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I don't think anti-creationism evangelists are fighting the right battle. blahedo basically nailed it in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892757 h

I don't think anti-creationism evangelists are fighting the right battle. blahedo basically nailed it in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892757 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892757 I would say it like this: creation is a non-scientific issue. It is not, absolutely NOT anti-scientific. Science is to creation as anthropology is to dependency injection. There just isn't any relation. Allow me to illustrate. If you were God (more specifically, if you had the power to create something from nothing) and you wanted to prepare an awesome dinner for your significant other, what would you do? Would you create a huge cosmic explosion, wait for planets to form, set up the necessary amino acids for life on one of them, wait for life to form, direct the evolution of plants suitable for human consumption, start a garden to grow those plants, grow some produce, harvest it and cook it up? No, you would just snap your fingers and create the dinner. After doing so, any scientist looking at your dinner would conclude that something like the process I described above had occured. There would be absolutely no way for them to know it had been created from nothing as all scientific inquiry would point to a clear natural origin. The ingredients in the dinner would all be identifiable as known plants and animals, so the obvious conclusion would be that they came from those known plants and animals. That the ingredients just popped out of nowhere as you snapped your fingers is not a provable (or disprovable) explanation. It is therefore non-scientific. It is quite possible that God created the world 2 seconds ago and everything we think we know about history was just pre-embedded in our minds. The situation would be almost exactly analogous to the dinner example I gave above, and science would still conclude the same things about our past. There would be absolutely no way whatsoever to prove or disprove our divine origins. The situation is exactly the same regardless when God is alleged to have created the universe. Maybe God created the universe 100 years ago, maybe 1000, maybe 10000, maybe there is no God. The point is, these are not questions science can answer and they are not questions any scientist should ever try to answer. In summary, evolution is as far as we know scientific fact. It certainly could be disproven (otherwise it wouldn't be science), but for now, it is irrefutable fact. It is simultaneously possible that the entire universe was created 2 seconds ago. The universe could have been created with this post already written and me only thinking I had written it myself. If that were the case, evolution would still be an irrefutable fact. It would be wrong, but it would be scientific truth. Science can only answer scientific questions (and can only answer them with scientific answers). It cannot and should not speculate on non-scientific ones. So as blahedo alluded, evolution will only be accepted as ultimate truth when science is accepted as the ultimate framework. There is no way to "prove" however that science is the ultimate framework. That too is a non-scientific question. Science can no more prove creation (true or false) than it can prove that the answer to "What is Buddha?" is "Three pounds of flax", and it makes just as little sense to try.

ernop 17y ago
But, why would god's magic automatically create a meal that looks like it came from real plants? There are many connections in the way organisms work internally. Patterns of characteristics never overlap; you never get fish with wings because wings evolved after fish (if you get them, it's cause of convergent evolution), but you do get whales and snakes with atavistic legs, because those genes may still be hanging around their DNA. There are literally thousands and thousands of characteristics like this, that can all be sampled independently; using this sampling organisms can be put into clades (trees of descent). These can be based on many, many characteristics of the species: appearance & physical features (shape of leg, skull, lungs, existence of various organs, etc), mutation rates of mitochondrial dna, their appearance and geographical extent from fossils. You can create clades of all major species based on any one of these, and the amazing thing is that ALL of them match up! So if god just created a random new animal, there would be thousands of variables he would have to take into account of to preserve this characteristic - not all of which we even know yet. (This property was noticed before we were able to detect most of the more sophisticated ways of measuring these differences, but it's always come true. And there could still be more out there - for example maybe you could use the dna of undiscovered internal bacteria of mammals to derive an evolutionary history, and it would have to match up). So God would have to do tons of extra work to match all these up - and the questions then is, why would he match all the other stuff up too?
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  If you didn't use real plants, science would just conclude it was a previously undiscovered species. That it exists is sufficient to prove it's real (and natural) to science. It's impossible to create something without causing it to exist. Therefore, it's impossible to create something without causing it to appear natural to science.

ernop 17y ago

But, why would god's magic automatically create a meal that looks like it came from real plants? There are many connections in the way organisms work internally. Patterns of characteristics never overlap; you never get fish with wings because wings evolved after fish (if you get them, it's cause of convergent evolution), but you do get whales and snakes with atavistic legs, because those genes may still be hanging around their DNA. There are literally thousands and thousands of characteristics like this, that can all be sampled independently; using this sampling organisms can be put into clades (trees of descent). These can be based on many, many characteristics of the species: appearance & physical features (shape of leg, skull, lungs, existence of various organs, etc), mutation rates of mitochondrial dna, their appearance and geographical extent from fossils. You can create clades of all major species based on any one of these, and the amazing thing is that ALL of them match up! So if god just created a random new animal, there would be thousands of variables he would have to take into account of to preserve this characteristic - not all of which we even know yet. (This property was noticed before we were able to detect most of the more sophisticated ways of measuring these differences, but it's always come true. And there could still be more out there - for example maybe you could use the dna of undiscovered internal bacteria of mammals to derive an evolutionary history, and it would have to match up). So God would have to do tons of extra work to match all these up - and the questions then is, why would he match all the other stuff up too?

DanielStraight 17y ago
If you didn't use real plants, science would just conclude it was a previously undiscovered species. That it exists is sufficient to prove it's real (and natural) to science. It's impossible to create something without causing it to exist. Therefore, it's impossible to create something without causing it to appear natural to science.