FREE ESSAY ON ORIGINS

ORIGINS

Adam Dill 
Origins
Creationism vs. Evolution, the argument disputed by more scientists, more paleontologists
and more everyday people than probably any other argument since the dawn of man. Who is
right? Do the theories and evidence of evolutionists have the right answers or do the
faith and facts of creationists hold the answers? 
What is creationism? "Creationism" is the idea that all forms of life, and particularly
humans, were independently created by a willful act on the part of God or a deity. What's
wrong with creationism? That depends on what form of creationism you are referring to.
There are several forms of creationism that all differ from one another. None are really
scientific, though not all are unscientific to the same degree. "Old earth creationism"
holds that the earth was created a very long time ago and populated with life
more-or-less shown in fossil records. However, new species of organisms were created
one-by-one over all that time, each the result of a separate creative act by the Deity.
This theory is not scientific, because it cannot be falsified; any evidence can be made
to fit into it. "Sequential creationism" says that the earth is old, and the major groups
of fossils do reflect organisms living at different times in earth's history. However,
the major mass extinction represent times when all living things were destroyed, and then
the earth was repopulated by a new creative act. The last extinction happened recently,
after which the current animals and humans were created, but this isn't scientific
either. Sequential creationism simply doesn't agree with the evidence. None of these mass
extinction's wiped out all life. In many cases, we find the same species of organisms
both before and after the extinctions. "Day-age creationism" says that the book of
Genesis is accurate in describing the order of creation, but that each "day" in Genesis
actually represents a long period of real time. This position also runs out of evidence,
primarily because the order of creation as given in Genesis doesn't agree with the order
as shown in fossil records. Of all the different forms of creationism "young-earth
creationism" is the worst. This is the position that most of the politically active
creationists hold. Young-earth creationists demand a literal reading of Genesis. They
insist that the earth is less than ten thousand years old; that it and all life were
created in just six twenty-four-hour days; and that the entire fossil record is a result
of Noah's flood. 
Other forms of creationism are simply different interpretations of the known geological
and fossil evidence. Only young-earth creationism requires its believers to either reject
or rewrite most of the hard sciences. Atomic physics, astrophysics, most of geology, most
of paleontology, much of biology and nearly all of genetics would have to be torn down
for young-earth creationism to be true. If this were true then all the fossil evidence,
researchers, scientists and many others supporting evolution are not only wrong, but also
have wasted centuries of time and research. 
There are absolute arguments to disprove the theories of evolution. The first being that
evolution cannot take place unless random mutations occur, but in the case of advanced
animal defense mechanisms, random mutation cannot produce them. 
An example of this would be a particular beetle called the bombardier beetle. This
particular beetle houses two chemical tanks in its body which are used for the purpose of
self-defense. When a predator attacks the beetle, the two different chemicals in the
tanks are sprayed out from the beetle. They combine in the air and create a hot chemical
explosion in the face of the predator insuring the beetle's survival. According to
evolution when the very first mutation appeared and the chemical tanks were just
beginning to form but were not yet functional, they would not provide any survival
benefit to the beetle. It would take many thousands of mutations over millions of years
to produce the end mechanism, but since mutations are random, they could never follow a
pattern to produce an end result, especially since the mechanism would not provide any
survival advantage until it was fully developed. Evolution just simply cannot work! A
current modernized example would be like copying a computer program on a computer that
randomly changes one byte during each copying process. You could copy the program a
million times but all you will get is a nonfunctioning program, not a program with more
features. Life forms can adapt and change within a species because God built into their
DNA the possibility of many variants, but one species can never evolve past these limits
into another totally different species. The second argument against the theory of
evolution is all observed mutations cause a loss of DNA information. Scientists of
creationism and non-creationism both show examples of the loss of DNA information. All
experiments in the laboratory that involve the DNA of mutated specimens always show a
loss of DNA information, for evolution to truly take place there must be the addition of
new data to the DNA chain, yet this has never been the case. In fact many evolutionists
always show animals that have lost some feature and hold that up as an example of
evolution. Thirdly, no intermediate fossils have been found to support evolution's theory
that we evolve through stages. An eye-opening example is if evolution were true there
should be numerous examples of animals which are between mutated stages. There has never
been a fossil discovered that shows how wings develop, never a fossil of a creature whose
forelimb is half way between an arm and a wing, yet evolutionists base recreated
creatures on these premises. 
In finding common ground in evolution and creation it should be mentioned that science
itself can only deal with how the universe operates or works, because this is what we can
actually observe and test. The subject of the origin of life and the universe is outside
the scope of human observation and, therefore, does not technically come under the
definition of science. Since no human was present to observe the universe coming into
existence by chance or evolution, and no human was present to observe the universe coming
into existence by design or creation, both evolution and creation are, ultimately,
positions of faith and not science. So whether creationist or evolutionist the believer
must be a person of faith.