Summary:
Religious creationism has tried to sneak into the minds and schools of the general North American population again and again in the last few decades, each time cloaking its religious roots more convincingly behind a scientific guise. This article discusses a few of the ways we can tell that creationism is not, and can not be, scientific.

Details or Sample:
Due to the way science works, an idea that isn´t scientifically viable (like ghosts, psychic powers, or intelligent design) doesn´t garner the attention of the scientific community. Ideas like this don´t fare well in peer-reviewed journals not because science is fascist or elitist, but because it requires knowledge to be usable as a tool of explaining, and obtaining, other knowledge in a way that is simple - that is, a way that doesn´t contradict strongly accepted theories without cause. Good scientific theories can be demonstrated to actually work.

The recent "debate," sparked largely by the push to have creationism taught alongside real science in Kansas schools, is all a part of the "Wedge" strategy, created by the "Discovery Institute," a front for religious creationism.

Creationism is not a science. Rather, it is an empirically unsupported religious opinion pushed on disinterested people for political reasons. No evidence supports it, and a vast amount of knowledge contradicts it. Laypeople fall for phrases like "Let´s open up the debate," and "Evolution is just a theory," because they don´t understand the science themselves. Any scientist proposing such nonsense is likely to be laughed out of the lecture all not due to bigotry, discrimination, or elitism, but because suggestions like "Evolution isn´t any more viable than intelligent design" are so wrong, they´re inane.

An assumption made by intelligent design creationists is that we can tell whether or not something is designed by looking at it. "Look at this building/telephone/car/painting/banana," they say, thumping at the pulpit, "And look at how complex it is. We know it is designed because it needed a designer. We can´t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell the painter - yet we know the painting is painted. We know it had a designer because it had to have a designer in order to exist. The same is true for all life."

Several responses can be made to such claims:

1) Creationists forget the meaning of real totality. God didn´t just create life, remember - according to creationists, god created everything under the sun, and the sun itself, and the billions of other suns in the universe. God didn´t only create all matter, he created waves, gravity, electromagnetism, space, time, light, causality, everything. Everything you know to exist was made by god.

At the same time, creationists claim that we can tell whether something was designed by looking at it, but how? If all things were designed, where is the basis for comparison? All things must look designed to someone who already "knows" they are designed.

The ability to distinguish between a designed and a non-designed thing is extinguished, as there are NO non-designed things. Whether or not something "looks" designed, then, becomes completely irrelevant - it was designed, so the fact that a thing looks any certain way provides no evidence that it was designed. In fact, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn´t even make something up to fit the bill, because we have no idea what a non-designed thing would look like. We don´t know our own criteria. Thus, a new argument is required to be in any way convincing of the premise that anything not known to be made by humans or animals has been consciously designed at all.

In order for the argument from design to work, a creationist must admit that something in the universe - maybe hydrogen, or rocks, or gravity - was not designed by god. This admittance of something having arisen naturally would create a basis for comparison with consciously-created things. Unfortunately for creationists, they would be required to deny the totality of their impossible god in order to take such a position.

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Written by: Currie Jean
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