Another list of questions that are supposed to stump “evolutionists” in our tracks. I think I had to use wikipedia to answer like one of them (the one about the chronology of insect and flowering plant evolution), the rest I answered off the top of my head.
Here goes:
“If the topic of evolution has never come up in your witnessing encounters, it undoubtedly will at some point. Christians need not be intimidated by it. Instead, here are some questions you can ask to help an evolutionist think through these issues while gently (yet effectively) exposing the irrationality of the theory itself.”
Actually all you are doing is highlighting your own ignorance and hoping the other person will be as ignorant as you.
“1) Where did the space for the universe come from? 2) Where did matter come from?”
I combined the two because the answer is the same – I don’t know and neither do you, and this has nothing to do with darwinian evolution.
“3) How does a strictly material, constantly changing universe give us immaterial, universal, unchanging laws (such as laws of logic, science, and morality)?”
The universe isn’t necessarily “strictly material”, material is just all that we can empirically observe and know to exist objectively. And the “laws” of logic, science and morality are all three very different abstract concepts. Laws of logic and physics are deduced from observation and are tentative, “laws” of physics are only constant and unchanging in principle, and many have been shown to not actually be universal or constant, such as newton’s “laws” of motion which break down at high speeds or the “law” of non-contradiction which ceases to apply in a universe where time, size, and velocity are relative. These “laws” are man-made symbolic representations of the world, and they are no more immutable than we are. If you mean why does the universe have the most basic known properties that it has, see the answer to questions 1 and 2.
“4) How did matter get so perfectly organized?”
It didn’t. If you drop the word “perfect” (bodies that get cancer and planets with fault lines that cause massive disasters that kill millions of people are hardly “perfectly” organized), and just ask how did matter get organized then my response is that the question is too vague – ask a more specific question and I can help you, but I am not going to spend an hour describing dozens of atomic, biological, chemical, geological etc processes that produce different things. How a mountain forms and how a snowflake form are two very different things that require different answers.
“5) Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?”
See the answer to questions 1-3.
“6) When, where, why, and how did randomness become non-random?”
I don’t know that it ever was non-random, or that anything even is non-random. We call things random when we lack the ability to predict them. In principle with enough data and enough smarts anything is predictable and non-random.
“7) When, where, why, and how did life arise from non-living matter?”
Plants turn non-living matter into living matter every day, non-living matter and living matter are the same thing – the iron in your blood and the iron in the steel of a golf club are identical. If you mean how exactly did life begin, we don’t know since the earliest life would not contain the fortified cell structures that are hard enough to fossilize and leave remnants, so the fossil record goes cold around 3.4 billion years ago. And the earliest fossil life is in the oceans to answer the where question..
“8) When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?”
Learning in the sense of mental activity evolved several billion years later, the first life would’ve simply been a chemical process. A germ doesn’t need to learn to reproduce, and is incapable of learning anything.
“9) Why would natural selection favor sexual reproduction over cell division, which is more efficient and less costly genetically?”
Sexual reproduction allows an individual to gain successful genes from many lineages maximizing it’s chance of survival and allowing a population to adapt to many selective pressures simultaneously. The mathematical speed of evolution is greatly enhanced by sexual reproduction which is evident in many evolution simulation programs you can download free to experiment virtually with the math of natural selection and virtually “evolve” things (including in some cases virtual functional machines).
“10) With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?”
Other cells presumably.
“11) Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of its kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and, thereby, decrease the chances of survival?”
As opposed to what, just dying out? I somehow think natural selection would favor starvation over automatic extinction. And natural selection is not a conscious process of species thinking about what they want or deciding what is best. As a science nerd who knows about this stuff it is always depressing to read rants like this posted by people who are bashing science and who, halfway through their rant betray the fact that they literally have no idea what the science they’re opposed to is about at all. Natural selection is the process of genes getting passed on at different rates because the genes themselves are useful or harmful, no thought or logic or “hmm, this would be a good idea” required.
“12) Which of the following evolved first and how long did it work without the others?:
(a) The digestive system, the food to be digested, the appetite, the ability to find and eat the food, the digestive juices, or the body’s resistance to its own digestive juices (stomach, intestines, etc.)?”
The food to be digested obviously, since predation is one organism eating another organism the organism must first exist before predation is an option. As for the rest, any organ system does not begin in it’s most tricked out, complex state any more than the first computer had a DVD drive. And just as my computer needs a hard drive to function but the earliest computers didn’t need a hard drive to function modern configurations of organs can become irreducibly complex by gradual modification the same way technologies do. As for the stomach resisting it’s stomach juices it doesn’t, your stomach lining digests itself perpetually.
“(b) The drive to reproduce or the ability to reproduce?”
