We are writing in response to, "Considering creationism offers interesting insight"(CT, Feb. 19). The major problem with this column was the liberal use of the terms "creationism" and "evolution" without proper definition, and they demand clarification.
For example, in the first paragraph the author defines creationism as "the view that the Bible is literally true and humans and the universe were created by God within the past 10,000 years." This definition would be better applied to the term "young-earth creationism." The author entirely ignores major schools of thought, such as old-earth creationism or theistic evolution. We will now clarify the meanings and relevance of these terms to the life origins debate.
Young-earth creationism concludes that the seven days of Creation were seven literal 24-hour days, and accordingly, the earth is less than 10,000 years old (Morris, The Genesis Flood, The Genesis Story; Ham, The Lie: Evolution).
However, this theory is critically flawed by the fact that, according to Genesis, God did not make the sun until the fourth day of creation. Therefore, how does it make any sense to assume 24-hour days before the sun was even created? Additionally, of course, modern science has clearly proven that a young earth/universe is not true. However, the Bible itself is consistent with an older universe and the young-earth belief arose from misinterpretation. The bigger point here is that the term "creationism" is not restricted to the young-earth creationism interpretation.
Old-earth creationism is a class of hypotheses that essentially argue a creator is responsible for crafting the universe, life and, to some extent or another, mankind. This understanding does not in general deny the idea of genetic transitions from simple to complex life. However, unlike some other theories, it does involve the idea that the Biblical story of creation has scientific as well as spiritual relevance (Ross, A Matter of Days, The Genesis Question; Stoner, A New Look at an Old Earth).
Theistic evolution is another potentially confusing, but critical, term appearing in the human development discussion. Theistic evolution deals specifically with the idea that evolution, essentially as described by a modern theory, occurred, guided, observed, or was permitted by a creative deity (Miller, Finding Darwin's God; Collins, The Language of God).
The lumping together of the term "creationism" with the definition of "young-earth creationism" is an employment of the straw-man argument by the author to reject all forms of creationism by cherry-picking one that has clearly been disproved and pointing out its absurdity to condemn all of them. "The Genesis Flood," Morris' seminal work on young-earth creationism (as per Mr. Thomas), was written in 1960; evolutionary science has since had its own changes and panned theories. Modern creationism has become more scientifically robust because of an increasingly accepted reading of the Genesis story that the universe and earth were formed over long periods of time.
The second very relevant clarification of terms that the author fails to provide is the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. He seems to operate on the premise that "evolution" is true and "Even the Vatican supports" it. Here, and in many other cases, "evolution" becomes unacceptably vague.
Microevolution refers to the drift of genes and traits within a population, which has been clearly proven and is observed ongoing today; just about every scientist who has seriously studied the matter accepts microevolution as fact (i.e. drug-resistant bacteria).
Macroevolution, on the other hand, is the much more controversial, theologically relevant, and less supported assertion that all life on this planet developed from a common ancestor by the blind process of natural selection. Macroevolution involves drastic genetic change, on the order of changing one species into another (i.e. developing new functions, appendages, body forms, etc.). We believe macroevolution itself is fatally flawed by Darwin's own standards, namely the existence of systems of irreducible complexity and the lack of evidence in the geological record, among other reasons.
Regarding irreducible complexity, Darwin wrote: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." In other words, irreducibly complex systems cannot be produced by natural selection, and their existence in biological systems would disprove his theory. Unfortunately for Darwin, we have since discovered tremendous examples of irreducible complexity in biochemical processes, organs, etc. (Behe, "Darwin's Black Box").
Regarding the geological evidence for macroevolution, Darwin wrote: "But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record."
Darwin was saying that in his time, the geological record didn't support his theory, but he expected that to change as we learned and discovered more. Unfortunately for Darwin, the geological record has been developed to a much greater degree in the past 150 years, and the lack of "intermediate links" is so great that Darwinists such as Stephen Jay Gould have resorted to proposing theories like punctuated equilibrium.
Punctuated equilibrium posits that, for unknown reasons, evolution works very slowly for longs periods of time, followed by great change in relatively short periods of time. This does not really conform to Darwin's theory, which in his own words, "can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps." It is modern evolution's attempt to explain away a fossil record that doesn't support their theory of life's development.
We hope that this article was able to clarify some of the misconceptions perpetuated in "Considering creationism offers interesting insight." The author's use of the straw-man argument to attack creationism and his blind acceptance of evolution (presumably both macro and micro) necessitated a response for the sake of clarity.