Books By Creationists?

Trichotomy. And what do you call someone with such a flagrantly bad argument?

Haven't you read Dennis Markuze's posts on this very forum?That does indeed seem to be a succinct paraphrase of his views. There are a few; though not many because atheism imposes no religious taboo against understanding biology.However, many creationist arguments are taken wholesale from the atheist, antievolutionist and crackpot Fred Hoyle, demonstrating the possibility. Well, that depends on the claim. Creationism is a disparate collection of errors, including both the false and the unfalsifiable. You could say the same of gravity or the germ theory of disease.You could also say the same of a theist, really. There is no intellectual fulfillment in attributing an effect you don't understand to a cause you don't understand.

Well, that depends.The data shows that the Earth is much older than YECism will allow for. At this point, you should agree that not only is it falsifiable, but that it has been proven false. In which case let me be the first to welcome you to reality.However, what a creationist usually does at this point is start adding unevidenced miracles to his hypothesis which gave the Earth the appearance of age (see my posts on the RATE project, for example).Now if you're allowed to do that, then no hypothesis is falsifiable. Perhaps I have three legs, but God (who Moves In Mysterious Ways) is using his magical powers to ensure that everyone only ever sees two of them.So YEC is on the face of it false, but the intellectual manoeuvres of creationists when confronted with this fact serve to render it unfalsifiable. What is a theist doing when he also embraces evolution and gives exactly the same reasons as the atheist for so doing? Yes, creationists have to believe that kind of thing, because how else do you explain why scientists who know more than you about science disagree with you about science? Either they know something you don't (which is obviously the case) or they're all dishonest.Meanwhile the evolutionist side can attribute creationist blunders to honest ignorance of science and to muddled thinking, since those are traits that creationists pre-eminently display.One thing puzzles me though --- why do you hang around here talking to people whose honesty you disbelieve in? What would be the point? I think that I could make an evolutionist of you if I exposed you to enough facts about biology; but why are you talking to me?

If you weren't a creationist, you might spend more time looking at the evidence and less time constructing implausible ad hominem arguments.For example, instead of impugning the honesty of evolutionists on this thread, you could be posting on our Great Debate thread about the intermediate forms of the mammalian middle ear.

Psychologists, aeronautical engineers, architects, philosophers, plastic surgeons, dentists ...They're really scraping when they're getting dentists from the bottom of the barrel, aren't they? Actually, CMI needs to do that.---My turn: Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

In order to show that there is no God, it is not necessary to show that there are no Gaps.But of course there's no reason for an atheist to swim against the tide of evidence, either. If no-one knew what caused lightning, that wouldn't cause me to believe in Thor; but since there is an explanation, I feel no need to fight against it.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, no, for a number of reasons.(1) An atheist in (let us say) the thirteenth century could have said (to himself, because fire is all hot and burny): "Although I do not understand the reason for the following natural phenomena [insert long list here] nonetheless I can be confident that the explanation will not involve the actions of a being whose existence I find trivial to disprove."Now, not only would he have been consistent, but he'd also have been right, since such explanations have now been found. Where is the inconsistency, where the untenability of such a view?(2) Atheists did have ideas about possible explanations for the phenomena which we now know to be the products of evolution. They were, as it happens, all wrong, but they had 'em. It is not atheism that compels one to the solution we have today, but increased biological knowledge. (And theist biologists have found it equally compelling.)(3) Even if one admitted the necessity of a magical explanation, one need not admit the necessity of a divine explanation. "God" as usually understood is not defined as "the being (or beings) who does (or do) the magic that conveniently fills the gaps in our knowledge". Only if he wants his answer to be consistent, not just with atheism, but with the facts. In which case a theist is in exactly the same boat.

