Origins Essays - Creationism, Denialism, Creation Myths,

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 time s 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. The y 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