What do creationists believe

Who said that? Science is a way of knowing stuff. Mutations that add or change function? Increased genetic diversity in a population? There are loads if you can be bothered to look. To have a good time. All the time. Here, let me Google that for you, unusually shaven man. Wikipedia lists at least nine Autralopithecus afarensis specimens. Seek and ye shall find. Someone said that, can't remember who.

The evidence for it is overwhelming. And no one has yet. It is amazing! And even more so when discovering how it works and how it came to be, rather than simply repeating a modern misreading of a 2,year-old book written by Palestinian goatherds. A Supernova? His contribution to neologisms is more impressive, as he also invented the term "spherical bastard" for people who were bastards from any direction. Creationist house!

You know how people say "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers"? Does this evidence "demand a verdict"? At first sight a discussion of biblical inerrancy might seem redundant, but it is not. The defense of gospel accuracy intends to safeguard knowledge of Jesus Christ, the central object of faith, but apologetics for inerrancy have to do with theological epistemology.

Granted one trusts Christ for salvation, how is one to form his or her opinions on doctrinal and ethical issues? Here of course is where "biblicism" comes in: "The Bible said it—I believe it—That settles it! This is important, since the believer is concerned about matters e. As is well known, fundamentalists must harmonize here as nowhere else, and some of the resultant contrivances are particularly incredible. For instance, all four gospels report that Peter denied knowing Jesus three times, but beyond this the accounts fail to agree.

Mark has Jesus predict that Peter will deny him thrice before the cock crows twice. Other gospels mention only one crowing, implying that all three denials must proceed uninterrupted and be terminated by a cock-crow. Then again, the four accounts do not agree precisely to whom Peter denied Jesus. For generations fundamentalists have puzzled over this problem and ever so often one of them will harmonize all the evidence so as to conclude that Peter denied Jesus six or eight times, just to get all the details in!

While we might imagine the cowardly Peter thus denying a blue streak, no one of the gospels hints at such an occurrence. Indeed such a desperate expedient backfires in unwittingly implying that the gospels are badly mistaken on this point since none of them report more than three denials!

This whole business is implausible to say the least , but it is possible, just barely, on the face of it. But fundamentalists who adopt this approach e.

Yet how can Lindsell expect anyone else to be persuaded? Less ludicrous, but illustrative of the same point, is the apologists' treatment of the census of Quirinius in the Gospel of Luke.

Luke records this decree as the occasion for Mary and Joseph being in Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. The trouble is that extra-biblical evidence indicates that Quirinius was governor of Syria only about ten years later! Apologists suggest that perhaps earlier in his career Quirinius had a previous tenure, officially or unofficially, as governor.

Even if there were any real evidence for this, it still would not remove all the difficulties, but let us grant that this hypothetical earlier tenure for Quirinius might make Luke's version possibly accurate.

It would do so by means of a less than probable reading of the facts—less probable, that is, from the historian's standpoint. From the standpoint of the believer in inerrancy, there is no embarrassment at all, since the mere fact that this historical reconstruction comports with inerrancy makes it plausible.

Now while any one or two of these harmonizations might turn out to be "strange-but-true" if we had all the facts, it is important to realize that the belief in inerrancy depends upon a whole zoo-full of such monsters, a fact the reader may confirm by examining any of several fundamentalist books on "Bible difficulties.

Because they are all possible readings of the facts which become compelling by their conformity to faith. And to the fundamentalist this palace of cards seems so awesome in its ingenious grandeur that he or she cannot imagine why the outsider is not impressed. Then the accusations of intellectual dishonesty begin to fly. At last we turn to creationism. I believe it will require no extensive demonstration to show how similar in logic and procedure many creationist arguments are to those outlined above.

In creationist literature it is common to find otherwise tenuous theories being preferred simply because they conform most closely to "the creation model. But if this proves unworkable, then we may posit that God created the starlight already in transit. Any reading of the facts will do, as long as it seems to support creationism. There is no point in belaboring this, since most readers are by now familiar with creationist arguments.

What is worth pointing out, however, is that we need not merely try to infer that the creationists are moved to their harmonizing tactics by the same apologetic zeal that impels proponents of gospel accuracy and biblical inerrancy.

Creationists themselves are candid about the matter. The acceptance of the theory of evolution has promoted apostasy because it has caused a radical change in the view of Scripture. If the theory of evolution is accepted, then it must be conceded that the Bible contains myths and legends. This logical chain of events in the interpretation of Scripture culminates in the abandonment of the blood atonement of Christ. There remains no Christian gospel Duane T.

