Index to Creationist Claims - World of Animals Version

[creature386]

As I saw that we have many threads about theology, but little about what the title promises in this section (this can be explained by the fact that we have some theists here, but no creationists; funnily, most of the creationism versus evolutionism debating is done outside of this section), I decided to revive the evolution vs creation aspect of this section with this thread.

The name of this thread is a reference to Talk.Origins' famous list:
www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
The point of this thread is collecting creationist (ID proponents are also valid) claims and links and refuting them, this is done partially in general debate & discussion zone, but I'd like to move these discussions here.

You can either post claims or articles here. The claims should have to do something with science and not so much with creationist claims about subjects like politics.

Little update:
Maybe I should make clear what I mean by creationism. Creationism refers to flat Earth creationism (let's call them FECs), geocentrism, young Earth creationism, progressive creationism, day-age creationism, gap creationism and Intelligent Design.
Claims on the age, shape or position of the Earth, as well as about the Big Bang or on the age of the cosmos belong here. So do questions on the origin of life (not strictly a part of evolution, but frequent creationist targets).

You can do the rebuttals the way you want. You can either tell in one sentence why they are wrong (or why the way of thinking is even wrong) or you can dig up a long creationist article and refute every syllable in it.

I'll start with two extremely easy targets (I even formulated them badly to make them even easier targets):

Claim: If humans descend from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

1. This is akin to asking "If Americans descend from Europeans, why are there still Europeans?". Or the version extra for creationists: "If humans were created from dirt why is there still dirt?".

2. The question is a straw man as the monkeys living today are not the ancestors of humans, they only share a common ancestor. The animals humans descend from (Australopithecus is a candidate for example) are in fact extinct.

3. One may point out that humans should replace even extant monkeys despite the above. This is not quite true as niche specialization occurred. Many monkeys are adapted to living in the trees and therefore do not compete directly with humans.

Claim: The second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution.

1. Life forms are not closed systems. They require external energy for their processes. The second law of thermodynamics does not apply to open systems.

2. Some creationists argue that the second law of thermodynamics should apply universally as the universe as a whole is a closed system. This is not true as energy exchange still occurs. Not even Earth is a closed system as it gets energy for the sun. And increasing overall disorder does not rule out increasing order/complexity in some places.

3. If it applied to anything, embryos couldn't develop as they need to get more complex over time.


I picked these easy targets to show you how a rebuttal can be done. It can of course be a lot shorter, I just enjoy the evolution vs creationism debate too much.
Later, I will post more in this thread, choosing harder targets such as an article on Answers in Genesis that aims to invalidate radiometric dating.

To copy Talk.Origins even more, I created a directory that mimics their style. Each of the claims listed here is a link to a post of a member that replied to it.


Biology

• Ecology
• If humans descend from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
  • Why don't monkeys evolve into humans today?
• Human population growth is consistent with the Biblical age of Earth.
• Why hasn't anyone ever seen a species give birth to another species?

[li]Anatomy[/li]

• Homologies are invalid because homologous similarities can also exist within one organism (i.e. fore- and hindlimb similarity in tetrapods).

[li]Embryology[/li]

• Finger development differs between theropods and birds.
• Finger development differs between frogs and humans.
  
  

[li]Irreducible complexity[/li]

• Eyes are too complex to have evolved.

[/ul]
Paleontology

• Fossil record
• The Cambrian explosion contradicts slow, gradual evolution.
• Living fossils refute evolution.

[li]Paleobiology[/li]

• Tyrannosaurus' teeth are not indicative of carnivory.
  
  

[li]Ad hominem

• Nebraska Man and Piltdown Man were hoaxes (a pig tooth and a mixture of primate remains respectively) that undermine the credibility of evolutionists working with the hominid fossil record.

[/li][/ul]

• Transitional forms
  • Why don't we see things like crocoducks?

Chemistry

• Chemical evolution
  • Elements heavier than iron could not have been the result of stellar fusion, indicating that God designed them.
• Abiogenesis
  • Pasteur's law of biogenesis refutes spontaneous generation, making abiogenesis impossible.

Geology

• Radiometric dating
• The findings of the RATE research team invalidate radiometric dating.
• Helium in zircons indicates that radioactive decay may have occurred faster in the past.

[/ul]

Physics

• Relativity
• Lightspeed may have been faster in the past.
• The age of the universe could be the result of time dilation.
• You don't know if the speed of light is the same in all directions.

[li]Thermodynamics[/li]

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics refutes evolution.

[li]Big Bang[/li]

• The Big Bang theory states that nothing made everything for no reason which is impossible, falsifying the theory.
• Red shift quantization refutes fundamental a priori assumptions of the Big Bang.

[li]Astronomy[/li]

• Nobody has ever seen a star forming.

[/ul]

History and Politics

• There is no recorded history prior to 4000 BC.
• Historical advancement happens too fast to have occurred within around 100,000 years.
• Languages are getting extinct faster than they can emerge.
• 20th century dictators were inspired by Darwin.
• Evolution is a deliberate lie by conspirators.

Philosophy and the Scientific Method

• Causation
  • Something cannot come from nothing.
• Epistemology
  • Evolutionists have no evidence for their claims.
  • Macroevolution does not pass the scientific method.
    • Were you there?
  • Science is observable, testable, repeatable and falsifiable. Evolution is neither.
  • When Ockham's Razor is applied to origins Creation is the winner with Evolution not even being close.
    
• Presuppositionalism
  • Evolution requires the biblical worldview, but denies said worldview, making it inconsistent.
    
  • An evolved mind cannot know what truth is, hence evolution can impossibly verify itself, even if it were true!
• Theory of Evolution
  • Evolution is a religion.
    • Evolution is the religion of atheism.
  • Evolution encompasses more than just biological evolution, it also encompasses the Big Bang, stellar evolution, chemical evolution and abiogenesis.
    
  • Micro- and macroevolution have to be differed.
  • Even evolutionists dispute aspects of evolution.

• Teleology
• Bananas are intelligently designed.
• Design requires a designer.

