We
understand the theory of evolution to be a series of conclusions drawn
from over a century of research, predictions, and discoveries. This
theory allows us to understand the mechanisms in biology and make
further predictions about the sort of evidence we will uncover in the
future. Its predictive power is vital to success in real-life
applications like medicine, genetic engineering, and agriculture.
However, creationists don’t see it the same way. Creationists
artificially classify medicine, genetic research, and agriculture as
“operational science,” and believe that those disciplines function in a
different way than research in evolutionary biology. They understand the theory of evolution, along with mainstream geology and a variety of other disciplines, as a philosophical construct created for the express purpose of explaining life on Earth apart from divine intervention.
Thus, they approach the concept of evolution from a defensive
position; they believe it represents an attack on all religious faith.
This defensive posture is reflected in nearly all creationist
literature, even in the less overt varieties such as intelligent-design
creationism. It dictates responses. When creationists see a particular
argument or explanation about evolution, their initial reaction is to
ask, “How does this attack the truth of God as Creator? What
philosophical presuppositions are dictating beliefs here? How can I
challenge those underlying assumptions and thus demonstrate the truth?”
Recognizing this basis for creationist arguments is a helpful tool for
understanding why such otherwise baffling arguments are proposed.
In reality, we understand that although various philosophical
implications may be constructed around evolution, it is not driven by
any atheistic philosophy. The fundamental principle undergirding the
theory of evolution is the same as the fundamental principle behind all
science: that hypotheses can be tested and confirmed by prediction. But
creationists instead insist that evolution arises out of explicitly
atheistic axioms. This series will look at the arguments and objections
which flow from this worldview in six different areas.
Creationists accept certain aspects of variation, adaptation, and
speciation, but they artificially constrain the mechanism for adaptation
to produce an imagined barrier between “œmicroevolution” and
“œmacroevolution” (Part 2). They conceptualize evolutionary adaptation
as a series of individual changes, missing the entire mechanism provided
by the population as a whole (Part 3). They make the extraordinary
claim that no transitional fossils exist, simply by redefining
“transitional” into something that could not possibly exist (Part 4).
Creationists attempt to rewrite the last two centuries of scientific
progress in order to avoid dealing with the multiple lines of evidence
all independently affirming common descent and deep time (Part 5). They
have far-reaching misapprehensions concerning microbiology and DNA (Part
6). On top of all this, they assign ethical and moral failings to
evolutionary science in order to make evolution seem dangerous and
anti-religion (Part 7). I will address each of these topics in the
coming posts.