Fundamentalists, what is the scientific evidence for Creationism/Intelligent Design?

Question

I asked "what is the scientific evidence for Creationism/Intelligent Design?" not "based on your lack of knowledge on evolution, what do you think about it?"

The moment you mentioned "God" or "Bible", you prove that your answer is not scientific therefore, not a valid answer to this question.

Answer 1

I asked a similar question requesting an explanation of the theory of "God Did It."

Based on the answers I received, it appears the basis for the theory of "God Did It" is "It's Not Evolution."

Other than that, I got the same kind of answers you seem to be getting. (nonsense or circular arguments, to wit: the bible said so, that's why)

Answer 2

1) The age of the earth is too young to support an evolutionary development. The mathematics of probability state that the first single celled organism still would not have had enough time to evolve from the primordial soup (10 X 10 to the 128th power seconds, at an elemental trial rate of one trial per second) which is way older than the most liberal evolutionary theories allow, and also far beyond the arguable lifespan of the sun (the 'energy source' for evolution).

2) The field of genetics has shown that DNA strands of dissimilar length or dissimilar RNA encoding cannot combine. In order for DNA strand lengths to change (evolution of species as opposed to micro evolution). a male and a female of the same species must have identical genetic mutation at the same time in the same place, find each other, and successfully mate. This takes the math in step one to an exponential level above a google (thats a really big number). Way outside the math of probability to the point of definitive impossibility.

3) The complexity of DNA combined with it's diversity and the mathematical impossibility of 'natural' or 'accidental' occurrance points to the intervention of another, presumably intelligent, being.

4) And, just for fun:
a) In the 60's, as NASA prepared to go to the moon, they discovered that dust and very fine debris was falling from space to the earth, and presumably the surface of the moon. They calculated, base on a 'billions of years' age of the earth and moon, a dust layer around 20 feet deep, and modified the LEM with dished feet that were extended away from the capsule, and modified the landing throttling pattern so that the thrusters would not crater the dust. The Eagle landed, in about an inch or so of dust, the math worked out to around 8000 years worth.
b) The explosion of Mount St. Helens: 1) created a canyon similar to the Grand Canyon and about 1/6th it's size in 4 hours; (2) produced new oil deposits and petrified wood in less than 10 years; and (3) has had it's lava dome checked radiometricly to determine its content, and was determined to have identical radiometric and C14 structuring as lava domes that were previously decided to be millions of years old.
c) And there is considerably more scientific evidence that either supports a drasticly younger earth (10000 years or so), or casts viable doubt on the 'science' of other ancient earth claims.

Answer 3

I realize this is a trick question, but I will play along anyway. There is no evidence based on scientific methods to prove either creation or evolution. You cannot test either theory, nor repeat them. We use the legal method of proving our case, that is, looking at the known evidence, and basing our conclusions on the scientific principles and laws we do know and what makes the most sense. If you wish to explore the evidence to support creation, this is a good place to start:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/index.html

And in the future, could you refrain from using "Fundamentalists"? This is a term used in a derogatory manner as a way of putting down Christians who adhere to the fundamentals of the faith. Just call us Christians, Believers, or just people. Thank you.

Answer 4

Intelligent design supposes that the universe just isn't old enough for random actions to have reasonably created life. Maybe if the universe was a 10000000 trillion years old, or even better yet, infinitely so. Creationism doesn't have any scientific evidence, but it bases its conclusions on the bible.

Personally, I'm agnostic, and a bit on the fence as far as intelligent design v. evolution is concerned. I'm pretty sure creationism is wrong though.

Answer 5

I'm not a fundamentalist but I can say that the bible cannot be disproven. Take Noah's Ark for example. They have found skeletons of fish on top of the highest mountains which proves that this earth was once covered by water. To believe in evolution would be like believing you can take a deck of cards and through them in the air and they not only land perfectly in line but in perfect order. That seems alot more far fetched than believing in creation. And if we came from monkeys why can't we reproduce with one, matter of fact our DNA doesn't even come close in matching. Thanks for the question.