[li]Anti-science:

• Science was wrong before

[/li][/ul]

[Infinity Blade]

"Atheists believe something came from nothing."

1.) "There is no barrier between nothing and a rich universe full of matter."-Frank Wilczek.
2.) It's possible that there's no such thing as "nothingness" as we believe it.

I am open to corrections.

[creature386]

Now a tougher challenge, Answers in Genesis' article on radiometric dating.
answersingenesis.org/geology/radiometric-dating/does-radiometric-dating-prove-the-earth-is-old/

Answers in Genesis	creature386
Many accept radiometric dating methods as proof that the earth is millions of years old, in contrast to the biblical timeline. Mike Riddle exposes the unbiblical assumptions used in these calculations.	Unbiblical is not the same as unscientific, this introduction won't give nightmares to many old Earthers.
The presupposition of long ages is an icon and foundational to the evolutionary model. Nearly every textbook and media journal teaches that the earth is billions of years old.	This is a true statement. The general theory of universal common descent of life on Earth would completely collapse in case your article was correct.
The primary dating method scientists use for determining the age of the earth is radioisotope dating. Proponents of evolution publicize radioisotope dating as a reliable and consistent method for obtaining absolute ages of rocks and the age of the earth. This apparent consistency in textbooks and the media has convinced many Christians to accept an old earth (4.6 billion years old).	Such a shame that not all Christians want to accept the flood geology of Answers in Genesis!
What Is Radioisotope Dating? Radioisotope dating (also referred to as radiometric dating) is the process of estimating the age of rocks from the decay of their radioactive elements. There are certain kinds of atoms in nature that are unstable and spontaneously change (decay) into other kinds of atoms. For example, uranium will radioactively decay through a series of steps until it becomes the stable element lead. Likewise, potassium decays into the element argon. The original element is referred to as the parent element (in these cases uranium and potassium), and the end result is called the daughter element (lead and argon).	So, you can apply a kind based taxonomy to atoms as well. Joke aside, no problem with that description.
The Importance of Radioisotope Dating The straightforward reading of Scripture reveals that the days of creation (Genesis 1) were literal days and that the earth is just thousands of years old and not billions. There appears to be a fundamental conflict between the Bible and the reported ages given by radioisotope dating. Since God is the Creator of all things (including science), and His Word is true (“Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth,” John 17:17), the true age of the earth must agree with His Word. However, rather than accept the biblical account of creation, many Christians have accepted the radioisotope dates of billions of years and attempted to fit long ages into the Bible. The implications of doing this are profound and affect many parts of the Bible.	Translation: No matter what evidence you present, we will never change our minds as evidence conflicting it MUST be false.
Science and Assumptions Scientists use observational science to measure the amount of a daughter element within a rock sample and to determine the present observable decay rate of the parent element. Dating methods must also rely on another kind of science called historical science. Historical science cannot be observed. Determining the conditions present when a rock first formed can only be studied through historical science. Determining how the environment might have affected a rock also falls under historical science. Neither condition is directly observable. Since radioisotope dating uses both types of science, we can’t directly measure the age of something. We can use scientific techniques in the present, combined with assumptions about historical events, to estimate the age. Therefore, there are several assumptions that must be made in radioisotope dating. Three critical assumptions can affect the results during radioisotope dating:	I skipped the "How Radioisotope Dating Works" section in case you noticed because I don't have problems with this, so let's look at this: Answers in Genesis, as usual presents its dichotomy between historical science and observational science to point out that scientists know absolutely nothing about what happened in the past. Their conclusion is that we cannot study the past using science and must rely on historical documents the Bible. Their dichotomy is of course false, as uniformitarianism ("assume the past was like today") is an important part of the scientific philosophy which implies that we can look a the past using science.
1. The initial conditions of the rock sample are accurately known.	As you state below, isochron dating can eliminate that assumption. Also, some dating techniques such as carbon dating make reasonable assumptions. For example carbon dating (which can yield ages well above 6,000 years) assumes that the plants have the C14/C12 ratio of the atmosphere and that this ratio is the same in the animals that eat the plants.
2. The amount of parent or daughter elements in a sample has not been altered by processes other than radioactive decay.	You do have a point on rocks not being completely closed systems. However, isochron dating also has a check for contamination:[1] Also, while rocks are not perfectly closed systems, the impact of contamination is not that terribly high. Here are tables that show the concordance of radiometric dating methods:[2]
3. The decay rate (or half-life) of the parent isotope has remained constant since the rock was formed.	The reason why this is assumed is that the decay rate of unstable isotopes is a fundamental constant based on rather fundamental properties of matter.[3] If it wasn't a constant, we'd need to find evidence of the decay rate changing. However, this evidence has not been presented yet, despite exposing the isotopes to all possible perturbations.[4] This is one of the main reasons why radiometric dating is used. Most of the creationist "methods" are based on rates that are everything, but constant. Creationists need some Flooddidit to explain away the constancy of radioactive decay. This will be discussed in more detail below.
The Hourglass Illustration Radioisotope dating can be better understood using an illustration with an hourglass. If we walk into a room and observe an hourglass with sand at the top and sand at the bottom, we could calculate how long the hourglass has been running. By estimating how fast the sand is falling and measuring the amount of sand at the bottom, we could calculate how much time has elapsed since the hourglass was turned over. All our calculations could be correct (observational science), but the result could be wrong. This is because we failed to take into account some critical assumptions. 1. Was there any sand at the bottom when the hourglass was first turned over (initial conditions)? 2. Has any sand been added or taken out of the hourglass? (Unlike the open-system nature of a rock, this is not possible for a sealed hourglass.) 3. Has the sand always been falling at a constant rate? Since we did not observe the initial conditions when the hourglass time started, we must make assumptions. All three of these assumptions can affect our time calculations. If scientists fail to consider each of these three critical assumptions, then radioisotope dating can give incorrect ages.	Content-wise merely an illustration of the above, so I can skip that.
