Evidence for Creationism, is there any?

[FreddieFreeloader]

I found this quote in the "Why do you believe in Creationism or Evolution?" thread, as a response to a claim that there was no scientific backing for Creationism.

No scienticfic backing? What do you call Louis Pastuer's studys that disproved spontaneous generation? How do you explain the the fact that the earth is perfectly placed, that if it were just little bit over here or a little bit over there that we'd either burn up or freeze? Have you ever studied the complexity of the human body, of a plant or animal, or even of a microscopic cell?

As evolutionists (I'm doing the popular thing of calling evolution, abiogenesis and cosmology the same for sake of simplicity)
provide backing for their theories Creationists (specifically Young Earth Creationists) try to explain "scientifically" why that evidence doesn't hold.

I observe two things in above quote. First a misunderstanding of the implications of scientific studies (here in the case of Pasteur's experiment), but secondly, and more importantly, in the question of the burden of proof.

On to my question: Ignoring whether or not Creationists are correct in disproving the theories... Does disproving evolution, prove creationism?

I think that the answer is a loud and clear NO!

Then I ask you, what evidence do we have for Creationism?

[otseng]

A quick question:
What testable predictions which are different from those of "mainstream theories" does the creation model make?

A thread was started on this - The Flood As Science. It's another one of those threads that I'll need to get back to. Sigh... too many threads, not enough time.

[jwu]

The flood...point taken (albeit i would the creation model consider to be falisfied then...but that's a matter for that other thread).

Is there anything else?

[micatala]

I have not gone through all of the two Global Flood threads or the Flood as Science thread (I just don't have the time ). From skimming them, I think it is my sense that

1. IF the flood did occur, it occurred more than 6000 years ago, conservatively. This is based on evidence from bristlecone pines and other plant data. Now, this doesn't go against our assumptions since we have not assumed in this thread anything about when creation or the flood occurred, only that creation was a one time event and a global flood did occur.
2. The water canopy is an untenable hypothesis.
3. Radiometric dating is fairly reliable, at least for ballpark figures. We would not confuse 6000 years with 6 million years.
4. The human population growth models extrapolating back into the past are not reliable.
5. It seems to me that for Noah and company to survive the flood event, supernatural intervention would have had to occur at that point. This would violate the additional assumption I had asked for.
6. I admit I did not look EVERYTHING. I would note that I did not find what I considered an adequate explanation of the observed sequencing of fossils. It is very hard for me to accept that, under the conditions of a global flood, especially where a lot of 'stirring' occurs, the fossils would not be more mixed up. Why are there NEVER any dinosaur fossils with humans? Surely, some dinosaurs would have hydrological properties similar to humans. Why no trilobites with more modern animals? etc.

I'll stop there (as it is time to put the four year old to bed).

[USIncognito]

Greetings,

Sorry for not adding a bit more substance, but Warren's points warrent addressing and I wanted to subscribe to this thread. I'll post responses as time warrents.

(Assuming there are other further responses - not sure how subscription works here exactly.)

[Jose]

I find Warren's points rather odd. How is it possible to deny the existence of DNA, genes, and inheritance? I guess one can deny anything, but one looks rather foolish denying irrefutable facts.

This thread is simply showing evidence for a supernatural entity creating the universe.

It is insufficient merely to show that there is evidence for something. It is also necessary to show that said evidence cannot be explained by alternative models. For example: I found a tree seedling this morning where there was none last year. This is evidence for creation of that seedling by God during the night. It is evidence for a frog being converted into a tree seedling at that location minutes before I looked there. It is evidence for any origin at all. Of course, the presence of the seedling can also be explailned by the germination of a seed that landed there last fall. On the basis of the immediate data, we cannot rule out the first two explanations. But, on the basis of additional data (that trees tend to drop seeds, which tend to germinate and grow into seedlings), we are forced to consider the last explanation to be more likely.

