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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CA611:

Evolutionary theory, for a variety of nonscientific reasons, has obtained the status of sacred revelation. To express doubts by bringing up the counterevidence to the theory is to brand oneself an intellectual infidel.

Source:

Wiker, Benjamin D. 2003. Does Science Point to God? Part II: The Christian Critics. http://www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2003/feature1.htm

Response:

  1. Evolution is far from sacrosanct. Since Darwin's formulation of it, there have been several significant revisions of important aspects of it:


    Challenges to parts of evolutionary theory continue today. However, they are the sort of thing one rarely encounters below the graduate level.

    Evolution has undergone a tremendous amount of testing, some of which has shown that correction is necessary. Correcting a scientific theory makes the (corrected) theory stronger. The testing and correction account for evolution's strong reputation today. If evolution were sacrosanct, it would not undergo testing and revision, and it would lose its reputation among scientists.

  2. Critics of evolution are treated as intellectual outcasts not because they criticize evolution but because they do not know what they are talking about. Answers in Genesis (AIG) recognizes the problem of poorly educated creationists doing more harm than good to the reputation of creationists, so they devote a page to arguments creationists should not use (AIG n.d.). Still, it is extremely common to hear creationists speak with ignorance about the second law of thermodynamics, no transitional fossils, irreducible complexity, and other subjects, and AIG's list of bad arguments barely scratches the surface. The real infidels of evolution, such as Barbara McClintock and Stanley Prusiner, win acclaim.

  3. Creationist works almost invariably cite mainstream science in their attempts to discredit evolution. If evolution is sacrosanct, how can creationists so readily find science articles to use against it?

References:

  1. AIG. n.d. Arguments we think creationists should NOT use. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp
  2. Kimura, M. 1983. The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Margulis, Lynn. 1981. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co.
  4. Ohta, Tomoko. 1992. The nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 23: 263-286.
  5. Woese, Carl R. 2000. Interpreting the universal phylogenetic tree. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(15): 8392-8396 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/15/8392

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created 2003-8-7, modified 2004-2-15