The Facts We know that radioisotope dating does not always work because we can test it on rocks of known age. In 1997, a team of eight research scientists known as the RATE group (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) set out to investigate the assumptions commonly made in standard radioisotope dating practices (also referred to as single-sample radioisotope dating). Their findings were significant and directly impact the evolutionary dates of millions of years. A rock sample from the newly formed 1986 lava dome from Mount St. Helens was dated using Potassium-Argon dating. The newly formed rock gave ages for the different minerals in it of between 0.5 and 2.8 million years. These dates show that significant argon (daughter element) was present when the rock solidified (assumption 1 is false). Mount Ngauruhoe is located on the North Island of New Zealand and is one of the country’s most active volcanoes. Eleven samples were taken from solidified lava and dated. These rocks are known to have formed from eruptions in 1949, 1954, and 1975. The rock samples were sent to a respected commercial laboratory (Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts). The “ages” of the rocks ranged from 0.27 to 3.5 million years old. Because these rocks are known to be less than 70 years old, it is apparent that assumption #1 is again false. When radioisotope dating fails to give accurate dates on rocks of known age, why should we trust it for rocks of unknown age? In each case the ages of the rocks were greatly inflated.	The reasoning of Mike is accurate here. However, the facts are not really presented accurately. It is not as if the argon is just there, it is known where it comes from. The argon in those lava domes comes from the atmosphere.[5] So, you have a valid point when saying that using K-Ar dating on young volcanic rocks is difficult. However, the paper provides a solution to the problem. The solution are the basic principles of isochron dating: Finding a stable reference isotope. In this case, it are even two, 38-Ar and 36-Ar. The paper presents formulas which can be used to calculate the amount of 40-Ar which was produced through radioactive decay: For those who have difficulties with the equations, if 40-Ar enters a rock sample via the atmosphere, this of course inflates its age (as the K/Ar ratio shrinks). However, such Argon won't enter the rock alone, there is also 36-Ar and 38-Ar in the air. Of course you cannot expect that the ratios in the rock are the same as in the atmosphere, due to sampling bias, but having many samples should eliminate the problem. As 36-Ar and 38-Ar are not created via radioactive decay, you can assume an external origin for them. As the ratio of atmospheric 40-Ar and atmospheric 36-Ar should be the same as in their source, you can calculate the amount of atmospheric 40-Ar by multiplying the 36-Ar by 295.5, given that in the atmosphere, 40-Ar is 295.5 times more abundant than 36-Ar. By the way, maybe I should add that using K-Ar dating on recent lavas is outside of the appropriate range. The appropriate range is determined via calibration via comparing the results to those of other methods. Though the methods presented in the paper apparently also work on younger lavas, as they are able to date the eruption of Mt Vesuvius adequately. The particular dating of the Mt. St. Helens by young Earth creationists has been addressed in detain on No Answers in Genesis. In short, xenoliths probably gave the false results.[6]
Isochron Dating There is another form of dating called isochron dating, which involves analyzing four or more samples from the same rock unit. This form of dating attempts to eliminate one of the assumptions in single-sample radioisotope dating by using ratios and graphs rather than counting atoms present. It does not depend on the initial concentration of the daughter element being zero. The isochron dating technique is thought to be infallible because it supposedly eliminates the assumptions about starting conditions. However, this method has different assumptions about starting conditions and can give incorrect dates. If single-sample and isochron dating methods are objective and reliable they should agree. However, they frequently do not. When a rock is dated by more than one method it may yield very different ages. For example, the RATE group obtained radioisotope dates from ten different locations. To omit any potential bias, the rock samples were analyzed by several commercial laboratories. In each case, the isochron dates differed substantially from the single-sample radioisotope dates. In some cases the range was more than 500 million years. Two conclusions drawn by the RATE group include: 1. The single-sample potassium-argon dates showed a wide variation. 2. A marked variation in ages was found in the isochron method using different parent-daughter analyses. If different methods yield different ages and there are variations with the same method, how can scientists know for sure the age of any rock or the age of the earth?	Yes. Even isochron dating is not perfect, the paper above talked about that as well (it is nice that we are still talking about K-Ar dating). It is possible that the overall 40-Ar/36-Ar ratio of non-radiometric argon is not 295.5. The paper has shown ways to avoid the problem. In case it is higher (which can inflate the age):[5] To minimise influence of extraneous argon on the K-Ar age determination it was suggested to avoid datingof glassy rocks, remove pheno-, mega- and xenocrystals and use holocrystalline rock matrix as dating mate-rial (Guillou et al., 1996; 1997; Matsumoto and Kobayashi, 1995; Rasskazov et al., 2000a; 2000b; Singer etal. 1998 etc.). Of course this does not rule out all the problems. However, you have two reference isotopes to work with, you can take the average of both and you can also use techniques like 40-Ar/39-Ar dating. If all the methods yield similar results (1-3% difference), you can be certain that you know the approximate age of the rock. It is in fact true that different methods can yield different methods, but after doing all the described corrections, the anomalies are not that great. Geologists in fact usually publish their age ranges, you can see that not all the ages in the tables above are the same. However, the differences are not great.
In one specific case, samples were taken from the Cardenas Basalt, which is among the oldest strata in the eastern Grand Canyon. Next, samples from the western Canyon basalt lava flows, which are among the youngest formations in the canyon, were analyzed. Using the rubidium-strontium isochron dating method, an age of 1.11 billion years was assigned to the oldest rocks and a date of 1.14 billion years to the youngest lava flows. The youngest rocks gave a billion year age the same as the oldest rocks! Are the dates given in textbooks and journals accurate and objective? When assumptions are taken into consideration and discordant (disagreeing or unacceptable) dates are not omitted, radioisotope dating often gives inconsistent and inflated ages.	This particular issue was addressed in detail by the Talk.Origins archive.[7] If you want to see the problems, you can read their review. The short response to this is that their dating methods have only shown the age of the source of the rocks (the mantle) and not the rocks themselves. This happens when using non-cogenetic samples.
