No visit to my (softcore catholic / agnostic) in-laws is complete without the apparition of some fundie walking in and preaching some creationism. Since I cannot avoid visiting my in-laws and they won’t fence in their property or kick the nutjobs away, I have taken the sport of arguing with them (only at my in-laws, at home I gladly tell them to crawl back into the abyss where Satan spawned them).
After dozens of these encounters, I have learned that attacking religion as a whole is a dead end with them. Attacking creationism without attacking religion has had much better results (I call confusion and alarm successes. I have yet to get a real conversion).
Admitting to atheism here (Puerto Rico) is probably worse than taking off your face mask and showing your reptilian head. Some may consider it a worthy fight but it is not one I care to fight in a Sunday afternoon while I am in a hammock trying to quiet down a pound of fried pork meat with tostones.
So I turn to you for help, what are good arguments you can use to attack creationism without attacking religion or the existence of a god?
So far “God doesn’t play with plasticine (play-doh)” has been my most successful weapon. If I had to choose between an improvising god that made every species out of clay and one that made a seminal event that spawned all life through evolution, I am a lot more impressed by the latter.
Ideas, questions, responses?
Please spare me the habitual atheist rant. As I said, this is about fighting creationism from a theist standpoint without fighting religion or the existence of a god.
Creationist arguments are welcome only as a rebuttal to an argument against it already presented by someone. Don’t just jump it to preach.
I think you will be much more effective adopting your new strategy. As I have pointed out numerous times on these boards, theism does not equal religion. Religions are merely ways theism may be expressed. I take the position that every religion the planet has ever known can each be mind-blowingly wrong and there can still be a God. Knowing in your own head what you are arguing against is quite helpful, as the argument against a particular religion and the argument against the existence of God are two entirely different arguments. It is true that the non-existence of God does away with any religious arguments, but the disproving of a particular religion has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God.
God gave us eyes to see His creation and a brain to understand its wonders. Rejecting what we observe and what we infer - in other words, rejectingscience - is committing a form of blasphemy.
Remember that most religious people accept evolution without a qualm. Unfortunately, the Creationists don’t accept them! To the average Creationist, the Pope is Satan Incarnate and every sect except their own corrupt. I have no objection to ‘big religion’ - that is, the mystical type with a deity far beyond petty anthropomorphisms I like to think of as Stomping Zeus. A personal god (called ‘God’) who takes an interest in what people get up to in bed or what they eat and drink, as far as I am concerned is not worth the title.
If you can get them to accept that the Earth is billions of years old, not thousands, that is a hugely important step. The arguments for this are pretty standard:
[ul][li]South America and Africa link up nicely, as any child can see, and are separating as fast as fingernails grow as new molten sea floor is pushed out of the mid-Atlantic ridge. If this had happened quickly, during the Flood or something, remember that that new seafloor is molten - if it had all appeared at once it would have boiled all the oceans. [/li][li]There are plenty of radioactive isotopes left in the Earth with half-lives of billions of years, such that even Earth’s 5-billion years isn’t enough to decay them away. But there are precisely no isotopes left which have half-lives of even millions of years - they are all decayed away. And again, if they decayed away quickly, this would have released enough heat to boil all the oceans.[/li][li]Other galaxies contain billions of stars like our sun, but look like tiny blobs in the night sky. For them to appear this small, they must be billions of light years away - ie. their light must take billions of years to reach us. Yet we often see supernovae - huge star explosions - in those galaxies. If the Earth and the universe are young, God must be showing us a light show of an explosion which never really happened. (Some Young Earthers say light travelled faster in the past. From E=m x c x c, this would cause Adam to create a nuclear Holocaust whenever he lit a fire.)[/ul][/li]
Once an old age is agreed upon, the random mutations of DNA over time are much more likely to produce the observably big changes captured in the fossil record.
When you say you believe in evolution, you’re really just saying you believe this guy really, actually lived a million years ago. Dawkins himself takes precisely this tack in his new book (which is excellent, by the way.)
You’re not going to get very far with the Biblical literalists, but there have been a lot of theologians who’ve attempted to put science in a theological context. I’m fond of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Roman Catholic priest and paleontologist who believed that the development of the universe (both on a cosmic scale, and biological evolution) is a process leading from individual bits of matter/energy to a unified spirit at the end of time.
Or, as Einstein put it succinctly, God doesn’t play dice with the universe.
(Of course, de Chardin got into some hot water with church authorities, but that was because of his views on Original Sin, NOT because of evolution.)
Are the Annoying Fundies using some form of the God-Of-The-Gaps argument (“There’s no scientific explanation, so it must be supernatural”)?
Natan Slifkin, in The Challenge of Creation argues convincingly that such an argument insults God when you think about it. The GotG person is saying, in effect, that God did a lousy job of creating the world, and has to resort to stop-gap miracles to make it work. (Not to mention someone always comes up with a scientific explanation later). For some reason, people have trouble with the idea that, “God did a good enough job with the world that it works on its own”.
Genesis 1:24 says, "And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ " The land itself producing life sounds like evolution to me. (Admittedly, the sources who use this as a proof-text say that the whole creation chapter is a spiritual narrative, not a historical one. Your Annoying Fundies probably won’t like that).
Accepting science does not make you into an Evil Atheist Heretic. In fact, Maimonides says that study of nature is one of the main paths to appreciating God. Look at a flower, watch the stars, pick up a biology textbook. Isn’t it amazing? A God that can formulate the rules of physics in such a way the world on its own can give rise to all that in a perfectly natural manner is a lot more impressive than one who just makes everything from scratch out of dirt. (Yes, I know, we’re back to point #1). Thinking theists have no reason to be afraid of facts. In fact, one could say that to know nature is to know God.