Sex drive is a behavioral mental characteristic of higher animals which would not have been present in early microbial lifeforms which lacked brains just like bacteria do. Early life would’ve reproduced by chemical reactions just like mindless microbes do today.
“(c) The lungs, the mucous lining to protect them, the throat, or the perfect mixture of gases to be breathed into the lungs?”
There is no “perfect” mixture of gases, the atmosphere is not consistent anywhere on the earth’s surface. And the answer is the throat, followed by the lungs and then the various add-ons to them.
“(d) The termite or the Trichonympha symbiotes that live in its intestines and actually digest the cellulose?”
The termite – it would logically have had the ability to digest it’s own food and later lost it as a result of the effectiveness of the symbiotic relationship, the same way humans btw have largely lost the ability to digest food since the trillions of bacteria in our intestines do such a good job of it.
“(e) The plants or the insects that live on and pollinate them?”
Plants pre-date insects by many millions of years and flowering plants evolved several hundred million years after the first insects.
“(f) The bones or the ligaments, tendons, blood supply, and muscles to move the bones?”
Bones first emerge in the fossil record in the cambrian period, before which there were plenty of animals that could move around and thus had muscles, blood etc. Though if by blood supply you mean a heart pumping blood our four chambered heart evolved from the three chambered heart of the reptile which evolved from the two chambered heart of the fish, which evolved from simpler species like crustaceans, some of which have hearts and others do not. The first heart was most likely simply an accidental by-product of musculature, every time a fish wagged it’s tail it pumped a little blood – this mimics the lymph system in humans today which circulates all the non-blood fluid in your body by your muscles pressing on different parts of the body and forcing fluid from one region to the other – this is why a doctor gives you a shot near the butt, aka the gliteus maximus – the largest and most often used muscle in the human body. Short of injecting it in to a vein it’s the most effective way to circulate it through the body.
“(g) The nervous system, repair system, or hormone system?”
I’m not sure what you mean by “repair” system but I suspect the answer is the nervous system, though I could be wrong. I don’t know a lot about the evolution of hormones.
“(h) The immune system or the need for it?”
Well the first virus would necessarily pre-date the first immune system since natural selection is reactive, not pro-active.
And yes, I also know which came first, the chicken or the egg.
agnophilo 
“Sorry, you cannot reconcile creationism with evolution, which many are trying to do, nowadays.”
If by creationism you mean biblical literalism (in particular as it applies to genesis), you cannot reconcile it with almost any aspect of the physical world. Evolution has been made into the poster child for the anti-science movement by the leading ID organization the discovery institute (see their leaked manifesto the “wedge document”) but it by no means is the only aspect of nature that conflicts with a literal theology. Everything about geology, astrophysics, regular physics, biology, geology, anthropology, paleontology, genetics and many other fields points to an old earth where things like planets, plants, animals etc were not created as-is or in a brief or similar period of time. Yes, science is at odds with these scriptural accounts, but only if you take them literally which you need not do. Many people do however because they’ve built such a huge theology on these assumptions over centuries that to go back to the drawing board would be too embarrassing or too personally dangerous that many refuse to even consider the possibility that their founding assumptions are wrong. It’s the “we can’t question x because if we do we have to re-evaluate y and z” logic. It’s the same reason the catholic church covered up for, protected and enabled child rapists as a matter of policy when this was so obviously immoral by any reasonable standard – they were too afraid of the damage it would do to the perception of the church and the clergy as being somehow better than everyone else – if the pope or a priest is just a person like a president or a senator, just as prone to corruption or evil or insanity, then why go to the catholic church and not just make your own church or read the top theologians and figure it out for yourself? Their theology was more important to them than their ethical obligation to the truth, and to their parishoners’ children. Just as to many creationists their theology is more important to them than objective reality.
“Certain liberal ministers will cite evolution as possibly God’s way of creating other than “ex-nihilo”… out of nothingness and instantaneously, in an attempt to placate their humanist critics.”
A god could create atoms ex-nihilo and let abiogenesis occur or even create early life forms ex nihilo without conflicting with evolution science.
“It’s another way of saying that God can’t do what a god innately should be able to do, which is create something from nothing RIGHT NOW.”
Couldn’t a god create something any way it pleases? If so then why is your method the only reasonable one? Isn’t it also arrogant to suppose to know the mind of god?
“This is finite thinking.”
You have that backwards, evolution is the form of creation that produces an infinite and ever-growing number of kinds and types of life, probably on trillions of worlds throughout the cosmos, which by the way are also forming every second of every day. YOUR worldview is that a god made a much smaller, finite number of forms of life on one planet. The scientific view is not the one that’s finite, yours is. If you ask me the universe as science reveals it is a much more impressive creation than the “poof, a squirrel – poof, a dog – poof, a giraffe”, I-dream-of-genie-esque notion of creation.