Two Case Studies The RATE team selected two locations to collect rock samples to conduct analyses using multiple radioisotope dating methods. Both sites are understood by geologists to date from the Precambrian (supposedly 543–4,600 million years ago). The two sites chosen were the Beartooth Mountains of northwest Wyoming near Yellowstone National Park, and the Bass Rapids sill in the central portion of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. All rock samples (whole rock and separate minerals within the rock) were analyzed using four radioisotope methods. These included the isotopes potassium-argon (K-Ar), rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr), samarium-neodymium (Sm-Nd), and lead-lead (Pb-Pb). In order to avoid any bias, the dating procedures were contracted out to commercial laboratories located in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Ontario, Canada. In order to have a level of confidence in dating, different radioisotope methods used to date a rock sample should closely coincide in age. When this occurs, the sample ages are said to be concordant. In contrast, if multiple results for a rock disagree with each other in age they are said to be discordant.	Interestingly, nearly all the studies presented here are the work of the RATE team (a creationist team). It is normally nice to see when radical paradigm-shifting results are repeated by different scientists. Lack of repetition is a common feature of pseudoscience.
	So, overall, old strategies are used, they in fact show even more Grand Canyon dating. For the reasons stated above, it is hard for me to take RATE's results seriously as far as isochron dating is concerned.
Possible Explanations for the Discordance There are three possible explanations for the discordant isotope dates. 1. There may be a mixing of isotopes between the volcanic flow and the rock body into which the lava intrudes. There are ways to determine if this has occurred and can be eliminated as a possible explanation. 2. Some of the minerals may have solidified at different times. However, there is no evidence that lava cools and solidifies in the same place at such an incredibly slow pace. Therefore this explanation can be eliminated. 3. The decay rates have been different in the past than they are today. The following section will show that this provides the best explanation for the discordant ages.	4. RATE worked sloppy. Non-constant decay rates are a nice example of a bad explanation as the cause for that (the Creation Week or the Flood) as the decay rates of the different elements were some reason affected completely differently. Remember, both were global events! If billions of years of radiometric dating occurred within the last thousand years, there would still be consistency among the different methods.
New Studies New studies by the RATE group have provided evidence that radioactive decay supports a young earth. One of their studies involved the amount of helium found in granite rocks. Granite contains tiny zircon crystals, which contain radioactive uranium (238U), which decays into lead (206Pb). During this process, for each atom of 238U decaying into 206Pb, eight helium atoms are formed and migrate out of the zircons and granite rapidly. Within the zircon crystals, any helium atoms generated by nuclear decay in the distant past should have long ago migrated outward and escaped from these crystals. One would expect the helium gas to eventually diffuse upward out of the ground and then disappear into the atmosphere. To everyone’s surprise, however, large amounts of helium have been found trapped inside zircons. The decay of 238U into lead is a slow process (half-life of 4.5 billion years). Since helium migrates out of rocks rapidly, there should be very little to no helium remaining in the zircon crystals. Why is so much helium still in the granite? One likely explanation is that sometime in the past the radioactive decay rate was greatly accelerated. The decay rate was accelerated so much that helium was being produced faster than it could have escaped, causing an abundant amount of helium to remain in the granite. The RATE group has gathered evidence that at some time in history nuclear decay was greatly accelerated. The experiments the RATE project commissioned have clearly confirmed the numerical predictions of our Creation model.... The data and our analysis show that over a billion years worth of nuclear decay has occurred very recently, between 4000 and 8000 years ago. Confirmation of this accelerated nuclear decay having occurred is provided by adjacent uranium and polonium radiohalos that formed at the same time in the same biotite flakes in granites.12 Radiohalos result from the physical damage caused by radioactive decay of uranium and intermediate daughter atoms of polonium, so they are observable evidence that a lot of radioactive decay has occurred during the earth’s history. However, because the daughter polonium atoms are only short-lived (for example, polonium-218 decays within 3 minutes, compared to 4.47 million years for uranium-238), the polonium radiohalos had to form within hours to a few days. But in order to supply the needed polonium atoms to produce these polonium radiohalos within that timeframe, the nearby uranium atoms had to decay at an accelerated rate. Thus hundreds of millions of years worth of uranium decay (compared to today’s slow decay rate) had to have occurred within hours to a few days to produce these adjacent uranium and polo-nium radiohalos in granites.	Talk.Origins replied to the helium zircons in a very, very, very, very detailed article.[8] If you are interested in the issue, you can read their article, they show many examples where Humphrey misinterpreted the data, used poorly defined values, did a questionable sampling and ignored factors that can influence the helium diffusion rate. And again, this has not been repeated by other scientists, despite the fact that the accuracy of this would cause several paradigm shifts.
The RATE group suggested that this accelerated decay took place during the Creation Week or during the Flood. Accelerated decay of this magnitude would result in immense amounts of heat being generated in rocks. Determining how this heat was dissipated presents a new and exciting opportunity for creation research.	Both is very unlikely. Radioactive decay produces heat. If the amounts of heat of billions of years of radiometric dating were produced during a single event, they could have vaporized the Earth and killed Noah and the animals on the Ark (in case scenario two is preferred),
Conclusion The best way to learn about history and the age of the earth is to consult the history book of the universe—the Bible. Many scientists and theologians accept a straightforward reading of Scripture and agree that the earth is about 6,000 years old. It is better to use the infallible Word of God for our scientific assumptions than to change His Word in order to compromise with “science” that is based upon man’s fallible assumptions. True science will always support God’s Word. Based on the measured helium retention, a statistical analysis gives an estimated age for the zircons of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This age agrees with literal biblical history and is about 250,000 times shorter than the conventional age of 1.5 billion years for zircons. The conclusion is that helium diffusion data strongly supports the young-earth view of history. It must also be concluded, therefore, that because nuclear decay has been shown to have occurred at grossly accelerated rates when molten rocks were forming, crystallizing and cooling, the radiometric methods cannot possibly date these rocks accurately based on the false assumption of constant decay through earth history at today’s slow rates. Thus the radiometric dating methods are highly unreliable and don’t prove the earth is old.	Another AiG dichotomy, "true" vs "false" science which can be identified by seeing if it supports the Bible or not.

