You already dealt with the dinosaur part. As for the rest, hell, God had the time to tell Noah to build the boat in the first place, so I should think it’d be no skin off His back to pull a TARDIS on the ark.
Sorry; what’s a “TARDIS”?
Dr Who’s time travel device; looks like a British police box, much bigger in the inside than the outside.
The time machine used on Doctor Who. Although externally it looked like a “police box” (a British mini-jail about the size of a large phone booth), internally it consisted of several large rooms, using some kinda “dimensional warping” plot device. A similar prop was used in one of the Harry Potter movies, where a small ratty-looking tent has an impossibly large interior.
Not a Dr. Who fan. I take it?
Since facts are largely irrelevent in a creationism debate, I’d instead make the subject a moral debate. I’d say something like the following to a creationist: “Why am I opposed to creationism? Because it’s dishonest. You know, in your heart of hearts you KNOW, that the evidence strongly suggests that evolution took place over hundreds of millions of years. You’re like the defense lawyer for a man who was caught standing over a dismembered corpse with a bloody axe: you’re struggling frantically to find some way, any way, to say ‘this isn’t what it looks like’”.
That’s the problem, though: taken together all this evidence points to evolution. Any single point can be dismissed easily. Therefore, there is likely no single question that could put the fear of UnGod into a Creationist.
As per the OP’s request, that might make them pee their pants.
Thing is, these people believe in faith, not evidence. To continue your analogy, they are the equivalent of a UFO believer caught in the scenario you describe, who’d explain the body by claiming that aliens beamed it down five minutes ago, along with the bloody axe. And they’d wave away claims of impossibility or implausiblity with condescending lectures about how you can’t understand the powers and motivations of superhuman aliens. And they’d be very, very offended if you didn’t take them seriously, and call you bigoted if you pointed out how silly their beliefs are.
The irony, of course, is that the seven days of creation as explained in the Bible are a pretty good parable of the Big Bang. Look at the Noah story and it’s a parable of major disasters.
I think it’s time that science as a whole stopped trying to take these idiots head-on and attempting to engage them in debate.
Making them into social pariahs would be much easier and more fruitful.
[nitpick in the interests of Fighting Ignorance]
The reason a police box is the size of a large phone booth… is that it’s a large phone booth.
They were not used as mini-jails. They were used in the days before public telephones to allow constables and members of the public to call their local police station.
[/NITIOFI]
If a logically-based scientific question could alter a creationist’s view, there wouldn’t be creationism. This guy has an incompetent level of science knowledge which he uses to impress an audience with no scientific knowledge.
A simple question to ask a simpleton audience in this kind of presentation is:
Why are animal and plant populations so different where they are isolated? In the creationist view they all spread from the Ark several thousand years ago, so why are 80% of Australian species unique to just Australia, for example? Surely they would have reproduced while they were spreading from the ark to Australia. If there is no evolution, there should be an even distribution of all species with Mount Ararat as the central distribution point.
In general the hurdles to overcome are the charisma of the speaker and the ignorance of the audience. What normally happens in these types of debates is that sincere and nice professors come up against charismatic creationists. In general, charisma will beat beat content in persuading the polloi. The creationist approach is to fling such a broad variety of comments out that it appears there are numerous unanswerable flaws for the evolutionists. No single question gets adequately parsed.
There’s a video clip I saw recently “Why doesn’t God heal amputees?”, that I thought was a very provoking question for those people who honestly believe that God sometimes heals the sick (yes I know this isn’t the same thing as Creationism, I just thought it was a good example of a profound question).
–you can Google the video clip, I didn’t post it up because I didn’t think as a whole the video is that great–
I thought of one recently too: “If Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, would we exist”? Which doesn’t attack the reasoning or evidence but may make them uncomfortable.
But ultimately, Creationism requires a certain wilful ignorance*. How can you reason with someone that has decided to put their faith above reason?
- As I’ve said in the past, Answers in Genesis can count (doctoral) cosmologists and geologists among its membership. The level of day-to-day ignorance that these people must exercise is truly mind-boggling.
“Making them into social pariahs” is what the movie and play Inherit the Wind and similar presentations attempted–and when enough people holding those beliefs were backed far enough into a corner, (in their view and with associated isues of various cultural/moral conflicts), they rebelled by organizing into a political force that has been striving to take both science and governance back into the nineteenth century.
If you want to find a way to move their opinions out of mainstream society, (and I would say that head-to-head was the correct approach in Dover, PA), then you need to find a way to move the larger majority of those believers away from imposing their beliefs on the country and simple ridicule is exactly the wrong approach.
Heh, reminds me of the joke about the museum janitor who said, “This fossil is 1,000,003 years old. I know that, because they told me it was a million years old when I started working here, and that was three years ago.”
The 6,000-year figure comes from the work of Bishop James Ussher.
Ding ding!
Winner!
I think that´s the most earth shattering question.
The world as it is observed, all the evidence, points to much, much more that 6000 years back… heck, we have structures built by men older than that.
So, if god indeed did create the world to just look like it´s billions of years old while it actually sprouted fully formed 6000 years ago, then god is deceiving and thus lieing to us. Therefore, creationists refuse to believe god´s lie.
I´d love to see one wiggle his way out of that one.
As a Christian I can tell you, indisputably and without a doubt in my mind that the planet Earth is 6000 years old.
As a realist I can also tell you that this represents 0.00013215% of the total age of the Earth (give or take a couple hundred centuries).
Acceptance of reason neither enhances nor diminishes my faith. The existance of God cannot possibly be proven one way or the other because there is no way of reconciling between metaphysical points and physical points. It would be like reconciling apples and orange clown shoes.
My faith comes from a simple refusal to believe that, given all that I have seen and experienced, all of this is accidental. An elephant with the runs can shit on a curtain and some people will call it art, but that don’t make him Jackson Pollack.
Given this point of view I think the answer “Because God wants it that way” is perfectly reasonable as a way to establish a boundry between two wildly different overall subjects. I also think that any Christian with a brain will either discuss scientific issues within the scientific realm or, if science is being forced into the spiritual realm, throw up the BGWITW wall and end the conversation. It is important to recognize the rhetoric hurtled at us by the anti-religion community as the opposite side of the same coin as the rhetoric other misguided Christians throw at them.
As to the OP, there should technically be no question that will cause the faithful to crap themselves, although quite a few will when asked “Why did God create plant life on the second day if He knew He was not going to create the sun until the third day?”
See? We’re not all ranting lunitics.
Ok, maybe I am, but for totally unrelated reasons
Don’t judge me
You radically underestimate the rationalization power of the creationist. From here:
Your puny attempts to breach the wall of irrationality with which the creationist has surrounded his mind are doomed to failure.
Interesting idea, only problem is, creationists outnumber evolutionists nine to one, so assuming you are successful just who are the outcasts?
I had no idea the creationists arguments were so good, and accurate. There are only two minor things I would disagree with. The time (7 days) of creation and the age of the world. The rest is pretty solid. Please don’t tell me evolution is fact, it is all opinion, can’t possibly be anything else, no one was there to observe it, no one knows the truth.