The Creationism Error: ‘Evolution Of Difference In Kind Is Unobserved, So Didn’t Happen’

Some religious believers are Creationists that deny, to varying extents, that Evolution is ‘proven’ and that God created humans from scratch, and that humans did not evolve from earlier animals, even from ape common ancestors, never mind from fish. Yet, many can no longer find enough faith to deny what they term ‘micro evolution’, even speciation. So, that particular species of the Creationist family have to take a different route to Evolution denialism, and it goes something like this, to paraphrase …

We [now have to] accept that micro evolution can be observed in the lab, and that Speciation via DNA changes occurs. So, generations of fruit flies can be observed to ‘evolve’ to create different fruit flies, or different species of fly. But, they are still flies. We never observe them evolving into something different, like a bird, or a cat.

Here’s a post on the Creationism Facebook group that makes this point. And, of course, the point being that Young Earth Creationists have a special place in their heart for dinosaurs – “They must have roamed the Earth with early humans, 6,000 years ago, because the fossil record contains dinosaurs, but the world isn’t that old, and ‘macro’ evolution didn’t happen.”

Throughout a series of posts, including this one, opponents of evolution have made an argument from observation, or rather the lack of observed evolution, as emphasised in my paraphrasing above. Here are some examples from one contributor, Mark Lambert:

And that’s where it stops. Never above the species level. A species is not a kind – Mark Lambert comment

Religion only looks for the truth. Truth : evolution has never been observed above the species level. – Mark Lambert comment

As I and others try to put Mark straight, he’s having none of it.

Nope only conjecture by using assumption and guessing – Mark Lambert comment

And you don’t understand it enough that you have no evidence of adaptation in anything other than species. If it’s not observed it’s only conjecture – Mark Lambert comment.

I and others tried to point out some details:

Everything above Species is just futher categorisation, and so ‘Kind’ has no useful meaning outside categorisation, and what he thinks is a different Kind (of Family, or Genus, etc.), is still a difference in Species, which in turn is determined by sufficient differences in DNA making attempts at breeding between species fail: producing no offspring, or offspring that are sterile – this is the only way in which speciation has any significant meaning.
Speciation to the extent that there appear to be different ‘Kind’, or Genus, Family, etc. is merely the accumulation of differences in different branches, and is not something different. Observing ‘mico-evolution’, which they accept, is what constitutes ‘macro-evolution’.
It’s not ‘observed’ by humans personally, with large animals that they give as examples because humans don’t live on the time scales required to observe it. While new species of large animals have evolved in human lifetimes, the larger scale accumulation of differences that Mark sees as different ‘Kind’ takes much longer, and so is unobservable personally.

So, is it the case that if we don’t observe something personally it didn’t happen? This seems to be Mark’s contention. I tried to point this out …

Base on your own view your great great grand parents x 10 are not proven to exist. Their existance is ‘just a theory’, a ‘conjecture’. So, anyone claiming they were created by magic fairies has just as much credibility as your claims about God.

The reality is science works and the evidence for evolution on all scales is compelling, while all claims for gods have zero evidence, and your use of ‘not observed’ is irrelevant and a dishonest and laughable attempt at a “Gotcha”. – My comment

When mark pointed out that his recent ancestors were documented by people that did observe them, I tried the following:

You didn’t observe those people observing it [your N x grand parents, or Jesus] so by your criteria there’s no evidence, so it didn’t happen as you claim it did.

Humans can lie about what they observe, and can be convinced of nonsense. Just look at how many religions there are, sects within religions and even indivudual believers that disagree in the detail of what they believe their gods want of them. So, by your own criteria, nobody alive today observed anything that happened and all ‘written’ records could be fake. Your criteria discredits all knowledge of the past, especially religions. Your criteria.

So you putting any significance on written work from the past contradicts your own position.