“You attribute the God-given gift and trait that enables adaptation as evolving into completely different life forms”
This is a common misunderstanding of the similarity of different forms of life – a “completely new life form” has not evolved in the entire history of multi-cellular organisms. Plants and animals are not “completely different” from each other, not even close. The reason people think we are is that the similarities are on a cellular and genetic level, and our eyes do not have microscopic resolution. A plant doesn’t share parts of our anatomy in common with us like arms and legs, but our arms and legs and the leaves of a tree share parts of their anatomy in common like having nucleic cells with similar structures and mechanisms. So evolution does not require the production of a “completely different” form of life – everything is a modified version of what came before and is built on what came before.
“and there has never been a successful experiment to show any new life forms are coming about as a result of adaptation as it is described in the scientific
There have been many. Speciation (the splitting of one species into two distinct species) is common and well observed, all four kinds of speciation have been observed. You might also want to look into “ring species” for another interesting example of observable macro-evolution. By the way try to find a mention of ring species on any creationist website, they don’t touch the subject with a 10 foot pole. As for experiments showing that evolution produced new “kinds” of life these generally fall into the domain of experimental predictions made in the fields of genetics which support common ancestry and paleontology where the existence of many necessary (according to evolution) ancestral forms with unique features never before seen in nature were specifically predicted before they were discovered – some by darwin himself. So your statement is just not accurate. Unless you mean “nobody’s ever seen a dog give birth to a cat” in which it’s not accurate on a whole other level, since that has nothing to do with any actual biological process.
“Most scientists do NOT believe in a creator, although an increasing number are beginning to.”
Most scientists do, look up any statistic on belief in god among scientists and the rate is that of a healthy majority. Please cite evidence that the rate of belief is increasing. I know religious websites often promote the image that everyone is coming around to their point of view and there is a groundswell of support for things like creationism, especially among scientists, but this is usually BS.
“The empirical evidence for a creator is all around us, in the complexity of life.”
This is an argument from ignorance. It’s like saying that lightning proves the existence of thor. The problem is nobody ever showed that lightning comes from thor or from a deity, and of course now we know it doesn’t. But not knowing what lightning was or where it comes from seemed like a solid case for the existence of thor, just like not understanding how life began seems like a solid case for yahweh – but ignorance is not a sound basis for an argument. Show me a god creating life or throwing lightning bolts and I will believe you, until then I’m going to say “I don’t know”. Also we’ve made advancements in the field of abiogenesis, but it’s slow going due to the nature of the chemistry involved. We know how many of the components of life came together on their own but we don’t know what the initial form of life was like to speculate further.
“I once described to a group of antitheists their evolutionary theory, summing it up thusly… akin to me setting down my car keys and allowing enough time to pass so that they must inevitably evolve and morph into a BMW. Not a Ford… a BMW. In the same way it is explained to us by evolutionists that single-cell organisms HAD to develop to their present form as complex organisms, even though they functioned/function as well as fully developed complex life forms in modern times.”
Ironically you and darwin are actually in agreement here – this was one of the ideas darwin was attacking with his theory, the idea that species were evolving “just because” and were always spontaneously improving. Darwin thought this idea was absurd, partly because there is no trait which is useful in one environment but is not harmful in another, meaning there is no objective standard by which a species can be called “better” than another – a lizard is not better or “more evolved” than a polar bear or visa versa, each is simply better adapted to it’s environment. And the species that tend to gain complexity are the ones that leave one environment and have to adapt to another, then some leave that environment and have to adapt again etc, etc. This explains the co-existence of so-called “higher” and “lower” forms of life.
“These are not evolving… indeed, they don’t have to, they have everything that they need to live and reproduce NOW without going through any successive or future stages of development.”
This is true, in a vacuum. But when multiple species are competing over finite resources and some species use other species as resources this no longer is the case. If a cheetah needs to eat gazelle to survive it will tend to catch the slower ones and the faster ones will survive, meaning natural selection will favor variations which make the gazelle faster as a species – and just like automobiles a faster one is usually more complex than a slower one. What you are saying is analogous to saying that two companies that made computers in the 1980′s made computers that worked perfectly well so they couldn’t have possibly improved. The nature of competition whether in a capitalist society or an ecosystem produces niches – some company will make cheaper but inferior computers and survive that way, another will make really good but expensive computers and survive that way, and the ones that make computers that don’t work well or aren’t priced right will go “extinct”. So too some species will survive by being fast to avoid predators, others will survive by being small to evade them, others by being big and tough to fight them off, or a million other survival strategies. It’s probably no coincidence that the so-called “cambrian explosion” which produced a huge diversity of life in a relatively short time began with the first predation – teeth evolved to eat other creatures and were then modified to bones and shells to protect species from predators etc, in a kind of evolutionary arms race that is going on to this day. One species by itself will not evolve, but two or more competing species will, because of competition. Similarly one nation by itself will never develop nuclear weapons or stealth bombers etc, but many nations going to war over resources for centuries will develop these things.
