I'm
writing a series responding to an article from TalkOrigins.org
titled, FABNAQ
(Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions). I'm hoping to
answer 2-3 questions with each post but the first 2 questions had
multiple sub-questions so I answered only question #1 in my first
post and now I'm answering only question #2 in my second. And even
though I'm only answering a single question, this is a longer post
than usual. Thanks in advance for your patience. Let's get on to
the next question:
2.
Is there any observation which supports any feature of your theory?
(An adequate answer to this question will not
be something which is a problem for evolution, but is rather evidence
for your
theory. Remember that it is logically possible for both evolution and
your theory to be false. Something which appears to support Lamarkian
evolution rather than Darwinian, or punctuated equilibrium rather
than gradualism is not enough. Also, the observation must be
something which can be checked by an independent observer.)
I've
talked many times before about the nature of theories and evidence.
In short, theories are our attempts to explain the evidence. A
fossil, for example, doesn't tell us how it came to be. Instead, we
use our theories to explain how the fossil came to be. I believe
most fossils were created suddenly in the Flood described in Genesis.
Someone else may believe the fossil formed in a local event (like a
flooded stream), which buried the creature. Both theories could
explain how the fossil formed yet the fossil doesn't tell us which is
true. The fossil is simply data and isn't really for either
theory.
This
idea that evidence is for any theory seems rather circular to
me. If I invent a theory to explain some thing, how could I then say
the thing is evidence for my theory? If I found a black rock with
purple stripes painted on it, I could theorize that aliens painted
the stripes on the rock. What evidence do I have for this theory,
you might ask? Well, there's the rock and there are the stripes so
that proves it! You can see how that doesn't work.
The
question should be, which theory better explains the evidence?
It seems obvious that the better theory is the one that best
explains the evidence. And if that is true, then problems for
evolution do tend to be evidence for creation. I wrote a
series a couple of years ago, where I suggested 10 observations that
were better explained by creation than evolution/naturalism. I'll
link to the series below but here are a few points from that series:
- Secular origin stories claim matter/energy just poofed into existence. They believe there must have been a natural cause for nature but that's like saying nature created nature. It's absurd. It's far more reasonable to believe that something outside of nature caused nature – something “super”-natural.
- Secular scientists still cling to a type of spontaneous generation which they now call “abiogenesis.” It's similar to the long discarded belief that maggots would spring out of rotting meat. Every example of spontaneous generation that was once believed to have occurred has been debunked through experimentation and observation (AKA, “science”). Now, evolutionists similarly believe the first life-form sprang out of a fortunate arrangement of amino acids. They haven't seen it happen. They can't make it happen. They just blindly believe it did happen. It's far more reasonable to believe God created life.
- Mimicry is an observed phenomenon where one creature looks and/or behaves like another creature. A fly might look like a bee; a lizard might look like a leaf; a moth might look like an owl. There is an obvious survival advantage to this – prey can more easily hide from predators or maybe it appears too dangerous to approach. But how did such remarkable similarities evolve? Evolutionists have their stories: each generation of fly was tested by natural selection, and the fly most similar to the bee survived until, over time, the fly looked a lot like the bee. The problem with this story is that evolution is not supposed to be a directed process. Natural selection didn't know the fly should look more like a bee. Furthermore, the bee is also supposed to be evolving so it wouldn't matter if the fly looked like the bee if the bee was going to look like something else in a million years. To believe such a remarkable similarity could evolve naturally is improbable. To believe it has happened thousands of times is laughable. It is far more reasonable to believe the similarities are the product of design.
As
I've said, evolutionists have their own explanations for these
things. The question is, which is the better explanation. In many
cases, creation is the better theory to explain what we observe.
Related
articles:
2a.
Is there any observation which was predicted by your theory?
If
two theories predict the same thing, then that thing really wouldn't
be evidence for either theory. For example, because the Bible says
there was a flood that covered even the tallest mountains, I could
predict we might find fossils of aquatic animals on the top of even
the tallest mountains. Sure enough, we do find shells on the top of
the Himalayas. Now, people who believe in evolution have their own
theories on why there are fossils on the tops of mountains. It's as
I've already said, both theories have to explain the evidence.
However, in this case, the Bible was indisputably written before
anyone Mt Everest so finding evidence the tops of mountains were once
underwater was predicted before the evidence was found.
