Evolution vs. Creation, what's more reasonable?

Question

Scientists with impressive credentials are leaving the doctrines of evolution. Unfortunately, no one has informed the general public.

As Science Digest reported:

Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities... Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science.

Evolutionist Sir Fred Hoyle:

The notion that...the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Researcher and Mathematician I. L. Cohen:

At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt. ...the implications of the DNA/RNA were obvious and clear. Mathematically speaking, based on probability concepts, there is no possibility that Evolution was the mechanism that created the approximately 6,000,000 species of plants and animals we recognize today.

Evolutionist Michael Denton:

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

Peter Saunders (University of London) and Mae-Wan Ho (Open University):

From the claims made for neo-Darwinism one could easily get the impression that it has made great progress towards explaining Evolution, mostly leaving the details to be cleared up. In fact, quite the reverse is true.

Evolutionist Dr. Colin Patterson:

No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it...

Evolutionist Greg Kirby:

If you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments...

Evolutionist Lord Solly Zuckerman:

Students of fossil primates have not been distinguished for caution... The record is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is...in this field at all.

Evolutionist Tom Kemp:

A circular argument arises: Interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?

Evolutionist Edmund Ambrose:

We have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists...

Paleontologist and Evolutionist Dr. Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History:

The only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world is the notion of Special Creation.

Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist, and mathematician, Cambridge University:

I have little hesitation in saying that a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory.

Thomas Barnes, Ph.D., physicist:

The best physical evidence that the earth is young is a dwindling resource that evolutionists refuse to admit is dwindling...the magnetic energy in the field of the earth's dipole magnet. ...To deny that it is a dwindling resource is phony physics.

Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist, and mathematician, Cambridge University:

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. ...if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

Molecular biologist Michael Denton:

Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond...anything produced by the intelligence of man?

C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General:

When I make an incision with my scalpel, I see organs of such intricacy that there simply hasn't been enough time for natural evolutionary processes to have developed them.

Mathematician P. Saunders and biologist M. Ho:

We ourselves would be less concerned about falsifiability if neo-Darwinism were a powerful theory with major successes to its credit. But this is simply not the case.

C. Martin in American Scientist:

The mass of evidence shows that all, or almost all, known mutations are unmistakably pathological and the few remaining ones are highly suspect.

Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolutionist:

No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of Evolution.

Arthur Koestler, author:

In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology.

Norman Macbeth:

Darwinism has failed in practice.

Lyall Watson, Ph.D., Evolutionist:

Modern apes...seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans...is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.

Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D.:

The Evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable than ever before...

John Woodmorappe, geologist:

Eighty to eighty-five percent of Earth's land surface does not have even 3 geologic periods appearing in 'correct' consecutive order. ...it becomes an overall exercise of gargantuan special pleading and imagination for the evolutionary-uniformitarian paradigm to maintain that there ever were geologic periods.

Evolutionist S. Lovtrup:

Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology: ...I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?

J. O'Rourke in the American Journal of Science:

The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply.

N. H. Nilsson, famous botanist and Evolutionist:

My attempts to demonstrate Evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.

Luther Sunderland, science researcher:

None of the five museum officials could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another.

Tom Kemp of Oxford University:

As is well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record.

Francis Hitching, archaeologist:

The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places.

David Kitts, paleontologist and Evolutionist:

Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.

Gary Parker, Ph.D., biologist and paleontologist and former Evolutionist:

Fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation.

Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D., physicist and mathematician:

A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. ...moreover, for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully.

I. Cohen, mathematician and archaeologist:

It is not the duty of science to defend the theory of Evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end—no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers...

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, biologist:

The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in 'hard' science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.

Malcolm Muggeridge, well-known philosopher:

The theory of Evolution...will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.

Source: godsaidmansaid.com

I believe most of you mistake evolution with adaptation.

all of you check out this:

evolutionoftruth.com

psychoticB: mutts do not evolve, they just adapt their genes within each other, the don't form new traits.

Answer 1

Once again, I'm gonna have to call you on this.

