I’ve stayed out of these threads for a while. But I’m going to try something different (and lengthy) here. I’m going to try to give advice to a creationist (let’s call him Duane) who really wants to frame his thoughts scientifically.
First, I would like to remind Duane that we could spend all day picking at evolution. Hell, I’m getting a PhD in molecular evolution and I spend all day picking at evolution. Finding an aspect of evolution with which you do not agree does nothing for any alternative theories. I have my own list of stuff that I can’t explain using evolution, but that’s why I do science.
Here’s how I would tell Duane to approach scientific creationism. The first and foremost thing to do is to come up with a really tight definition of what he means by creationism, and how it differs from the events presented by evolution. The closest I have seen is akin to:
“X number of ‘kinds’ were created at time Y. These kinds have diverged by microevolutionary processes since Y, and leave us with our current diversity of life.”
Even this is not acceptable – in order to do anything with this definition, we need to tightly define ‘kinds.’ So work on that. Perhaps even frame it in something scientists can grasp, like already existing taxa.
Defining creationism seems to be at the root of scientific creationists problems. With a firm scientifically phrased definition, Duane would be able to make testable predictions. Even the Intelligent Design people (who want to seem like the most scientifically strident) can’t do this – instead they aim to poke holes in evolution without making testable predictions.
With a good definition, we can start to formulate hypotheses. Do we expect to see homology between similarly functioning genes in different kinds? Do we expect to see orthology between protein classes with no apparent functional conservation? How can we define the ‘kinds number’ X or the time Y? These questions have been asked in an evolutionary context; with a proper definition they could be asked in a creationist context.
Of course this is unrealistic. At every point we run into the same two problems. The first is that the questions have all been asked in an evolutionary context, and all of the data point to evolution. So our creationist friend is going to have to do hard reinterpretation of an incomprehensible amount of primary data, ranging in fields across the scientific spectrum.
The second problem is more serious. Every question framed in a creationist viewpoint eventually asks the unknowable – what were the motives and methods of the creator? This is easily seen in the building block question. Duane will look at the molecular data, see tons of orthology and homology, come to the conclusion that the creator used common building blocks, even where it is nonobvious (except in an evolutionary context). No more questions about this can be asked, nothing can be predicted, and therefore that part of the theory is largely dispensable. The creator used building blocks because. The creator created X kinds because. The creator made at time Y because. Anything dealing with the real core of the theory, the creation, is scientifically meaningless because the creator is unknowable. Therefore, the only thing separating creationism from evolution is dispensable. Predictions made by the theory are all based on things that have happened since the creation, and those things are all evolutionary.