Similarly, for Creation, we must consider alternative explanations, including evolution, and show that they are unable to account for the data before we can conclude that Creation must be true.

I argue that this is the problem with the existing "evidence for Creation." The "evidence" can also be explained by ordinary every-day mechanisms. Frequently, the "evidence" for Creation is contradicted by additional evidence, which rules out the creationist explanation. Thus, it is not enough to provide evidence. We must go to the next step, and evaluate the evidence against the background of other knowledge.

We must, of course, apply this same logic to evolution. Can we rule out creation as an alternative explanation? We cannot rule out only one version of creation: that god created the world (whenever he did so) so that it would look exactly as it does now, complete with data that point to the great age of the earth, and complete with genetics and fossils that point to common descent.

Creationism by its very nature can neither be proven or disproven. The only way to do so would to be to prove/disprove god itself, which isn't going to happen any time soon. Moreso creationism is a religious principle and in as such it does not need to be proven, merely believed, and if you are a believer it is generally very hard to dissuade someone of that belief.

Creation per se is a belief, as you say. I agree that it cannot be proven or disproven. However, the biblical creation story is deeply intertwined with the Flood, which can be approached scientifically. Therefore, The Flood As Science thread has been created to address this. I would think that if the Flood is untenable, and cannot account for the evidence, then it seems that we must consider Genesis to be allegorical--as most Christian denominations do.

Since evidence currently points that our universe is closed, I am inferring that the universe has always been closed.

Aha! I've caught you red-handed (whatever that means). This is the logic that forces us to the conclusion that evolution works, that the earth is old, and that common descent must be true. "X works this way now, so we infer that X has always worked this way." I think that if we apply this logic to things such as the closed nature of the universe, we must apply it to genetics, geology, and radioactive decay. There is no easy way to apply this logic only to the last 6000 years, and declare that there must be a discontinuity at that time, when god intervened. There is no direct evidence for such a discontinuity. Rather, the logic that "yesterday and today had the same rules" applies for all yesterdays.

Admittedly, we come to a conundrum when we work backwards all the way to the origin of the universe. What actually happened then? It's a difficult area of investigation, since it was a one-time event as far as we can tell, and we have no clue what happened before that. There are clearly things we don't know, so our explanations are rather imperfect. Perhaps, we could say, God said "let there be a big bang" and it was so. But this is a question of the origin of the universe, not the origin of life, and not the evolution of life once it arose. Creationism includes all of these--but we cannot use our limited understanding of the origin of the universe to argue against common descent and the much more recent origins of existing species.

It seems to me that it is much more profitable for us to discuss things for which we have more data. Is there evidence for the creation of plants, animals, and microbes? Is this evidence able to rule out the evolutionary origin of these species? Is there evidence for the Flood, or does the evidence rule out the Flood (which we should discuss in the flood thread)? Or must we support Creationism by taking Warren's approach, and simply declare that the evidence does not exist?

[micatala]

otseng wrote:
This thread is simply showing evidence for a supernatural entity creating the universe.

Jose wrote:
It is insufficient merely to show that there is evidence for something. It is also necessary to show that said evidence cannot be explained by alternative models.

Jose has eloquently made a point that I brought up a different waya couple of pages back. It is not enough simply to provide evidence in support of the creation model. One must show the model is consistent with ALL of the existing evidence; in other words, it must not be falsified.

If we have several models that are all consistent with all of the available data, then we do not know which one (if any of them) is 'true' (if it is even possible to tell this). We could pick out the 'best' model using other criteria. These might include:

1.

[micatala]

otseng wrote:
This thread is simply showing evidence for a supernatural entity creating the universe.

Jose wrote:
It is insufficient merely to show that there is evidence for something. It is also necessary to show that said evidence cannot be explained by alternative models.