The first point is that many of those quoted are not qualified to comment on evolution. Mathematicians, Physicists, philosophers, etc are simply not skilled in genetics to talk about such a concept as Evolution.

Take those who are. Michael Denton for example made his comments over 20 years ago and since then the gaps that he refers to are still be used as fact by Creationists.

Dr Colin Patterson is blatantly misquoted and you will find letter from him attacking the misuse of his quotes by creationists on the internet.

Lord Solly Zuckerman is more a zooologist and not an evolutionist as you state (although I suspect you did a cut and paste job from a creationist website). His research dates back to the 1930's and he wrote books in the 60's and 70's.

NOW THIS IS GETTING EMBARRASSING FOR YOU because this is typical Creationist strategy - either misquotation or quoting research that is decades out of date. And you talk about reasonable. But I will continue a bit further because believe or not am getting a kick out of EMBARRASSING YOU and your lack of SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE or even you inability to CHECK "FACTS" before you use them.

Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose is not so eminent and indeed the only refernce you find to him is on, you guessed it, creationist websites.

"Paleontologist and Evolutionist Dr. Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History:
The only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world is the notion of Special Creation."
Look at what is said here. Maybe the words are enough to fool creationists but this is simply saying that there is no competitor to evolution. It certainly is not denying evolution.

Thomas Barnes, Ph.D., physicist is not reputable and even appears on websites alongside our famous Dr Humphrey's, laughing stock of the physics community who made basic mathematical errors when formulating his starlight and time theory for a young universe in line with the big bang, who has been criticised by the whole physics community who titter at his name and yet Creationists drag these people out as evidence of defection. These people WERE CREATIONISTS FROM THE START. THEY NEVER WANTED TO BELIEVE ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE BIBLE.

Mathematician P. Saunders and biologist M. Ho, again it questionable as to whether a mathematician can comment on such a topic. Even a biologist does not mean geneticist or expert in evolution.

THIS ONE IS GREAT

Pierre-Paul Grassé born 1895 and died 1985. He is hardly a CURRENT DEFECTOR FROM evolution. He NEVER BELIEVED in evolution. He was never an evolutionist as the website from which you did your copy paste states - yes I found the website. The website is LYING - IS THAT CHRISTIAN? TELLING BLATANT LIES - IS THAT CHRISTIAN?

IT GETS BETTER
Arthur Koestler was born in 1905 in Budapest. He was interested in the paranormal, mysticism and judaeism. He was not scientifically trained and was one who believed in Jung's philosophy. I wonder if the Christian website would continue to use his views if they knew he COMMITTED SUICIDE with his 3rd WIFE?

Lyall Watson, the man who tries to explain the supernatural with biology. AGAIN, NOT AN EVOLUTIONIST.

NOW I HAVE EMBARRASSED YOU ENOUGH. YOu should know that I will call you on these lies and misinterpretations. It strikes me as strange that Christians JUSTIFY LYING in order to serve a purpose of recruiting numbers or keeping their numbers. It makes no sense. I hope your God is watching.

What is even more hilarious is that YOU BELIEVE this and call yourself reasonable.

Answer 2

The document you linked to is a complete crock! It doesn't prove that creation is more reasonable, it just proves creationists are intellectually dishonest. You talk about "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" as though they were different things but they are not! That's like saying that no matter how many millimetres you measured, they would never, ever add up to a kilometre! Population growth rates have changed over the years. Ancient civilisations didn't leave written records because they were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Stars are appearing all the time, and the fact that four of them came into existence about 10000 years ago proves nothing about anything except those four stars. Volcanic matter is continuously being melted from the inside, ejected and solidifying on the outside. Dissolved matter is abstracted from sea water by shellfish and cannot redissolve from their shells. Need I go on? Creation is completely unreasonable, because where did your imagined creator come from? Surely whatever process you invoke to explain a creator, could equally account for a pre-created universe?

Answer 3

Well it looks like you've already made up your mind, so I don't think it's a debate you want.

Things that are really, really unlikely happen all the time. If something exists then whether or not it is likely is irrelevant - it happened.

