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Friday, September 24, 2010

Parasites and Creationism

I signed up for the Creation Ministries International email newsletter the other day, so I'll be checking out their latest and greatest arguments for a young earth all the time.
In the first email I received from them, the main article they linked to was about parasites and how they fit into creationism. I'll just go through this article and see what I can find.

Firstly they talk about how the flatworms of the genus Schistosoma have "a bizarre and complex life-cycle which defies an evolutionary explanation." So straight away we have an argument from incredulity.. Uhh I meant to say argument from complexity. They are basically saying "Look how complicated it all is! GOD DID IT!" which is quite frankly an awful argument. They can't conceive of an evolutionary mechanism, therefore in their mind, creationism automatically wins. Sorry, that isn't the way science works.

Their next play was predictable, they assert that "The straightforward, biblical answer is that these evils did not exist in the original creation." Parasites (and all other bad creatures) apparently didn't exist until after Adam and Steve sinned. With this argument they take aim at other Christians and theistic evolutionists who "accept the secular belief in millions of years", saying that since death and disease and parasites exist before sin in this view of the world, that Young Earth Creationism must be right! Oh boy, I've really picked a great article to pee on haven't I?

Next is the explanation for the origin of parasites, and it is comedic gold. I'm just going to quote them. My comments are in red, bold and underlined square brackets.

"Parasites must have been benign and beneficial in their original form. ... But when Adam and Eve sinned [HAH!], things began to go wrong. These once-harmless creatures degenerated [evolved?], and became parasitic and harmful ...

Perhaps some became parasitic as a result of mutations [evolved?]...

Other kinds of genetic change may have been involved too [evolution?]. For example, microbes can swap genes  [and evolve?]...

In many cases, however, the life-cycle of the parasite is so complex that new genetic information may have been needed [evolved?]. Mutations do not provide new genetic information [WRONG]; so the information may have been there from the beginning. However, it was in a ‘switched off’ mode before the Fall [HAH!], and was not ‘switched on’ until after the Fall. God could have included this genetic information because of his foreknowledge that Adam and Eve would disobey him. "

They're so clever that they're committing post hoc fallacies with events that never happened.

Finally, they mention Noah's Ark, and try to explain the existence of parasites in the context of it. They propose the typical creationist hyper-evolution post-flood. All parasites in their mind have evolved from a few different parasites into the millions of species of parasitic organisms we have today, in just 4000 years. It blows my mind how much cognitive dissonance there is in the mind of a Young Earth Creationist.

7 comments:

  1. coulda, might'hve been, possibly... alot of uncertainty in their own argument. How can a parasite have had a benign form? that would mean it wasn't anything at all, you can't have a non - parasitic parasite..

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  2. Lol, Adam and Steve.

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  4. DM said...

    " you will not have a PUBLIC FORUM"

    I don't believe you.

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  5. If creationists believe so many millions of species of harmful organisms could have come into existence by descending from just a few benign organisms in the 4000 years or so since the Noachian Flood, then they believe in a heck of a lot more evolution than evolutionary scientists.

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  6. Can creationists cite experimental evidence to hypothesize how an act of sin can cause a change in the food-acquiring behavior of benign organisms so that they become parasitic organisms? If God caused this change by what input of energy or process did the Deity effect this transformation?

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  7. So God intentionally may have included non-expressed genetic information in these benign future-parasitic organisms so that when the Original Sin happened this information would have been instantly expressed to bring parasites into existence. All the billions of souls afflicted with the miseries of parasitic diseases, most of them innocent (and ALL of them innocent of ORIGINAL SIN) most surely be thanking this All-loving God for his wisdom in giving them a well-deserved lesson in divine justice.

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