The Questioning Librarian

Today is the final post of CMI's "Question Evolution" campaign, or rather my answers to their supposed Fifteen Questions for Evolutionists. I'm glad to come to the end of this exercise; the questions are long and tiresome, full of the same garbage that supporters of evolution (i.e. "real science") have rebutted over and over again only to see it thrown back at us like it's absolutely new. It isn't. There are the same old recycled arguments creationists have had for years. I have to think that the people pushing this wouldn't be satisfied with any  answer we can give them, no matter how much evidence is provided. They'll just close their ears and spout "irreducible complexity," "problems in the theory," "religious dogma" and other such denials at us. Nonetheless, I've come this far and won't stop until I've answered the last two. Here they are: Q14: Science involves experimenting  to figure out how t...

Back to answer three more of the "Fifteen Questions" for Evolutionists from Creation Ministries International. Stay with me for two more posts; now with ten of the fifteen answered, we are almost finished. So far, nothing they say has any weight in bringing down evolution; they are questions that can only appeal to creationists as definitively debunking evolution when they have done no such thing. Here they are: Q11: How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality? If everything evolved, and we invented God , as per evolutionary teaching, what purpose or meaning is there to human life? Once again, the argument from incredulity combined with a mischaracterization of what evolution actually says. Evolution says nothing about God; it is science, not theology, and explains the development of the diversity of life, not the origin of life or the origin of the universe. I repeat: evolution says nothing about God. Further, the brain is driven by c...

Back to the "Fifteen Questions" for two more today, both dealing in one way or another with fossils. The question of support for evolution in the fossil record is one of the segments of evolution that I am most interested in, especially refuting the oft-repeated canard that there are no transitional fossils, a lie if there ever was one. Here they are: Q9: Why are the (expected) millions of transitional fossils missing? Darwin noted the problem and it still remains... The creationists appears to be blind as well as deaf it seems; we do not have "millions" of transitional fossils, but we have many, enough to demonstrate the validity of evolution. The creationist once again thinks that evolution hasn't changed since Darwin wrote The Origin ; what was a problem for Darwin is no longer a problem. The discovery of Archaeopteryx soon after the publication of Darwin's book in 1859 was one of the first corroborating pieces of fossil evidence, and the case has onl...

The next three questions are up today. I must admit, I've been enjoying doing the necessary research to fill the gaps of my own knowledge in order to answer the questions, research, I might add, that any creationist could do if they actually wanted answers to the questions rather than just public relations point-scoring by asking so-called "unanswerable questions." Regardless, here we go again; Q6: Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know  that they were not designed? Ah, one of my favorites, the argument from design, often masked in the "irreducible complexity" of Intelligent Design such as Q5 represents. Living things give the illusion  of design, they are not designed, and in many cases this so-called design seems quite faulty. Species evolve over time through natural selection, their "fitness" as a species consisting of being adapted to their environment. Natural selection produces organisms that are adapted to t...

Here we are, back again to tackle a few more of the "Fifteen Questions" for Evolutionists that are supposed to awe and stump us into acceptance of creationism. Good luck with that; from what I can tell, these questions are rehashes of tired old creationist talking-points. Here are the next few... Q3: How could mutations--accidental copying mistakes--create the huge volume of information in the DNA of living things? This question encapsulates creationist obsession with, and misunderstanding of, what "mutations" are. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in the DNA when we speak of "mutations" one shouldn't read that to mean detrimental mistakes exclusively, though many are. What creationists don't seem to understand is that it isn't an all-or-nothing proposition when mutations occur in the genetic code. Sometimes they have no effect at all, but they are used later in combination with more recent mutations. This is clearly demonstrated in the devel...

Creation Ministries International has launched a new initiative, which seems a lot like all the other creationists blitzkriegs before it. With the wonderfully creative tagline of "Question Evolution", CMI intends to challenge "evolutionists" and their "indoctrination" of high school students with the supposed dogma of evolution. They also aim to  cut the population of atheists by half , presumably by challenging the "faith" that every atheist (and only atheists, no "real Christians") is supposed to hold in Darwin's great idea. The main thrust of this is a tract with fifteen "unanswerable" questions for evolutionists. I'm done putting quotation marks around the word, evolutionists; from here on out I ask my readers to recognize that it is a creationist term that is about as silly as calling someone a general relativist (accepts general relativity) or germist (for accepting germ theory). Regardless, CMI seems just as i...

There are quite a number of concepts that one could successfully argue that creationists fail to understand; whether this is out of a simple lack of knowledge or willful ignorance is hard to say and certainly can't be generalized to every creationist. Some, the everyday creationist, I would like to think simply haven't been exposed to the evidence. Others, the holders of Ph.D's in various fields, especially in the sciences, who happily reject evolutionary theory are willfully ignorant (John Whitmore comes to mind). But I think there is one idea that creationists of all stripes simply fail to understand; evolution is based on solid, visible evidence. Evolution is not some tenant of a "science religion" that descended down to Darwin from on high, it is an explanatory framework based on quite a lot of facts and mountains of evidence. It is evidence that leads to the conclusions of evolution, that life changes over time and, given the long history of the earth, all ...