Kevin Atkinson, 1995
Creations vs. Evolution, which one is correct? Which one is realistic? What is Creation? What is Evolution? Creation is the belief that everything was created by God as it is stated in the Bible. Evolution is the belief that everything evolved from something. By looking at what the views of each of these arguments are you can clearly see the flaws in both sides. We had to come from somewhere and we then had to evolve from there.
Neither view can be completely correct. Someone truly open will see both sides. We had to come from somewhere. However we then evolved from there. "We would be very foolish to maintain that our advancing understanding of the cosmos and the biological world in any way argues against the existence of God." [God is the creator] (Miller, 58) We simply cannot explain where life came from, which proves there must be a creator. (Miller, 59) However, who created the creator? We may never know. We couldn't just evolve from nothingness. Or could we? "Our understanding of astrophysics is too primitive to permit us to put a meaningful answer to the question of why there is a universe to begin with." (Miller, 58) Let's say the universe started out from nothingness then who created that nothingness? Even nothingness is something and someone had to create that nothingness. Someone had to. The universe then evolved from whatever was created because the earth, the universe, is definitely not where it started.
How can we account for all the changes that occured on the earth? Creationists call it adaptation. However, according to The American Heritage Dictionary adaptation is defined as "An alteration or adjustment, often hereditary, by which a species or individual improves its condition in relationship to its environment." And evolution as "A gradual process in which something changes into a more complex or more sophisticated form." By looking at there definitions, you can tell that they are very similar if you look at it like this: In order to improve conditions for yourself in the environment you have to become a more sophisticated or complex form. So by looking at the definitions, Adaptation is basically Evolution, the words are practically synonyms. If you argue that we adapted to the environment you are arguing that we evolved to fit the environment which makes the creation argument that we adapted not evolved irrelevant.
Look at the fish. "Both the lung structure of air-breathing organisms and the swim bladders of most modern fishes evolved from paired air sacs of primitive bony fishes." (Encarta) These sacks served as buoyancy device which the fish either inflated or deflated depending on the depth of the water. In other fish they became primitive lung structures.(Encarta) These fish ventured onto land for some unknown reason. Even though they were crudely adapted for this new land they survived because they did not encounter predators. These fish also had two very important characteristics which helped them survive on the land. They were the primitive lungs that were mentioned earlier and internal nostrils, both of which were essential for breathing on the land. (Groliers) These traits did not develop because they were preparing to migrate to land. They were already there by accident and became selected traits only because they helped them survive on land. (Groliers) Inductive reasoning will then tell you that these fish evolved into the land animals that you know today including ourselves.
To counter this sort of evidence creationist will argue "we do not have anything resembling the fossil record which would show us that the steps of chemical evolution have in fact occurred, and the suggestion that the first living cell may have been created is entirely proper" (Miller, 58) This argument is very true; however, "no scientific statement is ever fully proven. Science is made up of statements that may be proved false but that have not, in fact been proved false by the most rigorous tests." (Harden, 162) Many of the creation stories have major holes in them, areas where things don't make sense, areas that, if you thought them over, simply don't work. They do not fit all of the laws of science. This is true for many concepts of science. It simply has to be this way or things won't make sense. For example take the salt water that is present in all land animals. Where did it come from? It came from the fact that we originally evolved from fish. Another good example is that fish have gills and so do we, during the early stages of our development. As it should be clear now the scientific data on evolution does not contain these large gaps. Inductive reasoning (not fibs and more stores as creationist will produce) will fill in the gaps for this data.
There are many creation stories. The story of Adam and Eve, the Hindus' belief that we came from a cosmic egg, and let's not forget the Babylonians belief that there was not a single god but two cosmic parents. (Harden, 161) How can all these stores be how the earth was created? The answer was none of them do. All of these stories are completely made up with little scientific evidence. They were created with a lot of imagination and limited understanding of the real world. They were fine at the time and they gave the people of the religion something to believe in; however it is time that we move on and reject these limited ideas of how the earth, the universe, was created. True we had to come from somewhere but it is highly unlikely that any of these stories explain where it all started. Scientific data clearly proves most of these stories to be wrong.
Creation vs. Evolution, which one is correct? Which one is realistic? The facts, inductive reasoning should lead you to the answer of evolution. So, where did it all start? If it was the big bang, what was before the big bang? Who or what created the materials for the big bang to occur? Who or what created the creator of the big bang? Is the earth what it was 3 billion years ago, when life just started on earth? (Gallant, 221) Is the universe what is was 20 or so billion years ago when it all started? (Gallant, 220) Can you or anyone else honestly say that all this scientific evidence is false, and that god created us and we are the same way we were from day one?
Work Cited
Harden, Garrett. "Making Deception as Truth". Science and Creationism. New York, New York; Oxford University Press, 1984
Mileer, Kenneth. "Scientific Creationism Verses Evolution". Science and Creationism. New York, New York; Oxford University Press, 1984
Gallant, A. Row. Our Universe. Washington D.C.; National Geographic Society, 1986
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston, Massachusetts; Houghton Middlin Company, 1978
Groliers Academic American Encyclopedia. Unknown location; Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1993
Microsoft Encarta. Redmond, Washington; Microsoft Corporation, 1993