No.And you have yet to point out the inconsistency in my thirteenth-century atheist's thinking.As to it being "untenable", he'd have been right. It would be no more untenable for him to think that there was a non-divine explanation for (for example) the rainbow or the origin of species, and to hope, if not believe, that one day it might be discovered, than it is for me to think the same thing about ball lightning or the origin of life. It's perfectly tenable. I ten it. Except that as a matter of plain historical fact you're wrong and they didn't. Or because he lacked the data necessary to arrive at the correct answer. Something he'd have in common with a few theists I could name.It's only our actual knowledge that forces us to an evolutionary explanation. In that it's a completely different word, yes. Well, again, this is just historically inaccurate. 4- Accept the theory of pretersupation, which explains the facts perfectly.... well, we are discussing a hypothetical counterfactual world in which the facts are completely different, aren't we?

The things that he does believe.

... still wrong. ... still wrong. ... still wrong. ... still wrong. Well, what the other theory might be would depend on what the other facts were. And a three-time winner of the Noah Webster Prize For Knowing What "Inconsistent" Means.That's something that you could aspire to.

No. My very first answer is usually "fish". I do, after all, have a firm, deep, and abiding belief in their existence; a solidity of faith besides which your mere belief in God is as a shadow.But then I'm literal-minded. If you ask someone "what do you believe in", especially if the context establishes that you're talking about religion, then an atheist will usually treat the question as meaning: "what are your religious views", and will therefore tell you that he's an atheist.But atheism per se doesn't get you very far towards a "worldview". Nor does theism if it comes to that. The resemblance between your "worldview" and that of a self-castrated devotee of Cybele is not a close one.

I've never seen an atheist question the existence of gravity --- unlike certain Christian fundamentalists (I stumbled across an old file of those yesterday, oh my word, those guys can deny anything.) And yet demonstrably some of 'em didn't.Atheists pretty much have to believe in evolution now, 'cos of, y'know, all the proof that it happened. And so do theists, unless they're unfamiliar with the proof.---Your point, so far as it goes, is about as valid and relevant as saying that someone who doesn't believe in fairies must believe that flowers get their colors from naturally occurring anthocyanins instead of from fairies painting them with tiny paintbrushes.In the first place, it is not necessary to reach the anthocyanin conclusion from the afairist premise (as illustrated by the people who disbelieved in fairies but knew nothing of anthocyanins); in the second place it is not possible to deduce the conclusion from the premise; in the third place the conclusion would be reached by someone who studied flowers even if he did believe in fairies.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, when it comes to biology you don't seem to have got much further. I have asked you, and other creationists, for explanations of various features of nature (all of which fit perfectly into evolutionary thought) and the best I can seem to get out of you is: "Goddidit ... for a good reason ... which we don't know ... 'cos of not being God."As a substitute for actual science, this is a stone when we asked for bread.

