This is an adaptation of chapter 10, Confronting Creationists, in Michael Shermer’s book, Why People Believe Weird Things.

My comments are in italics.
 
He gives twenty-five of the main creationist objections to evolutionism and answers them. I have selected the objections that are worth considering.
 
1) They say that Creation Science should be taught in schools for it is science.
 
But it is not science but religion for they suppose that the Bible is inerrant and the word of God. They put the word of the Bible first.
 
Moreover, it is not scientific of them to say that God is creator when the creator could be an intelligent computer made of spirit and not a God of love.
 
2) They say that science deals only what can be found today and cannot tell us about the past so we need the Bible to fill in the gaps.
 
Geologists and archaeologists are scientists and we can learn what went on in the past.
 
Scientists shouldn’t be using the Bible for to use a book there is so much contention over among historians is unscientific.
 
3) They say Creation Science should be taught alongside evolution so that both sides of the human origins issue are presented.
 
That would blur the distinction between teaching science and fact. If classes should not be taught Native American creation myths in Biology they should not be taught the Bible’s myth either.
 
It is possible to believe in creation and in the flood and in two first parents without bringing in God or proclaiming the Bible to be the infallible word of God. Even if the Bible is right that does not prove it is God’s word. The creator could easily be an impersonal force as a God. But their science brings in God and that is unscientific and unphilosophical.
 
4) The Bible is a book of science and should be taught in the schools.
 
Why the Bible and not other books that do the same?
 
Even if the Bible fits science that does not mean it should be taught in science. However I agree with the Fundamentalist idea that the Bible claims to be science and history. To say that God made the world is to make a scientific statement.
 
5) Natural selection says the fittest survive for they are the best adapted and the best adapted survive for they are the fittest. This is arguing in circles.
 
It is not for the fittest would necessarily have to be the best adapted. It’s just commonsense.
 
Sometimes circular arguments give guidelines about what to look for and then we find evidence and they cease to be circular arguments.
 
6) Evolutionism is wrong for there is no evidence for it so creationism is right.
 
Evolution being wrong would not make creationism right and if creationism is right that does not mean that the Bible is true.
 
Creationism is a very strange concept for it has a supernatural God who makes things out of nothing at all. That means there could be an infinity of things we cannot think of that could be alternatives. When creationism seems mad and paradoxical that gives the other mad and paradoxical possibilities a chance. It is arrogance to say if evolution is wrong then creationism is right.
 
Evolution can never be disproved for there is no limit to the ways it might have happened. It could be that it happened to some species and the rest were made by beings from another world.
 
7) Evolutionism is to blame for the atheism, Marxism and decline in morals that sweeps America.
 
It doesn’t necessarily lead to these. And even if it does, it has not led to more evil in the people involved than we would expect.
 
Creationists call the God of Moses having gays and adulterers and apostates stoned to death and the climate of fear in which he governed Israel morality for they support the Bible in all it says. As bad as modern life is it is not as bad as that. Moreover, Atheism alone can purify your mental health and therefore your behaviour. Atheism is not bad. Evolution which is an atheistic attempt to explain life has nothing to do with Marxism because when not all Atheists are Marxists you don’t necessarily have to become a Marxist if you believe in evolution. Most believers in God believe that evolution is the way God makes all things. The creationists say this is a cruel way to create. But they don’t say that God commanding the needless murders in the Bible is cruel. It is just prejudice and deceit. Funny how they drop the excuse that we cannot fathom God’s ways when it suits them.
 
8) Evolutionism is a religion like secular humanism and should be banned from American schools if creationism should be.
 
Religion is about the unseen and science about what is seen and to say that evolutionism and secular humanism are religions is to make the word religion mean nothing or its definition becomes too broad.
 
Suppose evolutionism and creationism can both be classified religious. Creationism is more religious than evolutionism so since we have to teach something it would have to be evolutionism.
 
9) The disagreements among evolutionists proves that the evolution theory is false.
 
It does not when they all believe in evolution. They just bicker over the details and what happened when and how. There are many different versions of how evolution happens. Christians bicker over many things so does that mean Christianity is false?
 