[1] www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html
[2] ncse.com/rncse/20/3/radiometric-dating-does-work
[3] www.researchgate.net/publication/13277906_Time_variation_of_fundamental_constants_Bounds_from_geophysical_and_astronomical_data
[4] www.researchgate.net/publication/234152809_Perturbation_of_Nuclear_Decay_Rates
[5] www.academia.edu/4472181/K-Ar_and_Ar_Ar_for_Quaternary
[6] noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm
[7] www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-science.html
[8] www.talkorigins.org/faqs/helium/zircons.html

[creature386]

Because Answers in Genesis never gets boring, this article is funny:
answersingenesis.org/are-humans-animals/why-did-god-create-apes-with-human-features/
The introduction is already interesting:

While the artist adds the imaginary "missing links,"

WTF, does that mean that Australopithecus and other hominids were evolutionist fabrications on that the author drew them incorrectly to make them look more like missing links?

Anyway, this article uses the common design argument. This is not just a non-falsifiable claim (how scientific), it also has no Biblical support, it is rather a concept introduced by the creationist Jonathan Sarfati to explain homologies.

If God had not created apes, however, evolutionists would just find another "common ancestor."

Sure, it was completely impossible to make humans and apes less similar. That's why chimps share more DNA with humans than with gorillas. That's why he even used the same pseudogenes on humans and apes which means as much as that he even did the same errors when designing them or the same punishment after the fall. As for the ad hominem attacks to evolutionists ("evolutionists are the devil"), thanks for showing that you are in no way better than what you criticize (those evil evolutionists that cry "evolution is a fact").

EDIT: Answers in Genesis apparently tried to invalidate using pseudogenes as an argument by finding a particular pseudogene where humans share more DNA with gorillas than with chimps to undermine using them for phylogeny:
answersingenesis.org/genetics/human-gulo-pseudogene-evidence-evolutionary-discontinuity-and-genetic-entropy/
All I have to say is that everyone who once took a glance at a phylogenetic analysis can answer this for himself. There is a reason why phylogenetic analyses (if they uses genes) usually use more than one gene and present more than one phylogenetic tree (due to sometimes ambiguous characteristics) where they usually also indicate the robustness of each.

[Vodmeister]

Aug 13, 2015 3:11:47 GMT 5 creature386 said:

The name of this thread is a reference to Talk.Origins' famous list:
www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
The point of this thread is collecting creationist claims and links and refuting them, this is done partially in general debate & discussion zone, but I'd like to move these discussions here.

This is a great thread. Will make an elaborate post on this topic ASAP.

Creationists, especially those who actually practice in defending the subject, are the absolute masters at making mediocre arguments which seem intelligent on the surface to the average religious listener who already has a pre-disposition in creationism..

[creature386]

Because you mentioned their persuading skills, I wonder if I should also address their rhetorics when making rebuttals like the above. Even though I haven't found many fallacies in AiG's article on radiometric dating to be honest, except for circular reasoning, use of pseudoscience and false dichotomies, but few classical creationist techniques, such as straw men or gish gallop (even though their tests of K-Ar dating are straw manish).

[Vodmeister]

Where have all the people gone?

According to the now-prevailing view, the first humans lived over a million years ago. If that is really so, where are all the trillions of people who should either be alive, or whose buried remains, potentially fossilized, should be found in vast graveyards scattered around the world?

As a child, I was raised to believe that Adam and Eve were the first two people created and I had no problem believing it. But later people said we evolved from apes and I started to have problems.


A big question arose in my mind, ‘How many millions of years ago could humans have supposedly begun evolving from apes?’


I worked out how many times the world’s population had doubled since the first man and woman. Allowing for past diseases, famines, pestilence, wars and infant mortality, the population would probably have doubled at about the rate of once every couple of hundred years, allowing for it to be much slower than the sixty to seventy years it took to double last time. Multiplying the number of times that the population doubled by a couple of hundred years should give a rough idea, give or take a few thousand years, of when the first two humans were either created or evolved.


Believe it or not, the world’s population has doubled only 31½ times since the first human couple appeared on earth. This gives 6,500 years. You can work it out for yourself on your own calculator.


A lecturer on evolution once told me that there were never just two people because a whole population would have evolved. If that were so, then that would mean that the human population has doubled far less than 31½ times. But, to maximize believability of the evolutionary scenario, let’s say that the population started with only four people a million years ago. This would mean that the average time that the world’s population took to double was about 33,000 years (30.5 doublings). So it would have taken that many years to get to eight people, and another 33,000 years before the world’s population rose to 16. That is rather slow growth—by comparison, a Maori lady died in New Zealand in December 1984 at the age of 112, leaving 450 descendants.


Population growth is increasing currently at a rate of approximately 1.8% per annum (World Book Encyclopaedia), or doubling every 39 years.


Even if the average time that the population doubled in the past was as slow as once every thousand years (that is one twenty-fifth of the present growth rate), this would put the first pair of humans on Earth only 31,500 years ago.


Some people, not willing to believe that mankind was created only a few thousand years ago, claim that the world’s population has been almost wiped out many times. Clearly it has never been wiped out entirely. While some people will assert that the human population has been almost wiped out a number of times, without their providing any evidence to back it up, these same people get very agitated if we suggest that the population was nearly wiped out once by a great Flood in the time of Noah.


The world’s population was approximately 600 million in the year 1650 and increased to about 2,400 million by 1950. This means that it would have doubled twice in 300 years, at an average rate of once every 150 years.


Thanks to the Bible, we can trace the lineages of Jews and Arabs right back to the same patriarch, Abraham, who was born about 2167 BC and had six sons. His first son, Ishmael, was the father of the Arabs, and his second son, Isaac, was the father of Jacob, later called Israel, from whose twelve sons came the 12 tribes of Israel, better known as the Jews.


The World Book of Knowledge says that there are approximately 200 million Arabs in the world and about 18 million Jews.


This means that since Abraham’s time, his descendants through only two sons have doubled roughly 28 times at an average rate of about once every 150 years.


Now the Jewish people have undergone a tremendous amount of persecution and slaughter over the centuries. Hitler murdered over six million in concentration camps alone during the Second World War.


