers on this subject must answer.


ScientificAmerican.com: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense


filed: science