“Indeed, the primordial environment would not have allowed any such evolution as it would have been quite hostile and volatile and geologic and atmospheric changes would occur too quickly for any organism to adapt. it would simply die off.”
I can refute this with one word – lysol. It’s designed by us with our big brains to kill bacteria yet it only ever kills 99.9% of it. Some always survive. The same is true of the center of a nuclear explosion, it kills almost all the microscopic life, but some always survive. The reason is that if you have trillions upon trillions of micro-organisms some will always get lucky. If every germ on a kitchen counter had a lottery ticket, some would win the jackpot. It’s just math. The most devastating events in earth’s several billion year geological history, including meteor impacts releasing more energy than a nuclear holocaust and leaving 60, 80 and hundred mile wide craters did not manage to kill even all animal or plant life, let alone microbes. You would practically have to turn the planet into molten slag to kill all the little germs, so I don’t buy your argument.
“Yet, we’re supposed to believe that millions of years are required for such changes to occur.”
What do you mean by “such changes”? Cancer cells adapt to chemotherapy and radiation in days and weeks, not millions of years. Evolution can and does happen quite rapidly. One of the earliest evolution experiments was done in the 1800s, a scientist took seven cylinders of identical bacteria and heated some of them up to the point that the germs started dying, then to the point that they were all dead. Once he had that figure he did the same thing again, only this time did it gradually over several years. Not only did the bacteria survive the second time, but now when he lowered the temperature they began to die – they had adapted to the heat so well they could now not tolerate the cold. If he had lowered the temperature incrementally the reverse would’ve happened too. And no, this scientist was not millions of years old by the end of the experiment.
“The educational system is secular by nature and design.”
So is the game of checkers, that doesn’t make it hostile to christianity.
“You’re talking about people of faith crying persecution, when all I’ve been seeing lately are atheists… usually students crying that their atheistic views are not being taken seriously… bitching about their lot in life. Case in point, I was threatened with a lawsuit for countering a local ‘atheist’ (really an antitheist) and his contention that “Merry Christmas” signs shouldn’t be allowed on city buses during the holidays, that it was an insult to atheists and (lol) other ethnic groups… whom, incidentally, when polled, all came out in favor of the traditional expression. In fact, nearly every atheist… TRUE atheist I’ve ever encountered, sees nothing wrong with the practice! There may be shit-disturbers in Christian ranks, but, they are easily countered and balanced off in Darwin’s crowd. This particular guy, however, is simply a whiner who finds fulfillment dragging others through litigation.”
So you’re saying that all atheists ever do is whine about persecution, then you say that you’ve never met another atheist that did this and that those that do are not true atheists? Okie dokie. And there is a big difference between separation of church and state and finding the expression offensive. I don’t want the government endorsing any religion, but I don’t care if you say merry christmas or every store in town has a 20 foot neon sign saying it. This is why it’s only ever an issue when it’s done with taxpayer money on public lands. Bear in mind it would be equally offensive to me if atheists went around using public funds to put “there is no god” signs on public property, but atheists generally don’t do such things.
Bear in mind also that atheists are a minority and are often treated like second class citizens, and when we are constantly told this is a christian nation we are made to feel like this is your country and not ours. If that were not the case I’m sure that atheists in general would be less worried about signage at the post office or the city hall.
“Science is a legitimate field of endeavor, it helps us understand the created world. It only becomes confusing when God is left out of the equation, Him being the author of all science.”
Science is a man-made series of methods for testing ideas, not the world it is used to try to understand. People often confuse science (the scientific method) with nature, which is what one reads about in “science” books. Even if a god created nature science is all us. As for leaving god out, the reason scientists leave god out is that they can’t test god, so to present ideas about god as science is dishonest and unethical. Silence is not the same thing as rejection though, scientists also don’t publish papers about whether a movie was good or bad “scientifically” either, because it’s subjective and can’t be empirically verified by the tools of science. But you don’t see movie buffs crying persecution from the scientific community because they didn’t come out in favor of x, y or z film.
“Interesting you term science as a philosophy. I rather like that term, at least in the sense of it relating to theory. However, natural science can’t be philosophical, it must be tangible. It must be testable.”
I said it’s the subset of philosophy that deals with physical claims about nature. It is in other words the non-abstract field of philosophy. And the word theory as it’s used in science doesn’t mean a guess or a hunch, atoms, gravity and germs are all “theories” too.
“Even God asks us to test Him, to see if He is real and that He speaks truth. (Malachi 3:10)
And forbids us to test him (Luke 4:12). One of many, many, many, many, many contradictions.
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