They must have lost many members through disease, infant mortality and starvation over the centuries just as other people groups have. Their history is replete with stories of battles and loss of life because of wars. Yet we find that their numbers have doubled a minimum of 23 times, at an average rate of once every 182 years.



We can calculate the rate of population growth starting from about 4,500 years ago, when, from the historical details found in the Bible, Noah and his family—eight in total—survived the deluge. That population has to double 29½ times to get the current world’s population of six and a half billion, at an average doubling rate of once every 152 years. Interesting, isn’t it? The Bible’s timeframe of history fits the data.



creation.com/human-population-growth

Whether or not the mathematics behind this argument are correct is irrelevant, because the purpose of doing the mathematics is futile, as the creationist's arguments behind using this logic is very weak.

This argument's biggest fault is that it is trying to compare the population growth of the industrial and agricultural age to the population growth of the pre-industrial age. This is a huge fallacy by itself, because the two are in no shape, way or form comparable.



There is no comparison, and obviously so. Before the agricultural age, the amount of resources that humans had did not allow them to double their population at anywhere near even a fraction of the growth they do now.

Likewise, Famularo ignores that billions of males and females have died throughout history (whether it would be disease, accidents, wars, etc...) well before they ever reached their reproductive age.

There is a phenomenon known as the population stabilization factor. Once the carrying capacity of an environment is reached, the population will usually stabilize to the maximum number of specimens that the natural resources of the environment can support.



What agricultural progression did was to increase the carrying capacity of the earth exponentially, which caused an exponential increase in human population. To compare our population growth today and apply it to the stone ages is downright ludicrous.

[creature386]

Nice! CreationWiki tried to counter the criticism of the creationist population growth model:
creationwiki.org/Human_population_growth_indicates_a_young_earth_(Talk.Origins)
They tried to get themselves out by saying that the growth rates postulated by creationists are not constants, but average, so times like the black plague decrease the average, while the industrial age increases it. They are of course nowhere showing a justification why 0.5% is "reasonable", other than that it agrees with the Biblical chronology.
So:
1.) The Biblical chronology is correct because it is consistent with an average 0.5% growth rate.
2.) The average 0.5% growth rate is correct because it is consistent with the Biblical chronology.
They also say that the average human population growth rate would need to be zero over long time for being consistent with evolutionist predictions of the age of humanity. Of course they nowhere the explain why this is unreasonable, as most animals have near zero growth rates. Simply put, when there is enough food, the population can increase. When the population increases, the food becomes sparse and the population needs to decrease again to restore the equilibrium.

---

Anyway, here are some more claims:

The forelimbs of all terrestrial vertebrates are constructed according to the same pentadactyl design, and this is attributed by evolutionary biologists as showing that all have been derived from a common ancestral source. But the hind limbs of all vertebrates also conform to the pentadactyl pattern and are strikingly similar to the forelimbs in bone structure and in their detailed embryological development. Yet no evolutionist claims that the hind limb evolved from the forelimb, or that hind limbs and forelimbs evolved from a common source. . . . Invariably, as biological knowledge has grown, common genealogy as an explanation for similarity has tended to grow ever more tenuous. . . . Like so much of the other circumstantial “evidence”” for evolution, that drawn from homology is not convincing because it entails too many anomalies, too many counter-instances, far too many phenomena which simply do not fit easily into the orthodox picture.

(Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 151, 154)

So, homologies are invalid because that would imply that fore and hind limbs evolved from a common source. It is a bit imperfect to use an example from homologies within the same organism because then it is not unreasonable to assume that they emerged from the same gene, as gene duplication is a known process in bringing evolutionary novelty.

More on homologies, you will now see two claims from Jonathan Sarfati, two responses from Talk.Origins and two response-responses from CreationWiki. First of all, I admit that TalkOrigins' responses were spongy. Hence, I help them.

Jonathan Sarfati said:

Most scientists believe that birds descended from theropod dinosaurs. But theropod dinosaurs have lost digits IV and V from a primitively five-fingered hand, leaving them with digits I, II, and III. Birds, on the other hand, have digits II, III, and IV, having lost digits I and V. It is almost impossible for the two groups to be closely related with such a significant anatomical difference.

Talk.Origins said:

1. Anatomists initially thought bird digits were I, II, II based on their anatomy. This was revised on the basis of bird embryology; the digits are seen to derive from condensations II, III, IV. It is plausible that dinosaur digits also developed from condensations II, III, IV, and a frame shift in the development of digit identity causes those three condensations to developed into digits I, II, III. Such a frameshift occurs in kiwis, in which digits II, III take the form of I, II with the loss of the condensation for digit I.

CreationWiki said:

This is nothing short of an admission that the claim is 100% correct, Talk Origins just throws in a bit of baseless speculation to try to save the dino to bird theory from reality.

The speculation is far from baseless.
The argument in a nutshell:
1. A frame shift can save the dino bird theory.
2. The frame shift has been observed and is not made up.
Here is the source for the second claim BTW:
www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5111.full

A similar shift in digit identity with condensation loss is evident in the hand of the vestigial wing in the Kiwi [Apteryx (55)]. Kiwis have only two fingers, and, in the absence (or near absence) of digit DI (CII), digit DII (CIII) sometimes can display the number and shape of phalanges natural to digit DI instead of digit DII or a combination of attributes of both fingers (Fig. 5 b and c). It is equally revealing that, in Kiwis, the third condensation (CIII) never gives rise to a third digit (DIII). Natural variation of this sort demonstrates unambig- uously that there is no one-to-one relationship between digit identity (D) and condensation identity (C). That is to say, depending on the theropod in question, morphological fea- tures characteristic of a thumb (DI) can develop from any of three different condensations, that is, either CI (e.g., Herrera- saurus), CII (e.g., Archaeopteryx), or CIII (e.g., some Apteryx).

Which scientific principle is violated when solving problems with known mechanisms?

Moreover, the manus of birds is very similar to that of closely related theropods like Deinonychus, as figure 2 in the paper demonstrates. Are you saying that Deinonychus isn't a theropod either?