How it happened is a different matter and to a certain extent our debate is futile as we cannot know what happened; we can only speculate and hypothosise.

As a layman and not a scientist I can only say what makes sense to me. This fits into 2 categories.
1) a magician waved a wand and it appeared ready formed, dinosaur bones and all.

2) some kind of scientific process which went from there to here; from the unknown to the known.

To me i just cant get past the magic wand bit. if the magician had stuck around, maybe he could have let us into the trick. maybe it was some kind of party trick for his daughter's birthday - who knows?

This only leaves me with some kind of rational explanation involving a costant state of change. This i see evidence of; species dying out etc. The logic is not too difficult to grasp so i' m ok with it.

I cant say that the THEORY of evolution is true - no-one claims it's fact as the word THEORY denotes. It just seems to make more sense than the Harry Potter version.

Answer 4

Evolution.

Answer 5

Well - Creationists at the Discovery Institute have, since 2001, constructed a list of around 600 scientists who state that they do not believe in evolution (their "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism" document).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scientific_Dissent_From_Darwinism

However, in 2006, in only *four* days, 7733 signatures from scientists were collected stating they believed in evolution in the "Scientific Support for Darwinism" document.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scientific_Support_for_Darwinism

In a 1997 poll, 95% of all american scientists believed in evolution.

PS - the "Clergy Letter Project" has gathered over 10,000 signatures from American priests, ministers, and other Christian clergy rejecting Creationism, and supporting evolution.
http://www.answers.com/topic/clergy-letter-project
_______________________________________________
Edit:
Without more time to check all the quotations, I suspect that this question is a prime example of "quote mining"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_mining

However, a quick addressing of a few of the points made by the quotations:

The comments by Fred Hoyle (his 1st and 3rd comments), and Michael Denton (both comments) are about abiogenesis (how life began), not evolution (how life changes). These are entirely different fields.

Colin Patterson asked about creation of species. Well – speciation has been observed under laboratory conditions a number of times:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

Lord Solly Zuckerman is commenting on one specific field of evolutionary biology – Human evolutionary biology. Humans have been around for a short time, evolutionarily speaking, so there is naturally less fossil evidence for how they evolved.

Edmund Ambrose states that nothing in the geological record is against conservative creationism (by which I assume he means Old Earth Creationism). Why are there no bird fossils older than 150 million years? Why are there no mammal fossils older than 125 million years? Why is it that if you go back 4 billion years, you only find bacteria, and if you go back 1 billion years, you only find the simplest multicellular life?

Dr. Niles Eldredge says the only *competing* notion is Special Creation. Well that’s true: there are only Evolution and Creationism.

Fred Hoyle’s second comment is regarding the Big Bang. What has that got to do with evolution?

I’m not sure what the Thomas Barnes quote is meant to mean. Evolutionists do not argue that the earth is young – they argue that it is *old*.

Pierre-Paul Grassé states that mutations do not produce evolution. He is correct: evolution is produced by mutation, heredity, and selection. You need all three.

Norman Macbeth is a Lawyer – not a scientist. So he should *not* be included in the list.

J. O'Rourke’s comment on using fossils to date rocks fails to account for using radioisotope dating to date rocks. There are several different radio-dating techniques, and they all give similar results for the ages of rocks.

David Kitts asks where the transitional forms are. They are all over the place:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html#gaps

Answer 6

PLEASE READ THIS:




"It's just theories. Human beings can't help making them , but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. and they change. When America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? wll it doesn't matter, because it wasn't real anyway. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. and they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four billion years old, and we believe in photons and electrons, and we think human behavior is controlled by things like ego and self-esteem. We think those beliefs are more scientific and better."

"Aren't they?"

"They're still just fantasies. They're not real. Have you ever seen a self-esteem? can you bring me one of those on a plate? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?"

"No, but..."

"And you never will, because those things don't exist. No matter how seriously people take them, a hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so sily?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.

And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. You see all of us together? That's real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else."


- Michael Crichton, The Lost World






Creation.