Answer 6

Creatures change in order to survive better in their respective environments. This is indisputable. What is not indisputable is the idea that all living things on the Earth right now evolved from amoebas, or their close cousins.

Here's why: animals evolve out of NECESSITY. If there is no REASON for animals to change, they don't. So, until science can show WHY the animals evolved, I find it an unlikely theory. As of right now, it's all speculation.

And by the way, I'm not a fundamentalist.

Answer 7

Any creature that has a spine, has 7 vertebrae in the neck. So if evolution is random, how do you explain that. Humans, dogs, cats, fish, even a giraffe all have 7 vertebrae in their neck. That is no random.

Answer 8

One day a group of scientists told God they had discovered how to make man...

God says...prove it.

So all the little scientists smiled and started scurrying around in different directions to gather all the "tools" in their little arsenal and came before God and set up their little tables and test tubes and chemicals, etc.

The head scientist yelled GO...

One scientist had reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt to place in the biggest test tube when God yelled "STOP"!

"...there'll be no cheating boys, you gotta make your own dirt".

So to answer your question I say...get your head out of your butt and look around you. The PROOF is everywhere you care to look.

Answer 9

Is there really a God? How would you answer?
Far from being a blind faith, Christianity can be logically defended.

by Ken Ham

In our everyday experience, just about everything seems to have a beginning. In fact, the laws of science show that even things which look the same through our lifetime, like the sun and other stars, are running down. The sun is using up its fuel at millions of tonnes each second—since, therefore, it cannot last forever, it had to have a beginning. The same can be shown to be true for the entire universe.

So when Christians claim that the God of the Bible created the entire universe, some will ask what seems a logical question, namely ‘Where did God come from?’

The Bible makes it clear in many places that God is outside of time. He is eternal, with no beginning or end—He is infinite! He also knows all things, being infinitely intelligent.1

Is this logical? Can modern science allow for such a notion? And how could you recognize the evidence for an intelligent Creator?
Recognizing intelligence

For more information, visit Q&A: God
Scientists get excited about finding stone tools in a cave because these speak of intelligence—a tool maker. They could not have designed themselves. Neither would anyone believe that the carved Presidents’ heads on Mt Rushmore were the product of millions of years of chance erosion. We can recognize design—the evidence of the outworkings of intelligence—in the man-made objects all around us.

Similarly, in William Paley’s famous argument, a watch implies a watchmaker.2 Today, however, a large proportion of people, including many leading scientists, believe that all plants and animals, including the incredibly complex brains of the people who make watches, motor cars, etc., were not designed by an intelligent God but rather came from an unintelligent evolutionary process. But is this a defensible position?
Design in living things

Molecular biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic, concluded:

‘Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced [twentieth century technology appears] clumsy … . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.’3

The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins, states:

‘We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance.’4

Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the Bible’s explanation that God created all.

However, evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a Designer. He comments (emphasis added):

‘All appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind … . It has no mind … . It does not plan for the future … it is the blind watchmaker.’5

Selection and design

Life is built on information, contained in that molecule of heredity, DNA. Dawkins believes that natural selection6 and mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA) together provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts of information responsible for the design in living things.7

Natural selection is a logical process that can be observed. However, selection can only operate on the information already contained in genes—it does not produce new information.8 Actually, this is consistent with the Bible’s account of origins; God created distinct kinds of animals and plants, each to reproduce after its own kind.

One can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of natural selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves, and coyotes have developed over time as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of the wolf/dog kind.

But no new information was produced—these varieties have resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out, of the information in the original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to change into a totally different kind with new information that previously did not exist!

Without a way to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this, but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon.
Can mutations produce new information?

Actually, it is now clear that the answer is no! Dr Lee Spetner, a highly qualified scientist who taught information and communication theory at Johns Hopkins University, makes this abundantly clear in his recent book:

‘In this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e., instances alleged to be examples of evolution] particularly mutations, and show that information is not increased … But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information.9

‘All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.10

‘The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.’11

Evolutionary scientists have no way around the conclusions that many scientists, including Dr Spetner, have come to. Mutations do not work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process.
More problems!