Here’s a line of argument that I’ve used with some success against fundamentalist friends on Facebook:
We have to get fresh flu shots every year. Where are those new viruses coming from? Similarly, what causes antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
At this point they’ll usually concede that of course “micro-evolution” can occur. There can be little changes inside species in response to environmental pressure. But “macro-evolution” is impossible. It’s impossible for a new species to form.
I then ask them why not? Lots and lots of little changes will eventually add up to a big change. What mechanism is STOPPING macro-evolution from happening?
This usually flummoxes them. They’ve got a lot of (incorrect) canned rhetoric about why evolution can’t happen, but they’re completely unprepared to debate why it can’t NOT happen.
Alas, it is not the Roman Catholic (still a majority but a dwindling one) that walk into my in-laws’ porch. I don’t think there are many RC creationists out there.
This is pure gold. I have to check the local translations to see how they render it.
Ok, couldn’t wait. They mostly translate into something that reads the same. So it will be a good tool. Pity that the fish and the birds were not created such.
I strongly prefer non-scientific arguments, for the very same reasons I prefer them against conspiracy theorists. People easily get confused in matter of science and think you are just trying to mislead them. Arguments of logic and horse sense hit deep and hard and are not as easily forgotten or dismissed.
Most of these are people with little education that just happen to believe whatever they were told by the last person they spoke to. They dutifully carry a magazine with a cover that has a dirty monkey and a cute baby as invariably as the Oprah magazine carries her picture. The point being that such vile beast cannot be where your cutie came from. Genes and isotopes are the same as manticores and leucrotas to them. Things that they hadn’t heard and if you bother to explain them are just creatures of fantasy.
Bible quotes and appeals to the human nature of God (and thus as to how he would do things) are the way to their minds and hearts.
How about this: the rocks are full of fossils that tell the story of evolution. God created the rocks. If they doubt the story in the rocks, they are doubting the word of god. The Bible might seem to tell about creationism, but a fallible human wrote the Bible and God wrote the rocks Himself. Thus, if they don’t accept evolution they are doubting the direct word of God.
Another thing along similar lines is to ask them if they think that God is unable to create us through evolution. If they say he can, ask what evidence is there he did it the Adam and Eve way instead of the evolution way - given the evidence of the rocks.
Besides this, arguing evolution is pointless until you can get them to tell you what they think evolution says. They’ll probably say some garbage about cats changing into dogs. You can laugh it off and tell them what evolution actually is all about.
A good approach overall. The thing is that most of the believe the Bible to be the word of God, not of some fallible man. And again, the story on the rocks is in a language they do not know how to read.
I still like the angle of scientific evidence being written by God and doubting it is doubting God, though.
That’s true, but I figure if you get them to start looking at what the rocks say you’re halfway home. I’ve never seen arguments from creationists about the details of fossil interpretation. The best you get is some out of date blather about the small number of fossils (which can be cured by a trip to any natural history museum) or sorting from the flood. As for the Bible, you no doubt can work on the symbolism angle, which is how light and days before the creation of the Sun is explained.
I would like to provide a little bit of information about young-earth creationists, as someone who worships with quite a few of them. In fact, I belong to a small bible study group consisting of six couples, and my wife and I are probably the only ones in the group who believe that evolution is a fact. All of these people have bachelor’s degrees, five have master’s degrees.
They are trapped by their belief in the inerrancy of the bible and their lack of knowledge of both the details of the bible and the details of paleontology and evolution. The prevailing position among them on inerrancy is that if one thing in the bible is shown to be wrong, it all comes tumbling down. Because of this, they must make themselves believe that anything that contradicts the bible must simply be false. Fossils are simply interesting rocks, put there by God. Noah’s flood happened as written, and anything that suggests otherwise is either being misrepresented or misinterpreted by scientists.
It is interesting to me that the modern concept of biblical inerrancy was a response to Darwin. Biblical authority, not biblical inerrancy, was the meaning of Luther’s sola scriptura tenet. There some who were literalists and believers in total inerrancy, but that was not the main evangelical belief until the Darwin backlash began. And it all hinges on the words “created” and “after their kind” in Genesis. From this, some people reached the conclusion that species are immutable. The bible doesn’t say they are.
Believe it or not, the best way to make a dent in these folks might be to suggest some form of intelligent design as the creator and guider of life. Ask them if the bible says that an existing species can’t turn into a new one. Ask them where it says that. Suggest that God is the force and intelligence behind all that we see, and the evolution is how God does it.
There are lots of people like me around, believers in God, the bible, and science, but we’re not very noisy.
And Voyager, I have spoken with Christians who really claim to believe that fossils are interesting rocks created by God and placed in the earth for inscrutable purposes.
I find I get nice results (pain, confusion and divers alarums & excursions) from an argument that goes a little something like this:
“So your God is a bungler, is he? Made the human eye upside down and back-to-front? With a blind spot the size of a hundred and fifty full moons? That’s the sort of God you believe in? An inept dabbler whose efforts were at best slapdash? Why not a God that’s so great that he invented a perfectible eye that evolves and changes to fit any circumstance? Why do you believe that God has to be constrained in how He may choose to make life? Does he have to do it according to your book? What happened to omnipotence?”
I also tend to cite them for flagrant breaches of the ninth commandment as well as making an idol of their Bible (there goes another commandment). Then, if I’m particularly tetchy, I speculate on the eventual fate of their immortal soul.
This works best, though, if they don’t know that I’m an atheist.
I thought some said the devil did it. Inscrutable I can see, but they would have to call the fossils misleading. Why would God create something which would lead people away from his word?
