“Debunking” a theory requires some observation of a phenomenon that contradicts the theory. As far as I know, we don’t have a really good set of applicable phenomena, yet.
I think we have two competing theories. Evolution is based on a tenet of science which says that we should explain observations by a consistent, reproducible, and predictive set of rules. Creationism, as far as I can tell, just says that things are the way they are because the Supreme Being made it so.
It seems to me that, short of the Big Kahuna showing up tomorrow to 'splain itself, we have no way to reproduce or predict what’s gonna happen with speciation in the future, and the only consistency is that it’s in the BK’s hands.
Both theories, but one is a scientifc one, and the other isn’t. I’m not saying that science is better than or worse than non-science, just different. Comparing the two is unfair to both.
This is probably a Great Debate topic, but I see creationism versus evolution as more of a “political” argument along the lines of the Galileo heliocentric versus Catholic Church terracentric argument.
Galileo used scientific principles to explain that the earth moved around the sun. The Catholic Church maintained that the “Aristotlean” system of the sun moving around the earth was “correct”.
Remember, though, that this was all argued in a time of great political ferment in Europe. The Catholic Church was trying to deal with the Reformation, which challenged religious (and thus political) doctrine. Perhaps in an earlier time the Pope would have ignored Galileo, and in a later time accepted him, but at that time he felt he had to push back. The Pope had to fight for tradition and stability against revolutionary ideas that seemed to threaten society.
I see creationism and evolution the same way. I think the subtext of creationism is a desire to enforce G-d’s supremacy in human society. With G-d’s supremacy will come a return to order, safety, and perhaps even salvation.
The creationist view seems to be that modern human society is unruly, unsafe, and complex. We can only respond to this by following the rules! If we all acknowledged that G-d created everything, then supposedly we’d all follow G-d’s law and society would be “better”.
The best way to argue for creationism and thus G-d’s supremacy is to teach it to our children in schools. This is certainly why the creationist/scientist battlefield is public schools.
In addition, the main battle seems to be creationism versus evolution, and not other scientific theories. That’s significant. I think the reason for this is that evolution is hard to prove or disprove, as yet. Natural selection takes a long time, and the only way to really observe it is to watch one species change into one or more others. In comparison, most other processes are blindingly fast. Even some geological processes move quickly. But natural selection mostly does not.
Oh, and human tracks next to dinosaurs means very little. You’d have to show that both sets of tracks were laid down at the same time. That would require proof that the rock containing the tracks was covered over very quickly and then not exposed until long afterwards. This is nearly impossible to do.
We can judge time scales much better by carbon-14 dating correlated with the growth rings on very long-lived trees. We have a sophisticated and reproducible system for dating materials into the remote past. If, using this system, we discovered human remains next to dinosaur remains, we’d have to revise our ideas about natural selection! This hasn’t happened yet.