But if you do want to admit written work, DNA is written in every living thing and it tells us the relationship between all categories of evolution, and it tells us large scale differences all occurred through speciation via DNA differences. And, that record is more reliable than any written work from the distant past because it can be examined, observed, today …. and it is not written by humans who are often motivated to lie, as is the case with religions, where absolute assertions are made based in written words that nobody today observed being written, and from when ignorance and claims about gods were abundant. My comment

Mark still didn’t seem to get the significance and implication of his claim that if it isn’t observed it’s only conjecture or it didn’t happen by Evolution, God did it. He didn’t get that his criteria for observation could be applied to anything he used from the past, or out of reach of personal observation, and as such contradicted his own claims.

Eventually he blocked me and others trying to point out his errors, so we didn’t get the opportunity to challeng him further. I’d welcome further discussions.

AI, Robots, and Creationism: Implications for Intelligent Design Argument

If humans eventually create intelligent robots that think like us and have similar sel-awareness, what would the implication be for the intelligent Design (ID) argument. Would it show that we are intelligently designed by a creator God?

In an online debate with creationists I suggested that: if all things need a designer, the designer is a thing, and therfore needs a designer. Of course they went to their version of the first cause argument.

As I said before an intelligently designed creation requires an intelligent creator. Period. You sidestepping, deflecting, mudding the waters, asking who created the creator, is just making excuses. The creator would be uncreated. It must be. The Creator would be eternal. There was never a time that it didn’t exist. Now, what’s your problem? This state of affairs you obviously consider to be unfavorable or distasteful. You clearly have a problem with it. Why? To deny the Creator IS to hate it.

The first issue here is the presupposition that we are intelligently designed – because it would be tautologically true that by definition an intelligently designed thing needs an intelligent designer. That aside, let’s stick with the usual creationist Intelligent Design (ID) claim:

We humans design and ceate things, and if you came across a designed thing, like a watch, you’d presume it was created by a human.
Therefore things that look designed have a creator.
This world, and we humans in it, look designed, therefore we have a designer and creator.
That creator is God.
But, intelligent creaator God does not require a designer and creator, that God is eternal.

The error starts with the presumption that this world and us in it look designed. There are no grounds to make this claim. It’s a category error to presume that because we design things, we need a dersigner – we are not like the things we design, in regard to the capacity to design.

If we were actually designed it would be fair to claim there must be a creator. But if everything needs a creator, then so does the designer, and claiming the creator does not need a creator but in fact is the first cause is comitting the fallacy of special pleading.

And, if theists think that there can be things that don’t need a creator, then our universe doesn’t need a creator, and always existed – and the Big Bang and subsequent events we know about are just a phase in that eternal system.

AI, Robots, Thinking Machines

What if we eventually create intelligent robots that thing in ways similar to ourselves, in that they are self-aware, and feel as if they have free will.

If we manage to create such entities, would that show that in fact intelligent things can be designed, and therefore falsify the atheist hypothesis that we are not designed? Would this show that we had a designer, and would that in turn prvide a loophole for theists to claim their Creator exists?

No.

AI would show that intelligent systems CAN be designed, not that they must be. We would still have no evidence that we are designed.

It would add an extra difficulty for thesists. It would show that you don’t need a ‘soul’, or dualist mind, to be an intelligent self-aware system.

The atheism + science world view would remain intact, and it would all be consistent. As always, it would lead to yet more contradictions for the theistic world view.

Knowing Little Enough To Be Religous

This cartoon appears in a Creationist post on Facebook. What’s wrong with this cartoon? Let’s see …

Three of those examples have observed designers, all of the same kind: humans INSIDE this universe, … even, ONLY on this planet.

Religions ASSERT that an entirely different kind of entity, ‘God’, OUTSIDE this universe, created space, time, the material matter of this universe, and the processes that not only went on to create the waterfall scene, but also the creatures, the humans, that made the items in the other images.