Answer 7

So your saying evolution doesn't exist.
Explain Pit Bulls without evolution!
God didn't make them!
Mankind through the power of selective breeding (evolution) did it.
No matter how many times they say evolution doesn't exist they never see the truth in front of them.
Now let’s say the pit-bulls and the two dogs that make up pit-bulls (the terrier and bulldog) were fossilized.
Would you find that the missing link between the terrier and bulldog?
Would anyone see that these two dogs contributed to the evolution of the bit-bull?
No, you know why, because you don’t want to see it. It doesn’t follow your agenda.
But you see the more you deny the truth the more your religion and its views become in-valid.
Yes it does, because logic before religion should ALWAYS come first.
Hey, its ok your Bible messed up... time to move on.
Look I know more than anyone that you’re afraid to question the existence of a God… who wouldn’t.
I wish I could go back and be ignorant about everything I learned.
But it’s time to grow up a little, there is so much more to the meaning of life than to worship a God.

Answer 8

And you use the identifier "Let's Debate?" A debate, being a reasoned exchange of ideas between matched sides, is impossible here. You have no understanding of science. You have no understanding of evolution. (... or abiogenesis or speciation...)

Anyone who has so little training in science is unlikely to have researched all of these quotes (all of them either taken out of context or irrelevant or long since demonstrated to be wrong). Your answer is just to invoke magic.

Lets see, on one side is an extensive body of knowledge and technologies gained by applying scientific investigation, and on the other is a self contradictory collection of ancient texts that have only fueled a 6000 year war over a stretch of inhospitable desert. It is only the thoughtless that choose blind faith over reason.

Answer 9

Rather than address each quote separately I'll focus on just one, and leave it for the curious to investigate the rest. This entire list of quotations has been endlessly copied and pasted throughout the creationist world, but has gained no traction in legitimate circles. Why? Because it consists of misquotations, out of context segments, and other distortions. I suggest looking at

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/project.html

which is an start at a comprehensive rebuttal. Unlike this list it is exhaustively footnoted and provides context where it has been removed. It's clear that creationists are willing to lie, or blindly repeat lies they assume to be true but haven't investigated, in order to maintain their fiction.

For example, Tom Kemp is quoted as saying,

"A circular argument arises: Interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?"

This comes from New Scientist, vol. 108, 1985, pp. 66-67, but it is taken out of context. Here is the complete quote, which I encourage you to verify is accurately presented.

" The fact that the fossil data did not, on the whole, seem to fit this prevailing model of the process of evolution - for example, in the absence of intermediate forms and of gradually changing lineages over millions of years - was readily explained by the notorious incompleteness of the fossil record. In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be "wrong". A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?

Spearheaded by this extraordinary journal, palaeontology is now looking at what it actually finds, not what it is told that it is supposed to find. As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly - the "punctuated equilibrium" pattern of Eldredge and Gould. Irrespective of one's view of the biological causes of such a pattern (and there continues to be much debate about this), it leads in practice to description of long-term evolution, or macroevolution, in terms of the differential survival, extinction and proliferation of species. The species is the unit of evolution."

That last sentence bears repeating. "The species is the unit of evolution." In the question to which I'm responding a claim is made that Kemp has left "the doctrines of evolution." An out of context quote is provided to support this, but the reality is that, when viewed in its complete form, the quote actually demonstrates Kemp's belief in evolution. Kemp is a scientist. He does not believe in creationism.

Creationists are not necessarily stupid. But they are, as this example shows, willing to lie in order to promote their myth.

To Let's Debate, I ask the following:
Doesn't your god have something to say about dishonesty?

How do you feel, having been caught in a lie?

What else are you willing to do to get people to believe you?

...and how do you sleep at night?

Answer 10

Well alot of all this information is old, and all of their issues has already been addressed and explained....hundreds of times.

So believe what you want because if you do NOT want to believe in Evolution then you never will no matter the mountains of proof that exist.....you will always find that 1 pebble of doubt.

Which is good. keep doubting and questioning.....that's how science works.
btw..adaptation IS evolution