This difficulty results from our stubborn resistance in our ‘modern’ society to keep clear the difference between that which can be reasoned and that which is believed. The main religion for most of the country has for an exceedingly long time held as a belief the notion of the creation of Man by God in a specific way. As we have literally dug up evidence which would lead a rational person to propose a different concept of the beginnings of the universe and the development of mankind, the belief of Christians has come under attack. In the process, our society makes two fundamental errors. First, it fails to understand that belief cannot be attacked by use of rational thought; second, it accepts and believes the concept that man evolved over time from ‘lower’ orders of animals. In the process, those who believe in a different concept feel forced to provide a rational approach to their own belief.
There is no way to establish how mankind came to be. We can raise numerous suppositions, and presumably it would be ideal if the suppositions were compatable with the evidence we have discovered. But, having failed to adequately record just how mankind developed through eyewitness accounts or other evidence difficult to controvert, we must either refuse to reach a conclusion, or we must accept a conclusion on faith. Many in the scientific community, as well as in society in general, have faith that the evidence of past human ancestors, as well as of other biological and geological history, is not misleading. Such people go from being neutral on the conclusion to believing in the evolution of mankind. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that this is just as much a ‘belief’ as is the ‘belief’ that Man was created by God; they think of it as the ultimate result of scientific approach, the rational acceptance of what evidence the senses have provided. The result is an approach that teaches the concept of the evolutionary development of mankind as if it were fact, not theory.
In response, those who continue to believe a different concept find themselves compelled to provide some sort of competing ‘scientific proof’ of their conclusions. This is not strictly analogous to the ‘flat-earth’ arguments, because those arguments were based at least in part on poor understanding of evidence provided by the senses as much as on philosophical viewpoints incompatible with the notion of a spherical world. But one cannot help but think of the concept of epicycles used to try and explain the observed motion of the planets within the overall concept of an earth-centered universe when one listens to the explanations of ‘creation science’.
Of course, based as it is on belief, rather than rational deduction, creationism becomes difficult to disprove through rational discourse. It does no good to try and show how the concept is incompatible with the evidence because the underlying concept remains a belief in a religious text, rather than acceptance of what the eyes appear to tell us. Whenever the evidence fails to support the ‘theory’, the evidence is ignored as suspect, or the argument is ignored as meaningless. This will always be the case when the first thought in creating a rational structure of theory is, “How do we disprove a competing theory?”
The tragedy in this difficulty is that it shows the corruption of both sides of the ‘issue’. A Christian who wishes to accept on faith that Man was created by God as told in the Bible shouldn’t need to support that with a rational examination of evidence; such a need is the antithesis of the concept of faith. Conversely, those who cherish the concept of rational thought, and who feel that an examination of evidence and the use of deductive reasoning will provide the best result shouldn’t feel compelled to accept the results of such reasoning as belief. It should be enough to say, “Well, it looks as if mankind came about through evolution; if we didn’t, God had an awful lot of fun creating bones and such for us to find!”
By engaging in a ‘debate’ over the issue, both ‘sides’ fail to live up to their own basic underlying beliefs as to how to treat life and living.