I
can already see the evolutionists rolling their eyes as they read
this. I would consider this a very successful prediction – made
millennia before being confirmed – but I doubt critics will see it
the same way. In spite of what you've always heard, many skeptics
don't go wherever the evidence leads them. Instead, they only see
what they want to see and they refuse to see this as a successful
prediction. Oh well.
What
we need are predictions that are based on creationist assumptions and
are not the same as predictions made by secular theories. Here's one
for you to consider:
In
1984, PhD scientist, Dr. Russell Humphreys, published his predictions
of the strengths of the magnetic fields of both Uranus and Neptune.
His prediction was specifically borne out of his belief in creation.
In his own words (source):
“I
made the predictions on the basis of my hypotheses that (A) the raw
material of creation was water (based on II Peter 3:5, "the
earth was formed out of water and by water"), and (B) at the
instant God created the water molecules, the spins of the hydrogen
nuclei were all pointing in a particular direction. The tiny
magnetic fields of so many nuclei would all add up to a large
magnetic field. By the ordinary laws of physics, the spins of the
nuclei would lose their alignment within seconds, but the large
magnetic field would preserve itself by causing an electric current
to circulate in the interior of each planet. By the same laws, the
currents and fields would preserve themselves with only minor losses,
as God rapidly transformed the water into other materials. After
that, the currents and fields would decay due to electrical
resistance over thousands of years. Not all creationists agree with
my hypothesis that the original material was water, but all agree
that once a magnetic field existed, it would decay over time.”
What's
more, his predictions were very different than the
secular, dynamo
theory predictions. Not just a little different but different on
an order of magnitude.
In
1986, when Voyager II passed Uranus, we learned that Humphreys'
prediction was correct and the dynamo theory prediction was wrong.
In 1989, Voyager II passed Neptune and, again, Humphreys was proven
right and all other predictions were wrong.
Humphreys
made his predictions in 1984. They were verified in 1986 & 1989.
TalkOrigins wrote their article asking for successful predictions in
1992. They either had not heard of these successful predictions,
heard of them and didn't consider them to be successful predictions,
or heard of them and ignored them hoping that no one else ever hears
about them. I'll let my readers decide which is most likely the
case.
Related
articles:
4 comments:
It seems obvious that the better theory is the one that best explains the evidence. And if that is true, then problems for evolution do tend to be evidence for creation.
Do your criteria for "best explains" involve Occam's Razor (parsimony)? It's not clear that any explanation that tells us "anything can be explained if we just posit an omnipotent, omniscient Creator Who just happened to want things to be that way," can be more parsimonious than, well, any rival explanation that doesn't depend on positing any such entity.
Do problems for creationism (specifically your version of it) tend to be evidences for evolution?
Your particular explanation, inter alia, has the Earth and plant life created before the sun. Now, an omnipotent Creator could create fish before water to put them in, or birds before air to breathe or fly in, but that is not what the creation account posits. There are trees to nest in before there are birds to nest in them. So the creation of the sun on Day Four implies that the Earth doesn't orbit the sun, and that daylight is a thing that exists on its own, apart from sunlight. Are these not problems with your explanation?
Chimpanzees show more genetic variety than humans, despite humans being descended from three pairs of humans aboard the Ark and chimps from, at most, one pair of chimps. Evolution explains this in terms of repeated population bottlenecks in prehistory which affected our ancestors but not chimps; how can creationism explain it? Where does the biblical account allow for such bottlenecks after the Flood?
How, on creationist accounts, did kangaroos get to Australia without leaving any kangaroo populations along their trail?
And, always, if ichthyosaurs and whales existed together before and during the flood, why are their fossils not found together in the same strata? One could ask analogous questions for many sorts of faunal succession: dinosaurs and modern mammals alike occupy or occupied a wide range of environments and niches; why don't we find, e.g. equid fossils alongside any non-bird dinosaurs, etc.?
There's too much data that your theory doesn't merely fail to explain, but implies cannot exist, at all -- yet it does exist.
Mimicry is an observed phenomenon where one creature looks and/or behaves like another creature.