Lastly, this is a very important quote:

Novelties arising early in a life cycle can have profound influences on later development, which may explain how shared developmental and genetic pathways can so often succeed at providing congruent patterns of synapomorphy (56). Nevertheless, because evolutionary novelties can arise at any point in ontogeny (57), care should be taken to identify all of the developmental modules to which the homology relation might be applied, even if, at first glance, we seem to be dealing with a single “character.” Only in this way can one hope to avoid mistaking the homology of developmental precursors for the homology of the adult characters themselves.

We should also remember this when discussing the next claim.

Jonathan Sarfati said:

Amphibians and mammals both have five-fingered hands, supposedly homologous structures indicating common descent. However, they develop in completely different ways. In humans, the limb tip (called the apical ectodermal ridge, AER) thickens, and then programmed cell death divides the AER into five regions that develop into digits. In frogs, the digits grow outward from the beginning.

Talk.Origins said:

1. Frogs and mammals (and other tetrapods) use the same mechanisms of limb development, including the same HOX genes and the same molecules. All (except a few highly derived frog species) have an AER. The difference between humans and frog is that frogs have webbed feet. Human-like programmed cell death would destroy the webbing.

CreationWiki said:

Nothing Talk Origins says above in any way refutes Sarfati’s description of the two processes, all they do is show:
1. That there are some similarities between Amphibian and mammal hand development
2. What the reason for the difference is, that being the difference between webbed and unwebbed.
Neither of these is inconsistent with Sarfati’s description of the two processes, so what’s Talk Origins point?

This is a straw man, TalkOrigins claim is inconsistent with Sarfati's, as Sarfati acted as if frogs didn't have an AER. As TalkOrigins said, frogs have an AER except for some special forms like this one (and the paper makes clear that it is an exception rather than the rule):
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9688504
So, the main difference is that frog's devolved the programmed cell death to preserve their webbed feet. As the quote from the dino bird digit paper shows, evolutionary novelty can arise in any point of phylogeny, so Sarfati's claim shouldn't trouble evolutionists a lot.

[Vodmeister]

Aug 23, 2015 17:39:15 GMT 5 creature386 said:

Nice! CreationWiki tried to counter the criticism of the creationist population growth model:
creationwiki.org/Human_population_growth_indicates_a_young_earth_(Talk.Origins)
They tried to get themselves out by saying that the growth rates postulated by creationists are not constants, but average, so times like the black plague decrease the average, while the industrial age increases it. They are of course nowhere showing a justification why 0.5% is "reasonable", other than that it agrees with the Biblical chronology.
So:
1.) The Biblical chronology is correct because it is consistent with an average 0.5% growth rate.
2.) The average 0.5% growth rate is correct because it is consistent with the Biblical chronology.

Classic William Lane Craig style reasoning. 

They haven't made it as subtle though, arguably their only mistake!

I also have no idea where they got the 0.5% growth value from.

[Vodmeister]

THE SPEED OF LIGHT VS. THE AGE OF OUR UNIVERSE

1. Creationists believe that our universe is anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 years old.
2. We humans can observe other stars and galaxies which are millions of light-years away, meaning light took millions of years to reach this planet.
3. This means that our universe would have to be at least several million years old.


The creationist's main counter argument will be that:

The speed of light was faster in the past, so objects millions of light-years away are much younger than millions of years.

There is very little to absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the speed of light is anything but a constant. In fact, there is actually strong evidence that the speed of light has remained fairly constant, and was certainly never anywhere near what creationists need it to be.



One light year = 9.46 × 10^12 kilometers. That is the kind of speed per hour which the creationist needs light to have moved at during creation, in order for his theory to hold water.

Never mind the physical absurdities of it all, if the speed of light slowed down from 9.46 × 10^12 km/hr to only 1.08 × 10^9 km/hr in only a mere 10,000 years, we would expect an enormous, exponential difference (slowing down) of the speed of light across 21 years.

But no, the speed of light has been fairly constant whenever it has been measured, baring any margin of error.

This leaves the creationist with only the classic "God did it" argument, where they will simply imply that god deliberately put the light there to mislead us, or as they like to say, to "show us his creation". Not that you can actually disprove something like that.

[creature386]

UPDATE: I misrepresented Humphrey's claims, I'll give a better reply later.

Russell Humphreys tried to solve that problem with his white Hole Cosmology.
creationwiki.org/White_hole_cosmology
(This is also Answers in Genesis' tentative solution to the starlight problem)
This is the creationist's alternative to Big Bang Cosmology and implies that time was passing a lot (13.8 billion years/6 days = 840 billion times) faster on the distant edges of the universe than on Earth during the Creation Week which is why we can see light from that distant stars. The reason for this is that Earth was created inside a black hole and therefore experienced time dilation (of course the Bible forgot to mention this very important detail). TalkOrigins replies to that and CreationWiki (as usual) replied to them:
creationwiki.org/Gravitational_time_dilation_made_distant_clocks_run_faster_(Talk.Origins)
In a nutshell, CreationWiki's explanations are an attempt to make the theory unfalsifiable, by making un-uniformitarian assumptions, saying that the white hole ceased to exist and assuming a naturalistic anti-creationist conspiracy in scientific circles. White Hole Cosmology is radically different from Big Bang Cosmology, it assumes that the universe is finite and spherical. And of course that the milky way is located at its center. Humphreys used quantized redshifts to support his latter assumption, but these redshifts have been discredited by scientists:

For those who are too lazy to watch everything, minutes 11 to 14 should be enough.

P.S. Funnily, the helium zircon hypothesis (also developed by Russell Humphreys) and WHC are really similar. "Billions of years of radioactive decay occurring during the Creation Week or Flood" vs "Light traveling billions of lightyears during the Creation Week"

[Vodmeister]

I have to admit, I am almost impressed by some of the ridiculous explanations creationists can come up with, such as light distance of our universe or radioactive decay. It takes some serious creativity.

The tragedy of it all is that while the vast majority of creationists are rather dim, there are a few "leaders" they have out there who actually are fairly intelligent, and could (for the crying shame) become great scientists if they did not have such an enormous agenda and pre-disposition.

