Great Questions to ask creationists...

[malicious_bloke]

Doesn't it bother you that all creationist preachers and sources openly misrepresent and outright LIE to you?

 

[CommonEnlightenment]

Doesn't it bother you that all creationist preachers and sources openly misrepresent and outright LIE to you?

I honestly think that this doesn't bother some individuals as it allows them to hone their own lying skills. If they are being lied to then I think it somehow gives some a justification to outright lie.

 

[The Felonius Pope]

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

I don't see how it's a cop-out. There is a difference between saying that god exists and he knows your future, and saying god exists and he CAUSES your future. It's still free. You still had no less choice, even though God obivously knew the outcome - and I say this as an atheist.

But of course there are other complications, because there are theists (including some subsets of Christianity) who do believe that everything happens at god's will. Heh.

I see it is as more a conflict of the combination of omniscience AND omnibenevolence vs free will.

An all-seeing, all-loving God who knows from the moment of your conception what choices you are going to make with your "free will" is struck with his/hers/its/their own paradox in the case of someone who's life choices will lead to eternal damnation. To intervene and save you from hell nullifies the concept of free will, the lack of intervention means God knowingly allows you to eternally damn yourself (hardly an omnibenevolent act) and any other combination of the inability to know or act on your behalf are incompatible with the general portrayal of God.

The common attributes applied to God are entirely self-refuting when faced with the concepts of hell and free-will

The concepts of Hell and so on are, as Spong notes, inventions of the Church for political control of the masses.

Consider this question.

[If God exists...]

Would an all-good, all-knowing God create souls, knowing that they'll end up in "Hell"?

No.

Ergo, all souls will "return to God"/go to Heaven - because He is also all-loving.

[Considering the position that Naturalism takes on crime and punishment, an all-loving God could do no less.]

This reasoning doesn't half get up the nose of literalists/conservatives/fundamentalists!

Kindest regards,

James

 

[Laurens]

Can you name a prediction that has been made and successfully met based upon the creationist model (which is not predicted by evolution)?

 

[nemesiss]

when adam and eve got kicked out of paradise for eating forbidden fruit... what did the other animals do wrong to also get kicked out?

 

[DutchLiam84]

You need a flu shot?
Yes!
Do you accept evolution?
No!
Here's a 50 year old flu shot, have fun!

 

[The Felonius Pope]

You need a flu shot?
Yes!
Do you accept evolution?
No!
Here's a 50 year old flu shot, have fun!

Awesome joke, but I think the problem is that anti-evolutionists deny macroevolution.

 

[Laurens]

You need a flu shot?
Yes!
Do you accept evolution?
No!
Here's a 50 year old flu shot, have fun!

Awesome joke, but there are i think the problem is that anti-evolutionists deny macroevolution.

Which leads to another good question to ask a creationist:

Given that you accept microevolutionary processes, can you provide evidence that these processes cannot lead to macroevolutionary changes over time?

 

[The Felonius Pope]

Sorry, last post was worded rather clumsily; I'm a little rushed at the moment.

 

[Laurens]

Sorry, last post was worded rather clumsily; I'm a little rushed at the moment.

No, no, your post was perfectly clear, it just made me think of that question.

For a creationist to accept microevolution and not macroevolution they need to propose a mechanism that stops microevolution leading to macroevolution.

No such mechanism has ever been found...

 

[Frenger]

Sorry, last post was worded rather clumsily; I'm a little rushed at the moment.

No, no, your post was perfectly clear, it just made me think of that question.

For a creationist to accept microevolution and not macroevolution they need to propose a mechanism that stops microevolution leading to macroevolution.

No such mechanism has ever been found...

I have often thought about that but never had a good way of phrasing it. Well phrased chap.

 

[RedYellow]

^Creationists will end up accepting the majority of what makes evolution true when you press them, but then act like it's such a big deal to go that one step further in saying change over time doesn't stop. At that point you ask them whether it's more plausible that they're wrong about that one detail against all the others they accept, or that this one detail somehow holds back the entire theory and biologists just haven't figured it out after hundreds of years of study.

 

[Pirate]

Why do I breath and eat out of the same hole?

 

[CommonEnlightenment]

If it takes a nuclear reaction (or a supernova explosion to 'create' elements with a 'higher' mass than lead) to 'create' the elements with 'higher' mass than lithium on the periodic table, how was the Earth created before the stars?

And 'God Done it' is not an acceptable answer.

 

[scalyblue]

You need a flu shot?
Yes!
Do you accept evolution?
No!
Here's a 50 year old flu shot, have fun!

Awesome joke, but I think the problem is that anti-evolutionists deny macroevolution.

 

[CommonEnlightenment]

If I took every single bible ever in print and made them disappear, what evidence can you present that would verify your claim that your God exists?

If I made the bible disappear, what would you say the age of the Earth is? And what would you use as evidence?



I think a good follow up question could be.......

If I removed all of the physical evidence that someone committed the act of murder what evidence would you use to try to convict that person?

 

[The Felonius Pope]

Doonesbury comic

This might sound silly, but I actually know creationists who admit that changes in allelic frequency can result in phenotypic variations within a species. The problem, however, is that they don't believe that such changes can result in transformation from one species to another.

 

[Gnug215]

Doonesbury comic

This might sound silly, but I actually know creationists who admit that changes in allelic frequency can result in phenotypic variations within a species. The problem, however, is that they don't believe that such changes can result in transformation from one species to another.

Have you seen the latest Potholer54 video?

Evidently, some creationists (even Hovind) accept that one species can give rise to two distinct species that cannot interbreed. The problem is that all those three species would, in the eye of the creationst, still be the same "kind".

They will keep coming back to this, and as long as we "only" see speciation, not "genusation", "familyation" or "orderation", they will stand on their hindlegs.
As long as we cannot change a dog into a cat in the laboratory within a few generations, they won't accept "macroevolution".

It is as Laurens touched on earlier: creationists believe there is some kind of mechanism, some invisible "kind-barrier" that they will, of course, never be able to explain or provide any evidence for.

What we need, I suppose, is to REALLY, really fuck up a fruit fly in the lab. Breed a bunch of them for thousands and thousands of generations into something unrecognizable from a fruit fly.

 

[The Felonius Pope]

What we need, I suppose, is to REALLY, really fuck up a fruit fly in the lab. Breed a bunch of them for thousands and thousands of generations into something unrecognizable from a fruit fly.

I second this, but the problem is that the creationists will just come back and say, "You're using artificial selection. Blind, random, natural selection would never be able to produce such results. Therefore, a creator is necessary to explain our existence. Thanks for proving our point."

I can't tell you how many times I've had these people tell me, "Mutations don't lead to adaptations; mutations negatively affect an organism."
How do you argue with people like that?