Scientists have found that within the cell, there are thousands of what can be called ‘biochemical machines.’ All of their parts have to be in place simultaneously or the cell can’t function. Things which were thought to be simple mechanisms, such as being able to sense light and turn it into electrical impulses, are in fact highly complicated.

Since life is built on these ‘machines,’ the idea that natural processes could have made a living system is untenable. Biochemist Dr Michael Behe (see The mousetrap man) uses the term ‘irreducible complexity’ in describing such biochemical ‘machines.’

‘… systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.’12

Richard Dawkins recognizes this problem of needing ‘machinery’ to start with when he states:

‘The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem.’13

A problem indeed! The more we look into the workings of life, the more complicated it gets, and the more we see that life could not arise by itself. Not only is a source of information needed, but the complex ‘machines’ of the chemistry of life need to be in existence right from the start!
A greater problem still!

Some still try to insist that the machinery of the first cell could have arisen by pure chance. For instance, they say, by randomly drawing alphabet letters in sequence from a hat, sometimes you will get a simple word like ‘BAT.’14 So given long time periods, why couldn’t even more complex information arise by chance?

However, what would the word ‘BAT’ mean to a German or Chinese speaker? The point is that an order of letters is meaningless unless there is a language convention and a translation system in place which makes it meaningful!

In a cell, there is such a system (other molecules) that makes the order on the DNA meaningful. DNA without the language/translation system is meaningless, and these systems without the DNA wouldn’t work either.

The other complication is that the translation machinery which reads the order of the ‘letters’ in the DNA is itself specified by the DNA! This is another one of those ‘machines’ that needs to be fully-formed or life won’t work.
Can information arise from non-information?

Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, makes it clear that one of the things we know absolutely for sure from science, is that information cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence:

‘A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor) … It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required.15

‘There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.’16

What is the source of the information?

We can therefore deduce that the huge amount of information in living things must originally have come from an intelligence, which had to have been far superior to ours, as scientists are revealing every day. But then, some will say that such a source would have to be caused by something with even greater information/intelligence.

However, if they reason like this, one could ask where this greater information/intelligence came from? And then where did that one come from … one could extrapolate to infinity, for ever, unless …

Unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond our finite understanding. But isn’t this what the Bible indicates when we read, ‘In the beginning God …’? The God of the Bible is an infinite being not bound by limitations of time, space, knowledge, or anything else.

So which is the logically defensible position?—that matter eternally existed (or came into existence by itself for no reason), and then by itself arranged itself into information systems against everything observed in real science? Or that a being with infinite intelligence,17 created information systems for life to exist, agreeing with real science?

The answer seems obvious, so why don’t all intelligent scientists accept this? Michael Behe answers:

‘Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don’t want there to be anything beyond nature. They don’t want a supernatural being to affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been. In other words … they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.’18

The crux of the matter is this: If one accepts there is a God who created us, then that God also owns us. He thus has a right to set the rules by which we must live. In the Bible, He has revealed to us that we are in rebellion against our Creator. Because of this rebellion called sin, our physical bodies are sentenced to death—but we will live on, either with God, or without Him in a place of judgment.

But the good news is that our Creator provided, through the cross of Jesus Christ, a means of deliverance for our sin of rebellion, so that those who come to Him in faith, in repentance for their sin, can receive the forgiveness of a Holy God and spend forever with their Lord.
So who created God?

By definition, an infinite, eternal being has always existed—no one created God. He is the self-existing one—the great ‘I am’ of the Bible.19 He is outside of time—in fact, He created time.

You might say, ‘But that means I have to accept this by faith, as I can’t understand it.’

We read in the book of Hebrews, ‘But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him’ (Hebrews 11:6).

But this is not blind faith, as some think. In fact, the evolutionists who deny God have a blind faith—they have to believe something that is against real science—namely, that information can arise from disorder by chance.

The Christian faith is not a blind faith—it is a logically defensible faith. This is why the Bible makes it clear that anyone who does not believe in God is without excuse:

‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse’ (Romans 1:20).