Debate: Would you sooner let your faith rest with science or God?
Side: Science

We have some opposition to evolution so, as per usual, I will take it upon myself to pull these ridiculous critiques of evolution and "old earth theory" apart. I don't expect many, including JakeJ, to actually read this. God forbid he accidently learnt something rather than repeated the same old creationist nonsense.Let's begin with the very opening sentence."Darwin was never trained in the fields of science, he was actually trained to be a pastor."This isn't just slightly wrong; this is absolutely nowhere near the mark. Darwin originally trained as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going with Erasmus to the University of Edinburgh. He neglected his medical studies to learn taxidermy. In Darwin’s second year he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group whose debates strayed into radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmund Grant’s investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, and in March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. He learnt classification of plants, and assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time. Darwin was forced by his father to do an arts degree as the first steps towards becoming a pastor. Darwin began there in January 1828, but preferred riding and shooting to studying. His cousin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting which he pursued zealously, getting some of his finds published in Stevens' Illustrations of British entomology. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and met other leading naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known to these dons as “the man who walks with Henslow”.Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June. He studied Paley's Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He read John Herschel's new book which described the highest aim of natural philosophy as understanding such laws through inductive reasoning based on observation, and Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of scientific travels. Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined Adam Sedgwick's geology course then went with him in the summer mapping strata in Wales.He was as close to being trained in natural sciences as one possibly could be."When he was on a ship he was reading a book that talked about geological gradualism wich states that geological formations took millions of years to form. This book refered greatly to the Sanacrouse River valey, wich was a small river in a huge valey, it made sense to Darwin that it wuold have taken a long time for that tiny river to carve that huge valey. Though in theory it sounded good it has been poven by science that it couldn't have carved it out."The book in question is "Principles of Geology" by Charles Lyell. In it, Lyell set out that geological remains from the distant past can, and should, be explained by reference to geological processes now in operation and thus directly observable. Lyell's interpretation of geologic change as the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time had a huge influence on Darwin during his journey on the Beagle. The point made about the Sanacrouse River Valley is uncited, irrelevent and misleading. Valleys are, most definitely, carved out over time by erosion from rivers and other natural sources. This is basic geography."He thought that they were evolving but really they were varying and adapting."I like how they used two other words to describe the exact same thing. Evolution is simply variation over time, with natural selection being akin to adaptation. This is a stupid argument that isn't at all backed up. They were most definitely evolving."If the Earth were millions of years old many things would be different:"Go on then, humour me..."The salt content in the oceans would be so high we could almost walk across them."This is one of those arguments based on ignorance. This argument says that based on salt input and output from the oceans, they could not be older than 62 million years. The main problems with this argument is that, firstly, the people who first mentioned this left off many well known and established methods of sodium removal from water. This artificially inflated the numbers, making it appear that there should be far more salt then there is. It also assumes that salt accumulation in the past was the same that it is today, regardless of the scientific basis on this being that manmade pollution contributes a lot of additional sodium to the ocean. You can't use todays level of sodium increase and then simply go back 62 million years using the same rate; that's not how it works."The silt at the ocean floor would be much higher than it is."Not only has the writer got the original argument wrong, but the argument that it is supposed to be making is also wrong. The argument goes that the sediments that were eroded away from the Grand Canyon should be somewhere downriver from the Canyon, and that the sediments that have washed downstream are not nearly enough to account for the vast amounts that were eroded away from the Canyon. In reality, the Colorado River delta contains over 10,000 cubic miles of sediment. Much of the rock layers are limestone and dolomite. These would dissolve over time, and leave no evidence. Because of this, calculations of the amount of sediment eroded and deposited are inflated by as much as 200 percent. The calculations are also based on erosion rates during the years 1926-1950. The young earth authors assume the erosion has been happening at this rate for 70 million years. Early in the history of the river, erosion would have been much less. The Grand Canyon itself started to erode only five million years ago. Sediment rates are at their highest now, and this cannot be used to calculate rates in the past. Also, and most importantly I feel, for the first 65 million years, the Colorado River did not drain into its present location of the Gulf of California. Thus, the sediments for 65 million years of the young earth creationist calculations, based on 70 million years, are in a different location."The moon woudl be so far away from the earth we would have no tides because the moon moves an inch away from the earth every year."Ahh, one of my favourites. The argument is quite simple. Young earth creation science theorists claim that since the moon is receding (moving away from earth at a rate of about 4 cm/year, then in the past the moon must have been too close to earth, and would have been closer than the Roche Limit (11,000 miles), a point at which the tides caused by the moon would have destroyed the earth.This argument is so funny because the numbers used are mindboggling. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the Moon is receding at 6 inches per year. If we go back a million years, then the Moon was 6 million inches closer to the earth. That comes to about 95 miles per million years. Since the Moon is about 240,000 miles away, that doesn't amount to anything! Indeed, the Moon has a slightly elliptical orbit that varies more than 95 miles all by itself. A more accurate estimate, based on the present rate of lunar recession, puts the Moon within the Roche limit around 1 or 2 billion years ago. This is too easy."The moon would have much more dust on it than it does now"I can't believe this argument STILL gets used regardless of how many times it is shown to be utter nonsense. It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years. More than any other argument, it shows how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading. The reason for this argument is simply a miscaculation by a "scientist" who was trying to show that there would be far more dust on the moon then there was. Instead of, as everyone else did, realising that his calculation were wrong, he refused to accept that and simply stated that the moon couldn't be as old as it is. