Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Creationism and Intelligent Design

My Positions

  1. Young Earth creationism is false in every testable particular. The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, the universe about 13.8 billion, and all life on it shares common ancestry (Evolution).
  2. Intelligent design is creationism in a lab coat. It was devised to get round a court ruling, it has produced no research programme, no predictions and no designs, and a federal court found it to be religion after six weeks of evidence.
  3. The disagreement with creationists is not about biology. It is about whether anything can be known by looking, and so it is a disagreement about Knowledge.

Notes

  1. The age of the Earth. Radiometric dating by a dozen independent decay series agrees to within a percent. Ice cores show 800,000 annual layers; lake sediments show tens of thousands; tree rings run continuously back 12,000 years; coral growth bands, continental drift measured by GPS at the rate the rocks record, and starlight from galaxies billions of light-years away all give the same answer. The oil, gas and mining industries bet billions on this geology and win. Archbishop Ussher's date of 4004 BC was a respectable piece of scholarship in 1650 and is a figure from a different era now.
  2. The creationist replies. "Appearance of age" (God made the light already on its way, the rocks already old) was proposed by Philip Gosse in 1857, and was rejected by Christians at the time because it makes God a forger of evidence. It is also unfalsifiable: a creation five minutes ago with all our memories intact fits it equally well (Popper's Razor). "Flood geology" is dealt with under Noah's Flood. Ken Ham's "were you there?" denies that the past can be known at all, which would close every court in the land; forensics, astronomy and history are all sciences of things nobody now alive witnessed.
  3. Intelligent design has a paper trail. In 1987 the US Supreme Court barred "creation science" from public schools. The textbook Of Pandas and People was then revised by replacing "creationists" with "design proponents" throughout, and one botched edit left the word "cdesign proponentsists" in the draft. That transitional fossil was produced in evidence at Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), where a Republican judge appointed by George W. Bush found, after a full trial, that intelligent design "is not science" and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents". Its flagship argument, Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity", was shown in court to fail for its own examples: the bacterial flagellum contains a working subset (the type III secretion system), the immune system's evolution is documented in a stack of papers Behe had not read, and Behe conceded under oath that a definition of science broad enough to admit intelligent design would also admit astrology.
  4. It explains nothing. "A designer did it" generates no prediction, specifies no mechanism, no time, no method, and cannot be wrong. Evolution predicted where to dig for a fish with legs and Tiktaalik was found there. Intelligent design has never predicted anything, because an unconstrained designer is compatible with any observation. That is also why it cannot explain the panda's thumb, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, the broken vitamin C gene we share with the other apes, or the retina wired back to front: a designer who did that is either incompetent or imitating descent with modification. See Teleological Argument - Argument from Design for the cosmic version of the same argument.
  5. It is not a fight with religion. The Catholic Church accepts evolution; so do most Protestant denominations outside the United States, and so do religious biologists who run genome projects. The opposition comes from a particular reading of Genesis (Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy), and from the reasonable fear that if Genesis is not literal history then the Fall is not either (Sin and Original Sin). That fear is correct, which is why the argument will not go away.
  6. Why it matters. Around 40 per cent of Americans tell pollsters that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Creationist schools exist in Britain, and a replica of the Ark stands in Kentucky as a theme park. A population that can be persuaded that the whole of geology, physics, astronomy and biology is a conspiracy is a population that can be persuaded of anything (Anti-Vaccine, Climate Change). The reasoning errors are the familiar ones: Appeal to Ignorance, Personal Incredulity, and the False Dilemma that if evolution has a gap, Genesis wins by default.

Sources

  • Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005) — https://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller-v-dover-area-school-district
  • Dalrymple, G. B., The Age of the Earth (1991)
  • Miller, K. R., Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (2008)
  • Forrest, B. and Gross, P. R., Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (2004)
  • Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism (2016)
  • Gallup, "40% of Americans Believe in Creationism", 2019

Also see