Origins

Adam Dill
Origins
Creationism vs. Evolution, the argument disputed by more scientists, more paleontologists and more everyday people than probably any other argument since the dawn of man. Who is right? Do the theories and evidence of evolutionists have the right answers or do the faith and facts of creationists hold the answers?
What is creationism? ?Creationism? is the idea that all forms of life, and particularly humans, were independently created by a willful act on the part of God or a deity. What’s wrong with creationism? That depends on what form of creationism you are referring to. There are several forms of creationism that all differ from one another. None are really scientific, though not all are unscientific to the same degree. ?Old earth creationism? holds that the earth was created a very long time ago and populated with life more-or-less shown in fossil records. However, new species of organisms were created one-by-one over all that time, each the result of a separate creative act by the Deity. This theory is not scientific, because it cannot be falsified; any evidence can be made to fit into it. ?Sequential creationism? says that the earth is old, and the major groups of fossils do reflect organisms living at different times in earth’s history. However, the major mass extinction represent times when all living things were destroyed, and then the earth was repopulated by a new creative act. The last extinction happened recently, after which the current animals and humans were created, but this isn’t scientific either. Sequential creationism simply doesn’t agree with the evidence. None of these mass extinction’s wiped out all life. In many cases, we find the same species of organisms both before and after the extinctions. ?Day-age creationism? says that the book of Genesis is accurate in describing the order of creation, but that each ?day? in Genesis actually represents a long period of real time. This position also runs out of evidence, primarily because the order of creation as given in Genesis doesn’t agree with the order as shown in fossil records. Of all the different forms of creationism ?young-earth creationism? is the worst. This is the position that most of the politically active creationists hold. Young-earth creationists demand a literal reading of Genesis. They insist that the earth is less than ten thousand years old; that it and all life were created in just six twenty-four-hour days; and that the entire fossil record is a result of Noah’s flood.
Other forms of creationism are simply different interpretations of the known geological and fossil evidence. Only young-earth creationism requires its believers to either reject or rewrite most of the hard sciences. Atomic physics, astrophysics, most of geology, most of paleontology, much of biology and nearly all of genetics would have to be torn down for young-earth creationism to be true. If this were true then all the fossil evidence, researchers, scientists and many others supporting evolution are not only wrong, but also have wasted centuries of time and research.
There are absolute arguments to disprove the theories of evolution. The first being that evolution cannot take place unless random mutations occur, but in the case of advanced animal defense mechanisms, random mutation cannot produce them.
An example of this would be a particular beetle called the bombardier beetle. This particular beetle houses two chemical tanks in its body which are used for the purpose of self-defense. When a predator attacks the beetle, the two different chemicals in the tanks are sprayed out from the beetle. They combine in the air and create a hot chemical explosion in the face of the predator insuring the beetle’s survival. According to evolution when the very first mutation appeared and the chemical tanks were just beginning to form but were not yet functional, they would not provide any survival benefit to the beetle. It would take many thousands of mutations over millions of years to produce the end mechanism, but since mutations are random, they could never follow a pattern to produce an end result, especially since the mechanism would not provide any survival advantage until it was fully developed. Evolution just simply cannot work! A current modernized example would be like copying a computer program on a computer that randomly changes one byte during each copying process. You could copy the program a million times but all you will get is a nonfunctioning program, not a program with more features. Life forms can adapt and change within a species because God built into their DNA the possibility of many variants, but one species can never evolve past these limits into another totally different species. The second argument against the theory of evolution is all observed mutations cause a loss of DNA information. Scientists of creationism and non-creationism both show examples of the loss of DNA information. All experiments in the laboratory that involve the DNA of mutated specimens always show a loss of DNA information, for evolution to truly take place there must be the addition of new data to the DNA chain, yet this has never been the case. In fact many evolutionists always show animals that have lost some feature and hold that up as an example of evolution. Thirdly, no intermediate fossils have been found to support evolution’s theory that we evolve through stages. An eye-opening example is if evolution were true there should be numerous examples of animals which are between mutated stages. There has never been a fossil discovered that shows how wings develop, never a fossil of a creature whose forelimb is half way between an arm and a wing, yet evolutionists base recreated creatures on these premises.
In finding common ground in evolution and creation it should be mentioned that science itself can only deal with how the universe operates or works, because this is what we can actually observe and test. The subject of the origin of life and the universe is outside the scope of human observation and, therefore, does not technically come under the definition of science. Since no human was present to observe the universe coming into existence by chance or evolution, and no human was present to observe the universe coming into existence by design or creation, both evolution and creation are, ultimately, positions of faith and not science. So whether creationist or evolutionist the believer must be a person of faith.