Jose has eloquently made a point that I brought up a different way a couple of pages back. It is not enough simply to provide evidence in support of the creation model. One must show the model is consistent with ALL of the existing evidence; in other words, it must not be falsified. Jose's criterion is even stronger, in that it would allow us to conclude that the model given would be the only possible model for consideration.

If we have several models that are all consistent with all of the available data, then we do not know which one (if any of them) is 'true' (if it is even possible to tell this). We could pick out the 'best' model using other criteria. These might include:

1. Which model is simpler? Occam's razor says we should always pick the simplest hypothesis to explain any phenomenon. SImplest is often defined as the one which requires the fewest or most basic assumptions. THis can be a somewhat subjective judgment at times.
2. Which model has the greatest explanatory power. The creation model has a problem here, since allowing the intervention of a supernatural deity as an explanation in the past means you could not rule it out in the future. This makes prediction somewhat difficult, if not impossible (unless we can read God's mind).
3. The model which has the widest applicability. Evolutionary principles are inherently applicable to life anywhere. The creation model, as proposed so far, only considers life on earth, and only the particular life we see on earth.

There are probably others we could include.

I think it is also worth noting that if we rewound the clock and went back to the beginning of life on earth, the same evolutionary principles could have produces a very different world from what we see now, just through natural variability of the mutations and thousands of other 'non-pre-determined' events. Stephen Jay Gould refers to this as 'history being contingent.'

This would not happen under the usual Genesis based creation model. True, the assumptions we are using in this thread do not necessarily restrict the discussion to the Genesis model, except that they include the occurrence of a world-wide flood (although we are not saying it had to occur in just the way given in Genesis).

My own view is that the flood hypothesis is not tenable. In particular, the hypotheses regarding where the water came from and where it went to seem highly problematical and far-fetched to me. My points above are meant to get us towards that conclusion, although admittedly there is probably not universal agreement on this point . If a very ambitious person wanted to summarize the main points and if there were any conclusions from the three threads we could all agree upon, that might be helpful for the discussion here.

[Ilurk]

Otseng wrote:

Do I have empirical evidence whether the universe was closed or open at the point of its origin? No, I do not have any. Rather, I base it on our current observations of our universe. We have no evidence that anything is currently entering or leaving our universe. We have no evidence that matter/energy is decreasing or increasing in our universe. Since evidence currently points that our universe is closed, I am inferring that the universe has always been closed.

I think my initial criticism still stands. You state above that you have no evidence that the universe was thermodynamically closed or open at the point of creation. You also state that we have no evidence that energy or matter is currently entering or leaving the universe, or that the total sum of matter and energy is increasing or decreasing, yet you still claim that current evidence points to a closed universe and infer that the universe has always been closed. Sorry, but really, that doesn’t work. You can not generate an affirmative inference from the absence of evidence.

Let me give you an example. If somebody were to ask me whether your hair was black or brown, what could I answer? I have never seen you, I don’t have a photograph, I don’t know anybody who knows you so I can’t ask. In short, I have no evidence that your hair is brown and no evidence that your hair is black. I can infer nothing. The only answer I could honestly make, based on the lack of evidence is “I don’t know.” Similarly, given that you have stated repeatedly that you have no evidence one way or the other on whether the universe was open or closed at the point it came into existence or whether or not it is currently open or closed, it seems to me that “I don’t know” is the only valid answer on that point as well.

Now, I’d like to take this a step farther. I did a bit of research to discover what working physicists and cosmologists had to say about whether the universe was thermodynamically open or closed. I’ve recorded what I found below:

Martin Reese, Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge and former classmate of Stephen Hawking in his book Before the Beginning (1997):

“The famous second law of thermodynamics tells us that systems become more disordered as time goes on, that hot and cold bodies gradual equilibrate, and so forth. If an infinite past has already elapsed, why hasn’t everything run down already? This argument would be cogent when applied to a static, bounded system in a box, but carries less conviction in an open, possibly infinite, and dynamic system like our universe.”

