My email exchanges with Creation Ministries International

This is what i said in my email to Creation Ministries International:

A friend of mine said to me this on Facebook: "Creationism is not science. You can look up thousands of scientific journals, there's none about creation science. Creationism is a religious belief, not science. So I guess we're talking about different things here. I'm talking about science, you're talking about Christianity.


Just one caveat, if you start challenging scientific theories with religious teachings, you risk being as ridiculous as Pope Pius when he disagreed with Galileo's heliocentric view. And I'm not 'sure' about evolution. I'm no scientist, so my view doesn't matter. I merely agree with scientists on scientific matters, just like I agree with Mourinho on football or Jon Favreau on speech writing."


Please help me answer his challenges. Thanks.


This is their reply:

Creation at its core is not about scientific claims, but historical ones. While refuting the scientific claims of evolutionists is an important part of what we do, this in and of itself does not disprove evolution, because theoretically there could be some mechanism we haven’t discovered yet. So our rejection of evolution does not have to do with the scientific evidence per se, but our acceptance of the truth of the Bible’s historical account of the creation of the world by God in 6 literal days.


While some areas of the creation/evolution debate are carried out in the scientific arena, like whether or not there is a plausible mechanism that would bring about the conditions required for naturalistic evolution, the most vital questions are in the historical arena, because we’re not debating things that we can test in a lab, but one-time events. As N.T. Wright points out in Surprised by Hope,


“There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable. Caesar only crossed the Rubicon once, and if he'd crossed it again it would have meant something different the second time. There was, and could be, only one first landing on the moon. The fall of the second Jerusalem Temple took place in A.D. 70 and never happened again. Historians don't see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can't repeat them in a laboratory.


“But when people say, "But that can't have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn't actually happen," they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quite gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial. In any case, if someone declares that certain kinds of events "don't normally happen" that merely invites the retort, "Who says?" ...


“So how does the historian work when the evidence points toward things that we do not normally expect? …Sooner or later questions of worldview begin to loom in the background, and the question of what kinds of material the historian will allow onstage is inevitably affected by the worldview in which he or she lives.”


We’ve got a lot of articles on the Galileo myth (for instance http://creation.com/galileo-quadricentennial); Galileo didn’t get in trouble for promoting heliocentrism, but for promoting what was then just a pretty good hypothesis as if it already were a proven fact, and his arrogance. In fact, it was the Aristotelian establishment in the universities, not the Church, who was the first to attack him. The Church initially supported him!


Which scientists does he agree with, though? Evolutionist scientists agree that evolution happened, but it’s hard to get them to agree exactly how that happened! And then there are scientists who believe that the evidence in their specialty supports not evolution but some form of Intelligent Design or creationism (although not all of those scientists would agree with biblical creation). CMI employs more scientists than any other Christian organization to the best of my knowledge, and they all believe that the evidence from their specialties fits better with biblical creation than with evolution.


Me:

Here's what my friend replied me:

"Haha, first of all, my sincere respect to you for taking what I thought as a casual discussion seriously.
I suppose you want me to counter their arguments, so here it is:

 One of the first things I noticed is that they (CMI) seem to indicate that scientists are not evolutionists. This is very skewed. You can ask, google around or approach jc/univ biology/paleontology teachers/professors, find out how many of them are evolutionists.


Just to give you a perspective, in the scientific community, the theory of evolution is almost as solid as the theory of gravity. As I said, scientific journals are filled with articles about evolution. All scientists are evolutionists, except the cuckoo ones.I wrote a paper about (social) evolution last year, so I read quite a lot of them for my literature review. All the published articles agreed with evolution.



Having said that, it's interesting that they say creation happened like a historical event and, hence, unprovable/irrefutable. This clearly indicates that it is not science as one of the main principles of science is falsifiability. If there is no way that the "theory" can be falsified, it is no science. Example: the theory of gravity is falsified if it is proven that there is no gravity force between two masses. But since there is no such proof to date, we can assume that that theory is valid.

 The theory of evolution is the best scientific explanation we have today regarding the variety of species on Earth, at least untill we find a theory that better explains the matter at hand and/or falsifies evolution.