[Infinity Blade]

For the last few days I've been eating some bananas and looking at the "banana argument", coincidentally.

The "banana argument" basically argues that bananas possess a substantial amount of physical features that are supposedly perfectly fit for human consumption.

The argument makes the following points regarding the banana, which:

1.) fits perfectly into the human hand; there are even two grooves on one side that correspond to the two grooves on the thumb and three grooves on the other side that correspond to the three grooves on the index finger.
2.) possesses a non-slip surface.
3.) outwardly shows its ripeness; green is too early, yellow is just right, black is too late.
4.) has a sort of "tab" on the top that facilitates opening and prevents squirting.
5.) has a perforated peel to facilitate peeling.
6.) has a peel that's biodegradable.
7.) curves toward the face to facilitate consumption.
8.) is shaped perfectly for the human mouth.
9.) tastes good.

Therefore, it is concluded that given the number of supposed conveniences for humans bananas have, there must have an intelligent designer who created bananas for humans to consume.

Unfortunately, this argument ignores and has an abundance of counterpoints.

1.) It assumes that just because something has natural features that superficially correspond to designed features that said thing had to have been designed.
2.) It actually is true that the bananas we consume were indeed designed. Except not by God, but rather by humans. Bananas were domesticated via artificial selection by humans. It should be of no wonder that bananas, which were selectively bred by humans to make them more desirable for human consumption are seemingly well-designed for humans.
3.) The wild bananas humans domesticated did/do not resemble their domesticated counterparts; wild bananas are significantly smaller and are full of seeds, obviously making them less desirable for consumption.
4.) That a banana can't squirt someone (which is because it is rather solid inside) would sort of invalidate the need for an opening tab.
- Speaking of the tab, some primates don't even use it to open a banana.
5.) The banana doesn't really have a non-slip surface, it's just that the skin of the hand has contact friction properties akin to those of rubber. The human hand is likewise capable of holding virtually anything, making it understandable as to why a lot of objects can be viewed as "non-slip".
6.) The banana actually misses one of the grooves in the circle created by the index finger and thumb, namely the one created by contact between the finger and thumb.
7.) That domesticated bananas are parthenocarpic (seedless and unable to reproduce on their own) means that humans have the chore of having to intervene in their reproduction.
8.) The bananas humans consume today are actually inferior to the ones that were consumed up until the 1950s (Cavendish vs. Gros Michel, respectively).
9.) If bananas were so "perfectly designed", why don't the majority of animals eat them?
10.) Bananas vary in morphology. Therefore, to look at one banana and use it as an example of how bananas are "perfectly-designed" would be to ignore bananas as a whole, which do not actually fit the "perfect design" description.
- Many banana species are edible yet have drastically distinct appearances.
- Furthermore, some banana species are strikingly similar in appearance yet hardly edible if not flat out inedible.
- Also, a great deal of banana species don't outwardly show their ripeness.
11.) Bananas don't grow in the majority of the planet. The only way to make bananas available to all people living in various parts of the world would be through modern supply chain, further undermining the "perfect" image of bananas.
12.) Most plants do not fit the "perfect design" description.
- In fact, a lot of foods that humans eat are difficult to get at.
13.) "The Death cap fungus is superficially similar to the Edible field mushroom as are several species called collectively Destroying angel and mistakes over these fungi cause new fatalities annually. It is incomprehensible why a god who takes so much trouble over the design of the banana takes so little care to help people distinguish edible mushrooms from deadly poisonous fungi."
14.) Even if this was a valid argument for a non-human designer for bananas (which it isn't), the specific details about the designer could still vary tremendously.
- Perhaps multiple entities helped design the banana instead of a single one.
- Perhaps the banana designer doesn't exist anymore.
- Perhaps the banana designer wasn't/isn't supernatural at all.
- It does not prove Christianity in particular is correct. For all we know, bananas could have been designed by a deity (or deities) from any other religion.
15.) "The argument provides no good reasons to suppose that a naturalistic, non-design explanation for bananas is improbable, let alone impossible."
16.) There are far more inedible or dangerous objects than delectable ones.
17.) "Humans evolved to be able to eat naturally-occurring foods. From this perspective, the argument sounds a bit like Douglas Adams' analogy of a puddle thinking that the hole it's in was designed to fit it perfectly."
18.) "The list of features above smacks of cherry picking to devise a good example. Given the range of variation in fruits and vegetables, the enormous number of possible combinations of their attributes, and the fact that the foods we eat are almost by definition the ones "most suited" for our consumption, it would be extremely improbable that no fruit or vegetable would seem "especially well-suited" for our use."
19.) It's possible to be allergic to bananas. Perfect food for humans?
20.) It's possible to not even like bananas. Once again, perfect food for humans?

References:
- wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Banana_argument
- rationalwiki.org/wiki/Banana_argument

[creature386]

Aug 27, 2015 5:56:15 GMT 5 Vodmeister said:

I have to admit, I am almost impressed by some of the ridiculous explanations creationists can come up with, such as light distance of our universe or radioactive decay. It takes some serious creativity.

I agree. The advantage of these arguments is obviously that they sound very scientific and fledgling creationists very likely find them more convincing than "God created a universe/Earth that only looks old". And they are hard to refute for laymen, as they are hard to understand (RationalWiki apparently failed to understand White Hole Cosmology, judging from what was written on the talk page of their article about it).

On the other hand, the two theories I have shown are very disputed, even in creationist circles. The CreationWiki (which tries to give impression of peer-review in creationist circles) the noted that White Hole Cosmology is problematic as it is hard to test and even leading creationist organizations such as Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research only tentatively accept it as the solution to the starlight problem. As for the helium zircon hypothesis, even Humphreys is aware that the heat problem ("Why didn't billions of years of radioactive decay vaporize Earth") has yet to be solved. Of course such little details are cut out by creationists who are introducing such theories to a popular audience.

[Vodmeister]

Irreducible Complexity Argument - Richard Dawkins Explains the Eye




www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E