Creation: Question Evolution Campaign — Introduction
A Sunday guest post by my brilliant husband, Gregg.
Every Sunday, my clever husband offers me a “day of rest” by taking over the homemaker duties here. His primary topic, the Biblical Truth of Creation vs. Darwinism, is a subject that has broad reaching scientific, social, and metaphysical implications and is gaining more and more attention in our modern culture. For believers and non-believers alike, the primary purpose is to present scientific, historical, logical, and/or sociological data in an empirical and defensible fashion, as much as possible written in layman’s terms, and in a format suitable for supplementing any homeschool curriculum whether you choose to believe the Biblical account — or secular guesses — about the origins of human life on earth.
The Creation.com 15 Questions Campaign
I have been absent since returning from overseas and getting re-acclimated. For my regular readers, you have my apologies coupled with a commitment to return to contributing regularly. But honestly, the break did me a lot of good. Hallee and I will continue to refine our schedule and adapt to new demands made on our time.
Meanwhile, the good folks over at Creation Ministries have developed and launched a new campaign involving 15 questions to ask “evolutionists” which presumably means those who believe in any kind of evolution other than what is commonly referred to as “micro-evolution.” In very large part, I support this ministry and I want to use this campaign as a springboard for the next several weeks of Sunday posts, but I have a personal objection to the term “evolutionists” because I do not think it is specific enough.
After all, a person can accept the primary assumptions of Darwinism without being a Darwinist. In my opinion, a Darwinist is someone who not only largely accepts the primary assumptions of Darwinist, but also applies those tenets dogmatically as a matter of doctrine to his or her world view. Often, Darwinists exhibit evangelical tendencies, proselytizing the unproven primary tenets of unproven (or unprovable) evolutionary theory coupled with some flavor of secular humanism, and Darwinists consistently limit their problem solving and analytical skills to a framework of methodological naturalism.
So, in the coming weeks, I will change the language slightly and as appropriate in the interest of clarity.
Introducing the 15 Questions
This is a summary of the 15 questions we will be discussing in the coming weeks:
- How did life with specifications for hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?
- How did the DNA code originate?
- How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist?
- Why is natural selection taught as ‘evolution’ as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?
- How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?
- Living things look like they were designed, so how do [Darwinists] know that they were not designed?
- How did multi-cellular life originate?
- How did sex originate?
- Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?
- How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?
- How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality?
- Why is [Darwinist] evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated as ‘science’?
- Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to [the Darwinian model of] evolution?
- Why is [the Darwinian model of] evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as the operational science?
- Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?
I believe these are all good questions that deserve some room for discussion and I am excited to get back to regular contributions here. It is my sincere hope that you will feel free to participate in an intelligent and civil way that educates and enlightens on every side of the issue, whether you are a believer or not.
I commit to you that I will publish every single comment that meets this blog’s commenting criteria. You may want to review that criteria before adding your opinion here.
God Bless you and yours.
Gregg
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Additional Posts dealing with Creation and Darwinism
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I’ve been interested to see how you will address these questions, although in fact many are connected to topics you’ve already talked about here.
I see that CMI has started posting their own reactions to summarized responses that they have received, and dismissing them. I expect that some of the responses they got were more detailed and nuanced than is implied by the way they sum them up. And it seems to me they’re giving support to their readers to also dismiss any arguments they get which sound similar.
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I’ve been looking for their next installment of responses, so I saw today’s post about ‘junk’ DNA. It sounds like propaganda writing to me. I would guess that most of their readers don’t know a lot about DNA, so that anything they write sounds like an informed conclusion. To me, it sounds like they are arguing against a straw man idea of junk DNA and a straw man idea of how research gets done.
(I’m missing the creation posts; they stimulate my mind. But I know your time is very busy and full now. And I’m not your target audience anyway.)
Looking at the CMI website, which has a daunting number of articles, I found a page called “Arguments we think creationists should NOT use” which included an example: ‘If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes today?’. I mention this because someone used that argument in a comment here (I don’t remember which post).