And mimicry is at least a minor problem for (your version of young-Earth) creationism. Supposedly, all life was created to be vegetarian. What the need for protection against predators? But then again, even without vegetarianism (or assuming that, e.g. insects are metaphysically a sort of vegetable), what the purpose for protection against predators? The Creator, on your account, endowed predators with keen eyesight, and prey with elegant camouflage of various sorts, or gave predators strong slender limbs for pursuit, and prey similar adaptions for fleeing predators, or predators piercing and crushing teeth, and prey armor or thick skin. The Creator seems to enjoy working at cross purposes (unless the world is His personal video game, with balanced play to keep the conflict interesting ... which has interesting theological implications).
Natural selection, of course, would be expected to work at cross-purposes, since different organisms and lineages compete against one another for resources.
Natural selection doesn't need to know that an insect "should" look like a bee (or a leaf, or a stick, etc.). In a petri dish full of bacteria, natural selection doesn't "know" that the bacteria needs to become antibiotic resistant; it's just that mutant bacteria that are more resistant survive more. Likewise, any mutation that makes a predator less likely to identify an insect as potential food (it need not work perfectly; as with a casino that can lose many individual games and still make a profit, a "fitter" phenotype can fail many times, as long as it succeeds enough, and more often than competing phenotypes), whether that change moves it in the direction of looking like a bee, or a leaf, or whatever.
It likewise doesn't matter that the bee is evolving; in each generation, the flies that look most like current, local bees will be most likely to survive. Or perhaps there will be no flies that look enough like bees (or anything else) to survive; Daniel C. Dennett saw this as evolution's "bait and switch." You see the adaptions that worked; you don't see all the lineages that died out without descendants, all the things that might profitably have been mimicked, if the underlying structure of the insect or the available mutations had only been right, but the right opportunities and mutations did not arise.
Sure enough, we do find shells on the top of the Himalayas. Now, people who believe in evolution have their own theories on why there are fossils on the tops of mountains.
I'm not sure that evolution, by itself, predicts marine fossils on Mount Everest. And modern plate tectonics combined with millions of centuries predicts it whether we assume that species evolve by natural causes or are specially created when and where God wills. Here's a question: given that young-Earth creationists of your type generally assume that Mt. Everest as we see it today didn't exist before the Flood -- that the Himalayas were raised up as the closing act of the Flood -- how much difference, except in time scale, is there between your explanation for why marine fossils are on Mt. Everest and the mainstream secular explanation?
Okay, timescale is of some importance, I grant.
Doesn't the Flood imply that marine fossils should be on all mountains? Mt. Ararat, famously, is a volcanic mountain devoid of fossils. Okay, so maybe the volcanoes destroyed earlier fossils that had been laid down during the Flood. But still, your explanation for fossils on mountaintops implies that they ought to include a mix of modern, "Mesozoic," and "Paleozoic" species, since on your account they all lived and swam and died together.
Fun fact: back in the late 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci argued that beds of fossil claims on dry, mountainous Italian land could not be remnants of Noah's Flood, since [a] they consisted of separate layers of different species that defied explanation in terms of flood deposition, and [b] the presence of intact, connected shells shows that they were buried alive, and not transported by water after death. Again, the Flood explanation for marine fossils on high ground doesn't predict the details of such fossil depositions.
In 1984, PhD scientist, Dr. Russell Humphreys, published his predictions of the strengths of the magnetic fields of both Uranus and Neptune.
According to Wikipedia, he did not so much find his exact predictions confirmed, but rather claimed, after the magnetic fields of those planets had been measured, that his theory could explain the observations better than secular theories could. I cannot find an account that gives the actual values he predicted and compares them with those found, which somewhat undercuts the impressiveness of the prediction. An aggressively secular site, the Rational Wiki, claims that his predictions for the strength of Jupiter's magnetic field were way off (but again, no figures are given). So I don't know, but based on what information I can find, his prediction is less impressive than your sources wish it to be.
Here's an obvious prediction of young-Earth creationism: radiometric dating should yield young dates for the Earth. Now, some dating methods can't tell the difference between a rock a week old and one a million years old, but none are doomed to yield ages in hundreds of millions or billions of years if the samples aren't that old. It would be trivial for an all-powerful Creator to have all dating methods reliably converge on an age of, e.g. ca. six thousand years (or at least, "less than six million years") for every igneous rock layer. No amount of excuses for why radiometric dating might be unreliable can entirely erase the blatant failure of this obvious prediction.
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