Original: April 12, 2011 Issue 14

By: Evan Ricucci

Staff Writer

Despite arguments over taxes, healthcare, and war, there is one issue that is arguably more defining, fierce, and completely misunderstood and misapplied than all others.

That issue is the argument between creationists and evolutionists. No, I do not mean Christians and atheists. I mean those individuals that believe in the big bang, primordial soup, macro-evolution, and survival of the fittest as the basis for life on earth and, well, those that do not.

The creationists I speak of are not inherently Christian, they simply believe that the world was created by intelligent design, whatever shape that may take, and that macro-evolution is flawed and are creationists. That is not why I am writing this. I am writing this post because people on both sides seem to have lost all comprehension of what the debate is actually about and the discipline to which it belongs.

The scientific method makes very clear what is, and what is not, science. Science applies to the observable world that we can examine and test, it is the physical realm. Science is made up of hypotheses that individuals have made about the world which are called theories, and if those theories are able to hold true time after time, they become scientific facts.

That is what I believe. There is far more than science cannot answer than there are issues to which it holds the answer.

Why , do Darwinists treat macro-evolution as scientific fact? Why do creationists treat intelligent design as scientific fact? Because that makes their arguments sound more convincing. I hate to be the one to break it to them but evolution and creationism are theories, not facts. There are other ideas and none of which has been proven definitively true. All we know right now is that both ideas are on the table, along with many others, and none of them are scientifically proven as law. To treat either idea as such is not scientific.

Creationist’s arguments against evolution are not facts, they are opposing theories. Irreducible complexity sounds compelling, until one realizes that it is an idea open to the interpretation of the person. My idea of what may be irreducibly complex may be radically different from someone else’s perspective.

Where does that take us? Do we standardize what irreducible complexity applies to? The point is that the idea is not a scientific fact or even logical.

Now comes the idea of where and how mankind originated. Unfortunately, all those scientists on both sides are all way out of their discipline, because the idea of origin is philosophical, not scientific. No one was there when creation or the big bang happened. It is not observable, so the idea that they are scientifically proven or provable is simply nonsensical.

The argument falls under the philosophical idea of metaphysics and ontology; the ideas of existence, what reality is and how it came about.

On the evolutionary side, the idea of survival of the fittest is condemned by virtue of the evolutionary process itself. As something evolves there must come a time where whatever is evolving becomes unusable.

If a bat truly evolved into a rat, then there must have been a time where the wings of the bat were at a stage that made them unusable and yet also a stage at which the legs were also unusable. Since the changes happen at such a slow pace the development would have been such that the creature died out completely before the development could fully occur. Essentially there could never be a “fittest” by the very fact that the development happens at all.

Evolution denies the second law of thermodynamics. The universe is constantly becoming more and more disordered (entropy is constant). Matter does not order itself and so the idea of evolution, or the reformulation of matter into a more organized pattern, is not possible. The theory of evolution is undone by the law of thermodynamics.

Both sides have their strengths and weaknesses, the point is that neither is a purely scientific argument. Until we can see, test, retest and verify both hypotheses, we cannot call either theory a scientific fact.