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are the real figures:"Since the late 1960s, much better and more direct measurements of the meteoritic influx to the Earth have been available from satellite penetration data. In a comprehensive review article, Dohnanyi [1972, Icarus 17: 148] showed that the mass of meteoritic material impinging on the Earth is only about 22,000 tons per year [60 tons/day]... Other recent estimates of the mass of interplanetary matter reaching the Earth from space, based on satelliteborne detectors, range from about 11,000 to 18,000 tons per year (67) [3049 tons/day]; estimates based on the cosmicdust content of deepsea sediment are comparable (e.g., 11, 103)."Simply put, this means that figure for the moon (2 x 10-9 grams/square centimeter per year) yields 2.3 tons/day. In 4.5 billion years a layer of about one and a half inches of cosmic dust would accumulate on the moon. (On the moon, of course, a ton would weigh much less. We're actually talking about a mass that would weigh 2.3 tons on Earth.)"All commets would be burnt up"The argument states that comets last 10,000-15,000 years before being blown apart by solar wind, which is once again absolute nonsense. Any kid with a keen interest in astronomy will tell you that it is the heat of the sun which is a comet's undoing. Each time a comet, which is akin to a dirty snowball, passes near the sun it loses tons of material to vaporization. Thus, the number of orbits such a comet can make before being reduced to a swarm of asteroids is limited. The solar wind along with the heat and light of the inner solar system are responsible for a comet's magnificent tail. Thus, comets brighten up as they near the sun, their tails pointing away from the sun. A few comets occasionally crash into one of the planets, especially Jupiter, or into the sun itself. Others are thrown out of the solar system forever. The projected life span of one short-period comet, that of Halley's comet, is 40,000 years. The only way short-period comets can be made to support a young solar system, hence a young earth, is by showing that they have no reasonable source of replenishment. Because short-period comets orbit the sun at least once every 200 years (by definition), and as they lose material on each pass, they must be constantly replaced over billions of years. Let's briefly summarize what science knows about comets. In 1950, based on a study of the orbits of several long-period comets, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed that a great spherical shell of them existed at the remote frontiers of our solar system. Better statistics in more recent years have supported the existence of the Oort Cloud and put it at a distance of 50,000 AU (1.3 lightyears). This inner cloud of comets is called the Hills Cloud. Originally, it was thought that short-period comets were merely long-period comets from the Oort Cloud which had been converted by close encounters with Jupiter or the other large outer planets. That may well be true for some of them, but modern studies of short-period comets have identified their probable origin in a region of space now named the Kuiper Belt, which resembles a flattened ring just beyond the orbit of Neptune. Computer simulations show that such a source would account beautifully for the lowinclination, short-period, prograde orbits, and other features associated with short-period comets. The Kuiper Belt probably has around 100 million to several billion comets, which probably formed at that location when the planets formed, and the gradual pull of the giant gas planets over time sends a few of them continually towards the sun. Thus, the short-period comets are replenished. Now we go on to the common misinterpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, as well as a misunderstanding of the terms law and theory."Also the second law of Thermodinamics says that everything is decaying and complex thing are becoming simple. Evolution is a theory and says that things are getting better and simple things are becoming complex. If a theory defies a law the law stays and the theory goes."I've already showed how this is wrong in a previous post, but I'll go over it again. Firstly, I'll repost what I said in regards to misusing the second law of themodynamics when talking about the Big Bang:"The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. Order (the perceived complexity of the universe you speak of) is most likely to occur in a closed system which is far from equilibrium. When a closed system is in the equilibrium state, its entropy has reached a maximum value. The entropy of the closed system cannot increase further. Hence, there is no room to compensate for the entropy decrease of a local system within the closed system unless it is accompanied by an entropy increase in a neighboring local system. By contrast, if a closed system is far from equilibrium, its entropy will increase dramatically, which can compensate for a substantial entropy decrease of a local system. Thus, ordered structures are more likely to be created from a non-equilibrium state than an equilibrium state. The Big Bang theory backs up this view of the world. The Big Bang creates an initial universe which contains an enormously high energy density and is extremely far from equilibrium. In order to reach an equilibrium state, the universe expanded rapidly, resulting in dramatic increase in entropy. This compensate perfectly for the entropy decrease due to the formation of ordered structures such as galaxies, stars, planets, life on Earth, etc."Now, let's talk about the law and evolution.This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, as used in my argument above about the Big Bang: "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws. We also have a misunderstanding about "information" contained in DNA in regards to more information being added. Information theory does sort of have a principle of degradation, but it is only applicable in certain situations (which evolution isn't one of). It implies, essentially, that information change is irreversible: information gets more and more different from how it started out, and the more it gets changed, the harder it is to tell how it started out. In a communication or information storage system, where the goal is to transmit or replay the original message intact, change is necessarily bad, so this corresponds to degradation. In evolution however, change is not necessarily bad, so this is not a principle of degradation. No new 'information' is created in the way that creationists seem to assume. DNA is made up of sugar, phosphate and a mixture of four bases, which are adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Information within the DNA is represented by the mixture of these four bases. Changing the order of these bases within the DNA incodes new information; which is exactly what happens when there is a mutation within the DNA. The order of the bases change, and the information contained within the DNA is different to the original. Viola."Most dating Evolutionists use is faulty, and when they say that the Earth is millions of years old they only use10% of it."I have absolutely no idea what is being implied here. And the age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years, not millions."Darwin said that if science could prove him wrong then he was. If he said that and we can prove him wrong and we can then how can people still follow this theory?"Well, there we go. Science has consistently found evolution to be correct, and I've shown all of these arguments to be false. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you don't believe in evolution, it's either because you don't understand it, or have a religious reason for not wanting to accept it. Evolution is absolute fact.