NostalgiaSearch
Junior Member
Originally posted by Patient_Leech
Let's pretend this is still a debate, lol... because unfortunately far too many people still don't look honestly at the evidence. I think our species is doomed unless we realize our true origins and start making sense of the universe and our place in it. If we don't we're going to continue to kill each other (at worst) and delude ourselves (at best) over which book was written by God.Creationism has a lot of things to answer for to be a viable scientific theory. Just to name a few...
1. [b]Vestigial Structures
like the appendix in humans and hip bones in whales and dolphins (not very "intelligently designed"😉 (see video 1 below)2. Starlight (I even had a Bible teacher in high school mention this as a baffling piece of evidence for Christians)
3. Fossil Record (less complex organisms deeper in the record, more complex more recent in the fossil record - no humans with dinosaurs, no rabbits in the Precambrian era, etc)
4. Chromosome 2 (evidence of a fusion, pretty conclusive for our relation to apes) (See video 3 below)
5. Dover, Pennsylvania area School district. Creationism did not hold up in court..
[/B]
I'll be the devils advocate (if you pardon the pun) for the creationist position. I believe God did it, I just don't know how, so I guess I'm suitable for this.
Obviously it's harder to dismiss them all as a whole, in combination these points are pretty strong, but individually they are often (not always) easy to dismiss from a creationist standpoint.
1. Vestigial structures are easier to dismiss because they could just be a result of the fall. Also there's still so much about genetics we don't know, perhaps there is a hidden reason on the level of genetics why those structures exist. It could even be a result of "micro evolution".
2. For starlight. We are living in a big universe, and we know that the speed of light can be influenced by any number of factors, all it would take to throw this theory out of the window is to discover something new that makes the universe appear older through influencing the speed of light.
3. The Fossil record is definitely the strongest point. Even for a Christian, the idea of Satan planting fake fossils is far fetched for many. I could perhaps resort to arguing that dating the age of fossils using rock might not be reliable, and would at best show the age of the earth, not the actual creature encased in the earth. What would you say to such an idea?
Also, many creationists would point out that a person could create fake fossils in a lab, and that it would require faith in the system to believe otherwise. You might respond that there is evidence that science is reliable, to which the creationist would respond that there is also evidence that even non-credentialed scientists have successfully created false discoveries before. (Piltdown man for example), how much moreso credentialled ones who would likely have the knowledge and resources to produce a convincing fake?
4. Again, a pretty good point, although if it turns out this specific genetic similarity/difference exists for the benefit of humans, then that alone could explain the similarity.
Not to mention the whole 99% similarity thing is an out of date myth based on incomplete data (You can't just compare a small fragment of DNA and act like it applies to the whole thing). And because our DNA is made literally of the same 4 components (A,C,T,G) as chimps and all other animals, there's bound to be atleast a 25% similarity just because we are made of the same stuff, no common ancestry or evolution required. Another large section of the similarity could be explained purely as things needing to be that way for us to survive, the rest as smaller mutations.
What I'm interested in finding out, but have no idea where to begin to look, is how they know that they "HAR"s (human accelerated regions) are accelerated, rather than simply differences between us and chimps. Or how they know for sure that junk DNA doesn't have some actual use, considering how different we actually are from chimps.
I'm not a scientist, so I certainly don't know everything, but there has been so much discussion on the topic of evolution and yet most of it is out of date to my knowledge.