There are as more differences among creationists about what is evidence for its position and what is not and even about what exactly happened or how to interpret the Bible.
 
At least with evolution you don’t have the problem of explaining how God could have been such a bad teacher in the Bible and causing all this confusion and division!
 
10) There had to be a first cause and God is that cause so God is like a person when he makes persons.
 
Green paint is made from blue and yellow paint which are not like green. Men having nipples and panda’s thumbs are two things out of millions which refute design by a perfectly intelligent God.
 
And God is totally different from anything we imagine and the Church says that the more you learn about him the less you know.
 
11) Science says something cannot come from nothing so where did what exploded in the big bang come from? It must have been God. That is why we can’t believe that life evolved.
 
Evolutionists are more concerned with how the people and animals of the world got their present state of development than with how the universe began or what it came from or about how life began. The other questions are for philosophy not science. And if something cannot come from nothing then doesn’t God making something from nothing contradict this?
 
12) They say that if you calculate back from the present world population you work out that there had to be only two people Adam and Eve alive 6,300 years ago. The population would be very big if there had been people around for as long as evolutionists say.
 
That would mean that in 2,600 BC ago there would only be 600 people alive but we know that there were well-developed and sophisticated civilisation in Egypt and China and many other places at that time which refutes the small world population. Population does not grow steadily but jumps back and forward.
 
A lot of killings and plagues took place before man became more civilised.
 
13) Mutations which are supposed to be the basis of evolution are always harmful.
 
But most mutations are so small that they are harmless. They can effect genetic change and make the organism improve.
 
The mutations needed in evolution can take place so slowly and over such a long period of time that they are harmless. A slow mutation might not have have same effect as a fast one.
 
14) The bones offered as evidence of human evolution are just bones that have been diseased by arthritis and other diseases and homo erectus and australopithecus are just apes. Why is there no evidence of the beings that were half evolved to humanness in the fossil record?
 
The answer is that there are too many bones that show that evolution happened both in animals and with man for evolution to be wrong. Lack of fossils can be evidence of a rapid change not that evolution has gaps in it and that creationism is true like they maintain. Creationists ignore the fact that fossils are rare so you can’t expect the fossil record to tell you a lot.
 
When creationists are shown a transitional form and another one they demand a third to show that there is a link between the two. But if they got the link they would be looking for another link between 1 and 2 and 2 and 3 and more links between each one and so on forever which is mad.
 
16) The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that things get more disordered as time goes on while evolutionism says living things get more ordered.
 
The answer to this objection is that there were countless failures in the evolutionary process so it is not as orderly as it looks. It is only partly orderly but the order is what we would expect by chance to come out of the disorder.
 
17) Even the simplest living thing is too complicated to have been made by chance.
 
It is not random and by chance. Chance helped but it was not the entire cause.
 
18) The flood made sure that the simple organisms are on the bottom layers and the more advanced ones at the top of the fossil record. This sorting is the reason it looks as if the higher animals evolved from simpler ones in the fossil record.
 
This is wrong for something had to float down to the bottom and some of the organisms had to float up to the top.
 
19) Dr Thomas Barnes proved that the earth is no older than ten thousand years when he shows that the half-life of the earth’s magnetic field is 1,400 years.
 
He assumed that the rate of decay does not change speeds, sometimes going faster and other times slowing down and it is very changeable. He was wrong. Many dating techniques corroborate each other but creationists just focus on the ones that tell them what they want to hear.
 
20) We know that living fossils which are animals that have not changed in millions of years prove that God made all life at once.
 
Evolution says that the environment causes change. It only proves that these creatures didn’t need to change. With natural selection some creatures will develop all they need to survive quicker than others.
 
21) Science has been taken in by hoaxes like the Piltdown man so listen to Creation Science instead.
 
That is all the more reason to watch out for outlandish chatter like Creation Science.
 
Real science moves on after admitting mistakes and science cannot work or teach us unless it makes mistakes.
 
If creationists listened to evolutionists and were not hell-bent on proving an argument and had more time for integrity there would be no dispute.

 
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