I think I have answered to all of their arguments. Otherwise, please do point them to me. And for you, try think for yourself. Don't always believe what is said/written in a (holy) book or preached by a charming figure. Imagine all possibilities. Is there any slightest chance that you're mistaken about something? Open your mind. Ask questions, accept no simple answers. Life is much more beautiful if you understand its mechanism. (;"



i know i should be rebutting him myself but i lack the necessary adequate knowledge to do so. but one day i pray i God will equip me with the knowledge to enlighten the unreached! for now, pls advise me what i should reply to him. seems like i'm stumped!



Creation Ministries International:


I’ll reply to your friend’s assertions one-by-one.


> One of the first things I noticed is that they (CMI) seem to indicate that scientists are not evolutionists. This is very skewed. You can ask, google around or approach jc/univ biology/paleontology teachers/professors, find out how many of them are evolutionists.


Not all scientists are evolutionists. We don’t dispute that creationists are a minority. But creationist scientists have made important contributions to their individual fields. And heliocentrism and evolutionism were once minority positions, as was relativity; simply constituting a minority doesn’t make a view automatically wrong.ot all scientists are evolutionists. We don’t dispute that creationists are a minority. But creationist scientists have made important contributions to their individual fields. And heliocentrism and evolutionism were once minority positions, as was relativity; simply constituting a minority doesn’t make a view automatically wrong.


> Just to give you a perspective, in the scientific community, the theory of evolution is almost as solid as the theory of gravity. As I said, scientific journals are filled with articles about evolution. All scientists are evolutionists, except the cuckoo ones.



Gravity is testable. You can drop a ball, walk off a cliff, throw a computer out the window to observe the effects of gravity. You can repeat tests over and over in different conditions to see what happens. But you can’t perform the same tests with evolution; you can’t see life coming from non-living chemicals by chance. Indeed, the scientifically testable principle that I learned in biology class is that life comes from life, that is, if you see a living creature, it’s safe to assume that it came from a living creature of the same sort, which itself came from another living creature of the same sort, and so on and so forth. But they make an exception for the first life, which they argue came from non-living goo.


Also, part of the “life comes from life” rule is that the offspring will be the same sort of creature as the mother; rats from rats, bats from bats. But evolutionists have to assume that somewhere along the line, for example, a rat (or something so like it that that’s what a layperson would call it) gave birth to something that wasn’t quite a rat, even though it was separated from its family by only a membrane of skin. This was somehow advantageous to it, and somewhere down the line its descendants gave birth to something a little less like a rat. Somewhere along the line the front paws became neither paws nor wings, but something in between that was neither particularly good at walking or flying, but somehow an ancient predator didn’t leap at this easy dinner, and eventually, slowly, over millions of years, this crippled lineage turned into full bats.


As Chesterton argued, a divine providence watching over the creature is more plausible than a run of luck like that. Your friend might reply that this is a ridiculous simplification, and that in fact bat evolution is nothing like that. Okay then, have him give a more plausible account of an evolution of flight in a creature that couldn’t always fly that doesn’t result in a crippled intermediate. And ask him to explain why the “earliest” bat fossils are fully developed fliers with echolocation.


> Having said that, it's interesting that they say creation happened like a historical event and, hence, unprovable/irrefutable. This clearly indicates that it is not science as one of the main principles of science is falsifiability. If there is no way that the "theory" can be falsified, it is no science. Example: the theory of gravity is falsified if it is proven that there is no gravity force between two masses. But since there is no such proof to date, we can assume that that theory is valid.



Creation didn’t happen “like” a historical event, creation is a historical event. If evolution happened, it would be a historical event as well. If life arose from non-living chemicals, it would have only done so once, and had it arisen multiple times, it would have meant something different every time. In that sense, what we are discussing is a historical question, not a scientific one, and so science is limited in what it can tell us about those historical events, although no creationist would say that science tells us nothing about historical events.


> The theory of evolution is the best scientific explanation we have today regarding the variety of species on Earth, at least untill we find a theory that better explains the matter at hand and/or falsifies evolution.


The theory of evolution cannot explain the origin of first life, because evolution assumes a reproducing organism to start with. Your friend will say that the question of abiogenesis is a completely separate issue. It’s not—many specialists call it “chemical evolution”, but even if we give him that, evolution cannot account for the genetic information needed to turn the descendents of the first microbe into life forms as diverse as corn, fruit flies, and people.


Your friend argues that you should ‘think for yourself’. You believe what is written in the Bible and is preached by your pastor. Your friend believes what is written in his science textbook and is preached by the likes of Dawkins. Is there the slightest chance he is mistaken about evolution? He should open his mind and not accept simple evolutionary answers.