THE CREATIONISTS WIN THIS ONE

I was led to this wonderful written debate because somebody just started a debate ABOUT this debate at EvC limited to four participants. But the original debate, between Australian creationists and evolutionists, is great stuff, at least the Creationist side is. The Evolutionist side is the usual abstract obfuscations, misrepresentations and ridicule.

FROM THE CREATIONIST INTRODUCTION:

Modern historical geology was built on philosophical assumptions which excluded the biblical notion of a recent global watery catastrophe—by definition, rather than observation. (p. 10)

EXACTLY! By DEFINITION, NOT OBSERVATION. OBSERVATION DOES TURN UP EVIDENCE FOR A GLOBAL FLOOD, BUT YOU DO HAVE TO OBSERVE.

On page 12 the creationists outline my favorite biological argument:

Textbook examples of adaptation by natural selection (first described by the creationist Edward Blyth, pre-Darwin) always involve loss of genetic information. Mosquitoes may adapt to a DDT-containing environment by becoming resistant, because some already have the genes for DDT resistance. But overall the population loses genetic information (any genes not present in the resistant ones are eradicated from the population, since the non-resistant mosquitoes killed by DDT cannot pass on genes).

EXACTLY! EVOLUTION DEFEATS EVOLUTION. They say "genetic information," I say "genetic diversity" or "genetic potential" -- same thing only their term is probably clearer.

Mutations cause several thousand human diseases. Even where a mutation is beneficial (e.g. wingless beetles on windy islands), biological complexity is virtually always destroyed, not increased. (p. 12)

Oh, these guys are good! This essay is SO clear too. I'm tempted to copy out too much of what they say.

This observed downhill trend of heritable changes in living things (mutations, selection, adaptation—even to the extent of speciation17—and extinction) is consistent with the concept of original created gene pools (with high initial variety) being depleted since. To suggest that the informationally downhill ‘micro’ changes one observes (routinely but erroneously used as ‘proofs of evolution’) can accumulate over time to give the required (uphill) changes for microbe-to-man evolution is like a businessman arguing that many small losses will produce a profit, given time. The observed changes do, however, fit a Creation/Fall model well.

SO well said.

5. The age of things The evidence for a ‘young’ earth/universe is, by definition, evidence for biblical creation, because naturalistic evolution, even if possible, would require eons. There is much evidence consistent with a relatively young age of the universe, such as the decay of the earth’s magnetic field, including rapid paleomagnetic reversals; fragile organic molecules in fossils supposedly many millions of years old; too much helium in deep zircons; not enough salt in the sea; carbon-14 in coal and oil supposedly many millions of years old; polystrate fossils23 that extend through strata supposedly representing many millions of years; inter-tonguing of non-sequential geological strata; the small number of supernova remnants; magnetic fields on ‘cold’ planets; and much more (see What about carbon dating?). Elapsed time extending back beyond one’s own lifetime cannot be directly measured, so all arguments for either a long or a short age are necessarily indirect and must depend on the assumptions on which they are inevitably based.

Young-earth arguments make sense of the fact that many fossils show wellpreserved soft parts. This requires rapid deposition and rapid hardening of the encasing sediment. Observations of e.g. multiple geologic strata and canyons forming rapidly under catastrophic conditions in recent times indicate that the entrenched slow-and-gradual, vast-age thinking may well be markedly in error. (p. 14)

The immense complexity of the human brain—its consciousness, creativity and power of abstract reasoning, with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most ‘obvious’ evidence for intelligent creation.

We have seen that life is characterized by incredibly complex information-bearing (programmed) systems. No spontaneous physico-chemical process is known which could have generated such programs in the first place, without outside intelligence. And as information is transmitted, it is overwhelmingly observed to degrade, not build up. (p.15)

The most reasonable inference from such observations is that outside intelligence (vastly surpassing humanity’s) was responsible for an immense original store of biological information in the form of created populations of fully functioning organisms. Again, this is powerfully consistent with the Genesis creation account.

I'm just going to post this as is. It's a great statement. You can read ahead to the evolutionist introduction and then the follow-up arguments. I think the creationists blew the evolutionists out of the water throughout but of course that isn't going to be so obvious to the evolutionists.

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And here they go. The opening post at EvC for the debate-about-the-debate is the typical evolutionist litany. Many of the points in the creationist introduction I've appreciated above are dismissed as PRATTs -- "Point Refuted A Thousand Times" -- but of course just because they've come up with something they consider to be a refutation does not mean the point has been refuted, or even slightly dented by their argument, and that's why the same arguments keep getting repeated. Factually and logically the creationist points still stand after the evolutionists have done their worst, and all they are doing in the end is claiming victory without having accomplished victory. But what do you expect from an evolutionist site like EvC?

I considered doing my own answer to the poster's debunkery but decided no, I'll wait to see if a debate actually gets going there.

Why can't those people THINK? Excuse me, but that IS the problem here. Most of his "refutations" on his long list of the creationists' arguments (it's a good list but I'm unable to reproduce it here because of a nightmare of formatting problems) are flat out denial of the OBVIOUS.

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Sat Nov 21. Here's one of the evolutionists wondering if the list can be pared down:

I'd like to suggest that we see if we can pare down the list of items to discuss. We can remove those that we can all agree on (there must be some)...

For removal could we look at those that are marked as PRATTs in the OP? Even one or two of them? Some of those (e.g., salt in the oceans IIRC are even rejected by some major creationist organizations.)

ABE
Sigh, nope, they don't even reject the ocean salt one. Let's see if we can be smarter than that here.

Of COURSE they don't reject the one about ocean salt, IT HASN'T BEEN REFUTED. And why don't YOU sketch out the refutation if you think it has? Good grief. The polystrate trees also haven't been refuted. They CAN'T be refuted. They indisputably falsify the evolutionist interpretation of the strata.

How about removing those from the evolutionist side?
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11/23: So I'm not going to be very interested in this debate, it appears. If they're going to dismiss my favorite irrefutable point (microevolution always loses genetic information) as a PRATT and not even try to produce some refutations for me to laugh at it's not worth my time.