If you can’t see the difference in the evidence required to support the knowledge of the creators of the three man-made items, as opposed to knowledge about the creation of the the natural one, you know little enough about logic, reason, evidence, to be religous – your assertions damn you with your own stupidity. To suppose that the creation of man-made objects is carried out by humans, is not at all in the same category of the cause of the existence of the natural universe.

You get this difference if posed in a different way. You have evidence that a human created any car you come across, but this in itself is not evidence that some car might have been created by an ant, just because you didn’t see who created that particular car. Even though we have evidence ants exist as well as humans, we would not conclude, without evidence, that cars can be created by ants – we’d expect to see evidence of ants creating cars.

But, according to the religious, gods are very different entities to humans, and ants. Gods are not even supposed to be in the same realm. So, if you want to prove something created the natural world, you need to provide evidence – and we have NONE! You need to provide evidence of a god BEFORE then claiming that god did ANYTHING.

Let me compare those once more:

1: We have evidence of the existance of ants and humans. 2: We have evidence of humans creating cars. 3: We would not conclude that an ant created a specific car we did not see produced, BASED ON seeing humans creating cars.
1: We have evidence of humans, but not of gods. 2: We have evidence of humans creating cars. 3: We SHOULD NOT conclude “God did it” (created cars indirectly by creating the universe and the humans that create cars), when we don’t even have evidence of gods, let alone gods doing anything.

Your CONCLUSION of ‘Intelligent Design’, based on seeing human design, is a massive category error, AND comits the Begging the Question fallacy:

The fallacy of begging the question occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. In other words, you assume without proof the stand/position, or a significant part of the stand, that is in question. Begging the question is also called arguing in a circle.

We have evidence that GIVEN we find ourselves in this universe, there appear to be natural laws that describe how things work. And we have discovered evidence that explains how life works, and how there are different species of life – Evolution. This is all consistent, AND predictive:

The most important prediction was that there must be a mechanism for organisms to generate variations in body structure and pass them along to their offspring. At the time Darwin formulated his theory, there was no direct evidence for such a mechanism. The prediction was not confirmed until DNA was discovered and its way of working was revealed.

What we don’t have are:

Specific evidence of abiogenisis – how the first replicators were formed from complex but naturally occurring organic compounds. But we do have good evidence to form hypotheses about the process.
Knowledge of the origins of the universe – the space-time system we find ourselves in, and the ‘laws’ that describe how it works. Even the Big Bang tells only about certain phases the universe went through, based on the evidence we have so far.

These limitations apply to all of us – they are not opportunities for ‘God of the Gaps’ to be inserted.

Some crackpot ancient prophets from the Middle East have LESS going for them with their assertions than parts of Scientology – at least the idea of aliens in Scientology is consistent with this universe, given we exist.

Yes, Scientology has some crazy ideas (Thetans, and the specific of Xenu above), but even they don’t compare with the religious claims that there’s a teleological entity that not only created the universe, but has a special interest in us humans.

Creationists are obviously not in a position to appreaciate the irony of giving the cartoon what is intended to be a sarcistic title, “Atheist Logic”. Logic isn’t their strong point.

Knowing Less Than Atheists

This was a comment on another post:

So you’re admitting that you don’t know, so you don’t know that God exists or not. So why argue about something you don’t know about. Now, what DO you know? And how can theists no less if you don’t know anything? Where’s YOUR data and evidence of how everything came into existence?

NOBODY knows ANYTHING about the creation of the universe.

Atheist are a-theists, simply denying the assertions of theists when they assert they have evidence, or worse, proof, of the existance of gods … because theists have ZERO evidence or proof.

But, theists do know less:

Theists and atheists know the same about the creation of the universe: NOTHING.
But, theists know far less about evidence, logic, reason, because they misuse them, abuse them, …or don’t even use them at all (when they resort to faith).

So, overall, theists do know less. Instead they use the ‘God of the Gaps’ move – any gap in scientific knowledge is evidence that it required a God. The problem is, theists have ZERO evidence to support their claims that there is a god … there assertions are ALL GAP!