Gish, Evidence Against Evolution. It is this author's belief that a sound Biblical exegesis requires the acceptance of the catastrophist—recent creation interpretation of earth history. If this interpretation is accepted, the evolution model of course, becomes inconceivable Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Say No! John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris announce at the outset that the purpose of their work The Genesis Flood.

If this means substantial modification of the principles of uniformity and evolution which currently control the interpretation of these data, then so be it" The Genesis Flood , p.

We could ask for no more explicit statements of the apologetical intent to harmonize the data with the criterion of biblicist faith. Our preceding discussion makes it clear just why Gish, Morris, and other creationists remain so convinced in the face of repeated refutations by scientific critics.

They are so impressed with their own harmonizations that they do not see that harmonization can never convince one who does not already accept the independent belief with which the facts have been harmonized. It might be suggested that creationist apologists are not unaware of their real obligation to demonstrate that their model makes better sense of the data in their own right scientifically however poor a job they may do of it.

For instance, is not this the point when they criticize the theory of evolution by invoking against it the second law of thermodynamics and the absence of transitional forms from the fossil record? I would contend that we are still dealing with harmonizations since the creationists consistently choose interpretations of the second law and of the relevant fossils that are considerably strained in the direction of creationism.

The second law is always made to apply to the increasing complexification of evolving life-forms, despite the demonstrated inapplicability of the law to an open system such as earth's biosphere. Similarly Gish refuses to recognize the clearly transitional nature of the archaeopteryx, ruling instead that anything with feathers and wings has got to be a bird Evolution: The Fossils Say No! If creationist arguments can be seen to be of a piece with fundamentalist apologetics in regard to method, the same is true when it comes to motive.

Creationism is what Frances A. Schaeffer calls "pre-evangelism," apologetics as a laying of groundwork for conversion. For creationists believe that evolutionists are damned and going to hell, indeed not simply for their espousal of Darwin's doctrine, but because of what else this denotes.

The reason most scientists accept evolution has nothing to do, primarily, with the evidence. The reason that most scientists accept the theory of evolution is that most scientists are unbelievers, and unbelieving, materialistic men are forced to accept a materialstic, naturalistic explanation for the origin of all living things Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Say No!

Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals—which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations. Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.

Fossil record shows a succession of hominins, with features becoming progressively less apelike and more modern. When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context.

Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory. This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.

The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago , evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.

Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. Chance plays a part in evolution for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits , but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

But in the s Richard Hardison, then at Glendale College, wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's. On average, the program re-created the phrase in just iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time.

Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa. This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system one that no energy or matter leaves or enters cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word. More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase.

Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA —bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. Mutations that arise in the homeobox Hox family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features.

Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures.

Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

Nautilus shell has become a symbol of evolution and biological change. As the creature that occupies the shell outgrows one chamber, it builds another, larger chamber next to it, creating a growing spiral pattern.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.

Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community.

In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants and, of course, fossils do not breed. Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders.

For example, William R. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups.

One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx , which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found.

Or consider Adam and Eve. ECs generally agree that people were made by God and that humans are biologically related to other creatures, but they differ on how best to interpret the early chapters of Genesis. Some ECs believe Adam and Eve were a historical couple.

Many interpretations have been put forward and this remains an exciting area of scholarship. On the science side, all ECs accept that common ancestry is true, but they might disagree about which biological mechanisms drive evolutionary change over time.

Regarding the origin of first life , some ECs envision a supernatural miracle, while others see a variety of natural explanations, each under the providential guidance of God. The groundswell of interest and support for EC over the past decade has coalesced into a thriving community at BioLogos.

Communities are defined not just by ideas, but by values and commitments. In addition to our commitment to the historic Christian faith and EC, at BioLogos we are committed to truth-seeking. Truth-seeking requires community, exploration, and discussion. Questions—and even doubts—are welcome here, as we seek to understand both the Bible and the natural world. We value the expertise of scientists, biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers.

We value the sensitivity and spiritual understanding of pastors and leaders in the Christian community. We value the experiences and gifts of many, many lay people who love God and science. We value those who are simply exploring the claims of Christianity.

Many people distrust organized religion or have been hurt by Christians, and we welcome them to look for healing here. Another commitment for us at BioLogos is humility and gracious dialogue. We recognize that all people are loved by God and should be treated with respect. Finally, we aim for excellence in all areas. This includes recognizing that science is both powerful and limited. Science has vast explanatory value when it comes to describing natural history and natural phenomena.

And we aim to hold our scientific understanding with open palms in case new discoveries overturn consensus. In our approach to the Bible, excellence means reading with sound principles of interpretation in mind.