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Todd Ritzema

I have some questions that I was wondering if you'd consider answering on your website.
1. Why, if neither creationist theory nor evolutionary theory are 100% proven, should I choose to believe either one over the other?

Because evolutionary theory is a scientific theory, while creationist theory is not. No one has ever defined creationist theory in a scientific paper, and no one ever will because a scientific theory must have a mechanism, and creationism has none.

Moreover, God is a redundant term according to Occam's Razor, so creationism fails yet another requirement to be considered a legitimate scientific theory. And finally, literal Biblical creationism can be easily disproven, since many of its claims are scientifically impossible and many of its predictions can be tested and found inaccurate.

Both seem to be capable of fitting the creation account in Genesis, and both are incapable of being tested (A critical step in the scientific method) as far as I understand. If I'm incorrect please send me the data on how either or both theories might be tested.

Theories are tested by generating predictions from them and then comparing them with observations. In other words, you can test a theory even without experiments, by comparing its predictions to natural observations (ideally, observations which are taken after the theory is written).

Evolution theory is therefore testable, and it has been tested. In fact, a century and a half of fossil, geological, astrophysical, and biological evidence taken after Darwin wrote his theory of evolution have consistently confirmed that his theory has extremely accurate predictive capabilities, although the specifics of that theory have been revised and improved since he wrote it.

Creationism, on the other hand, is not necessarily testable. Vague creationism (ie- "intelligent design theory") relies upon an inscrutable divine being with unknown motives and mechanisms, therefore it is incapable of prediction and it is useless as a scientific theory.

Literal Biblical creationism, on the other hand, is specific enough to make predictions and it can therefore be tested because its central tenet is that everything in the Bible is true. Therefore any single prediction in the Bible can be tested in order to test the validity of the entire theory. For example, the Bible predicts that true believers can drink deadly poison and not be harmed at all (according to Jesus), and that a man (Jonah) can survive for three days in the belly of a whale. Both predictions are easily testable, and both are wrong. Therefore, literal Biblical creationism is also wrong.

In short, evolution theory is testable, and it has survived a century and a half of such tests. Vague creationism is not testable, therefore it is not a useful theory. Biblical creationism is testable, and it fails that test miserably. Clear winner: evolution theory.

2. Like you, I can list many examples of false creationist propaganda, however I can list just as many false evolutionary ideas and hoaxes over the years. To reject either theory on this basis shows a lot of bias.

Which is why I did not reject either theory on that basis. You should read my site before presuming to refute it with strawman criticisms.

If you reject crationism based on this where is your arguement? You're making hasty generalizations, something that you complain about in your writings.

I reject creationism for a vast array of reasons, all of which you apparently ignored in favour of this strawman.

3. A small explaination: "where are the missing links?" referes to several "links" between Cro-magnon and several varieties of pro-evolutioary frauds (one of which was based on a pig's tooth, though that one was more of a accident).

Silly argument. There have been some examples of fraud in the past, and you should note that they were largely discovered by other scientists rather than creationist activists. However, if a particular pre-human species is indeed a fraud, then there is no need to generate a missing link between it and cro-magnon, is there?

The "missing link" in creationist arguments refers to the link between primitive ape and man, and candidates for that link have been found many times.

As far as 'Lucy' is concerned, I've seen a pro-evolutionary documentary as well as a creationist book on her. While the pro-evolutionary documentary is convincing, I have some difficulty swallowing the idea of reshaping the hip-bone to allow 'Lucy' to have an upright posture. While the documentary attempts to claim that 'Lucy's hipbone was trampled, and bent; I fail to see why the bone wouldn't simply have broken, rather than bent at those points.

It was broken. You obviously didn't pay very close attention to the documentary (or it was made in an incompetent fashion), and you wind up creating a dilemma where none exists. The pelvis was broken, as shown by clear fracture indicators, and then the parts were crushed together by animal grazing.

If your bones were broken and you were buried that way, someday people would find pieces of bones. They would obviously try to figure out where one piece of bone must have fit into another, and it would not be fraud or deception to put two and two together, and reconstruct the original bone.

(I'm sure that there's no need to mention the skull-finding difficulties with 'Lucy', as that is a very common arguement on both sides of the issue.)

Wrong. It is a red herring, since the key evolutionary discovery of "Lucy" was the upright-walking pelvis, not the skull. Lucy could have had a completely chimp-like skull and it would not change the fact that it was a candidate for the so-called "missing link".

The creationist obsession with Lucy (going so far as to include outright fraud about parts being found many kilometres away from the rest of the skeleton) betrays its failure to look at the entire body of evidence. After all, Lucy is just one of many pre-human upright ape-like species discoveries. Are we supposed to simply swallow the creationists' implicit claim that any problem with Lucy must also invalidate all of the other fossils by association?

On the other hand, I do not reject evolutionary theory outright.

I would hope not, since it is the only legitimate scientific theory to explain our origins.

It may very well be that God chose to make his creation through evolution, but then again, are we really sure that only the creationist philosophy or the evolutionary theory can be true? Could they both be true?

They are mutually incompatible. They cannot both be true. Theistic evolution is the only reasonable resolution of the conflict between science and [your] religion.

Or, Could it be that niether interpretation is correct, and that the world was formed by other means by God? Could He have thought our world into existence?

That is simply another term for creationism, and it is a redundant theory. The laws of physics are testable, and known to work. Using those laws alone, we can construct a working theory for the origins of life on this planet. The laws are known and accepted, regardless of whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist (unless you're the sort of wildly ignorant creationist who denies virtually all of science).

However, the creationist adds the extra term of God into this equation, by insisting that even though physical laws can successfully explain our origins, we should instead choose a theory which adds a supernatural being into the mix, in addition to those laws. That is a classic redundant term, and it is proof that creationism merely adds unnecessary religious baggage to the situation. Occam's Razor slices it out of consideration.

Last updated: February 27, 2001

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