Grant Hallman, Ph.D., University of Toronto, on Physicslink.com in answer to this question:

Given the First Law of Thermodynamics: that you can't get something from nothing. Where did all the stuff in the universe come from and how is it still a law if it was once broken?

“The law you cite, applies only to 'closed systems', i.e. where nothing can be added or subtracted from the 'specimen'. Obviously if you apply the law to an empty box, then open the box and dump in a handful of sand, or quarks, or energy, you don't expect the law to apply, because the system is not 'closed'.

It is not known whether the universe as a whole is a closed system now at present. As far as conditions preceding and at the very moment of the 'big bang', we can only speculate whether the universe was closed, or open (to another, larger system), or whether the First Law (or lots of other laws) even applies under those extreme conditions.”

I bring these up not as an exercise in quote mining, but to point out that your claim that the universe is a closed system is not generally accepted, and that physicists and cosmologists, both big name and small name, do not agree on the issue. One says open, another says we don’t know.

The bottom line of all I’ve written is this: The universe may be open thermodynamically or it may be closed. We don’t know. The universe may have been open thermodynamically or may have been closed at the point where it came into existence. We don’t know. Given that we don’t know, you can not claim that the universe was closed at the point where it came into existence and that the only way it could have come into existence is if a system outside created it.

More later.

[Ilurk]

otseng wrote:

Same way there is commonality between a violin, a cello, a viola, and a bass violin. Though they are all stringed instruments and have common features, that does not mean they evolved from one another. Rather, they were all designed and created by string instrument manufacturers.

And that, of course, is a false analogy and will continue to be so until violins, violas, cellos, and bass violins (and any other inanimate, manufactured items) begin to mate and bare offspring. It’s also not an answer to my question or a counterpoint to the point I was raising. Here’s the question again, with a single word changed to emphasize what I’m looking for:

What evidence do you have that microevolution and the original genetic variation in created organisms accounts for the variation we see today? We know that morphological and genetic commonalities can only be inherited. If what you say about microevolution and original genetic variation is true, which puts severe limits on descent with modification, then how do you explain the morphological and genetic commonalities between, say, chimps and humans, or between humans and all mammals? If the commonalities were not inherited, than what other observed biological mechanism would you name as the cause?

[Jose]

Genesis 1 and 2 can certainly be interpreted by Christians non-literally. But, I also maintain that it can be interpreted literally. My arguments for such is based primarily on empirical and verifiable evidence. I believe there is sufficient evidence in the world to have it correlate with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 (as well as chapters 3 - 10). In all of my posts in CvE, I have rarely relied on the Bible for support. Practically all of my supporting evidence comes from secular sources. And, to my knowledge, I have exercised logical arguments to support my positions. If I can do all these things to support my literal interpretation of Genesis, why should I not be allowed to do so?

I have taken this quote from angelgirl's thread Should Evolution Be Taught In Schools because it looked like the issues are worth exploring in this thread. Otseng, you speak of evidence, primarily from secular sources. Can you give us some of this evidence? I realize that you have given us some of it in other discussions, but it would be "tidier" to summarize it here, so we can consider it in this context.

There are several issues, which we should separate. One is the textual interpretation of Genesis. For this, we need a different thread (I believe one already exists). It is a matter of theology anyway, and does not contribute to the nature of the evidence. The second issue is the Flood, which is a part of Genesis. For this, too, we have a thread in which we have considered the Flood Model seriously, but have not seen much activity in recent months--ie, since we got to the point of asking what the evidence really is. The third issue is the creative event itself, including its chronology, time of occurrence, etc. It would help me if you could remind us of some of this evidence here, with referral to the other threads if they are more appropriate.

The important point is that we often hear that there is considerable support for creation, but we haven't evaluated it closely. We should do so, to determine whether it is valid, whether the conclusions are justified from the data, whether alternative explanations are ruled out, or whether additional data contradict the conclusions.