Here's a sample of pre-evolutionary views on biology which were affirmed or at least entertained by atheists. I make no claim to completeness.--- (1) The eternal universe. In this view, the biological world has been (so to speak) an endless succession of alternating chickens and eggs, each egg explaining the subsequent chicken, each chicken explaining the subsequent egg.A variant was to have time be cyclic, so that there were only a finite number of chickens and eggs before you go round again.This is broadly consistent with superficial observation. After all, every hen's egg is produced by a hen, which hatched out of an egg, which was laid by a hen. We need a good reason to suppose that this law was ever broken.Being based on the observation of actual processes, and insofar as it didn't involve the activities of a being known not to exist, this was obviously superior to creationism. However, it has no more predictive power than creationism and so is inferior to evolution.We, of course, know arguments against this view --- but if it came to it, an adherent of that view even today would have less to explain away than a YEC does. Arguably, then, it is, for all its flaws, still superior to creationism. (2) Elan vital. According to this view, back in the early history of the earth, when it was bubbling over with elan vital, this caused the spontaneous generation of numerous organisms. Since elan vital is a natural substance and not at all smart, most of these organisms were doubtless complete cock-ups. These did not survive. The process is rather like that by which the reactive immune system works: lots of randomness followed by a selective sweep.This seems implausible to us, but this was back in the day when people would tell you that fossils grew in rocks as a result of astrological influences. They just weren't very good at science.This hypothesis explains the fitness of organisms to their environment. It also explains the appearance of undesign, since there is no necessity for the elan vital to produce the most perfect conceivable organisms, just organisms that could survive. Egregious blunders in biology could be more easily attributed to this process than to a supposedly omniscient creator; just as the cruelty of nature is more easily attributed to this process than to a supposedly omnibeneficient creator --- existence in this view being contingent on chance and survival rather than decisions made by a being of whom the Bible asserts that he "is love".Of course this leaves many questions unanswered that evolution answers. Homology, for example, is unexplained --- but that is not to say that it would have seemed in principle inexplicable. Crystals will spontaneously form into just a few crystal habits; why not organisms? Clearly more research was needed ... (3) The Epicurean Solution*. According to this view, everything is composed of combinations of immutable atoms, the action of which is unguided and random. In a universe infinite in extent, or duration, or both, the random action will as a statistical inevitabilty form "islands" of stability and persistence, and by appeal to the Weak Anthropic Principle it's obvious that we're going to be living in one of them.Similar remarks could be made of this view as of the previous one. * Epicurus himself was not actually an atheist, rather he was a sort of ultra-Deist who believed that God was too perfect to ever be bothered to do anything.(4) The demiurge. Just because there's no God, that doesn't imply that there aren't magical beings that are stupid, malevolent, and cruel. Oviously holding them responsible for creation makes more sense than theistic creation, if we're going to drag magical beings into our explanation at all.Homology could be attributed to their stullifying lack of imagination; biogeography to the idea that their were a number of them in different locales; undesign to their ineptitude; the cruelty of nature to their malevolence ...Of course, under this hypothesis the existence of these beings is not itself explained, but then you could say the same of God. This hypothesis is therefore clearly superior to theistic creationism, and would be preferable if there was the slightest evidence that there had ever been any magical intervention in biology. (5) The argument from ontogeny. Human design is certainly one analogy for the production of fitness for purpose and complexity. But biology itself provides another. A bird produces an egg which produces a bird without taking the least thought; without understanding the procedure in the slightest. The egg is produced, the limbs and organs form, all without divine intervention (as the theists admit) nor anything resembling intelligence.Why, then, should our universe not be, as it were, the egg of some Cosmic Bird, in which plants and animals form as naturally (yet mysteriously) as the parts of a bird do during ontogeny?This is an apt answer to William Paley and his like, since it has the same strengths, and the same weaknesses, as the argument from design:* It has little or no predictive power.
* It rests on an uncertain analogy.
* It requires the hypothesis of a being the existence of which is not itself explained.Its advantage over creationism is that it doesn't involve the notion of an omnibeneficient origin for the universe. The chick does not hatch from the egg in order to be happy; if the universe was produced by a similar process, we should not necessarily expect all to be well within it. (6) The confession of ignorance. Contrary to what slevesque claims, it is neither logically nor emotionally necessary for an atheist to have an answer to everything. I don't, and while I should like to it doesn't bother me qua atheist. (By analogy, I can dismiss the hypothesis that a unicorn ate my dahlias without knowing what did or taking more than a passing interest in the question.)Our thirteenth century atheist might (just prior to being tortured and murdered) have addressed a theist as follows: "You yourself admit that (for example) the growth of an oak tree from an acorn is a perfectly natural process not requiring any divine intervention. And yet you are not capable of telling me the slightest detail about the mechanism by which it occurs. How very ignorant we all are of biology, to be sure! Very well then, all I claim is the same indulgence with respect to the question of how oak trees could arise naturally in the first place. Let us therefore turn from your unevidenced hypothesis that their origin involved divine intervention and instead look at the excellent reasons why we know that there is no God."---It is obvious, then, that what constrains scientifically literate atheists and theists alike to believe in evolution are the facts, rather than their disparate and irreconcilable religious views. It is not that evolution is the only view that can be reconciled with not being a believer, or with not being a fundamentalist, but that it's the only view that is well-substantiated by the evidence.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.