Ten Amusing Questions Creationists Mistakenly Believe Science Has No Answers For

Some time ago, Matt Stopera asked 22 creationists who attended the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate what question they think "evolutionists" can't answer. "Evolutionism" being of course a term only creationists use these days, to imply that evolution is an "ism" or ideology, on even footing with creationism.

Below I've selected the ten funniest questions. The rest are either mundane appeals to consequences like "Do you think evolution is a good behavioral influence on children" or have rather complicated philosophical answers that aren't fun to read. These are just the ones that personally made me laugh.

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Note the "their". This is recurring in other images, basic mastery of English, their own first language, still eludes these apparent adults. Anyway of course a sunset is just a stage in the rotation of Earth relative to the sun where the sun is very low on Earth's horizon.

But what she's getting at is, "why is nature beautiful?" The answer is that much of it isn't. The parts humans typically see are, being that we have the benefit of technology and civilization, and as such are no longer routinely ripped apart and eaten by large predators. Why do we find certain parts of nature beautiful?

That has to do with defining beauty in a mathematical way, and the ongoing investigation of why certain color combinations, textures, proportions and ratios appeal to the human brain. That's not really my wheelhouse, but there are neurologists who do nothing but study questions like these.

Probably the answer is something to do with the genes which make us find the opposite sex appealing, which make us find our children cute so that we'll take care of them, and which attract us to colors associated with nutritious fruits. At any rate the alternative, that this guy made everything and desired it be beautiful, is not a testable hypothesis. It's a just-so fable, contradicted by everything we have so far learned about nature.

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More creationist word games. To people like these, if you can make something sound like it supports your argument, then it does. When you tell these people that in fact the word theory has very different meanings in colloquial usage versus scientific usage, you will typically be met with intense suspicion, as if you just made that up.

Even after they Google it and discover that it's true and always has been, probably they won't budge on the matter, just because of how they feel. Creationists tend to assume that in science, claims start out as theories, then become laws when proven. In fact, this is not the case.

Rather, they start out as observations. Then a hypothesis is formed in an attempt to explain what was observed. The hypothesis only becomes a theory after it has been confirmed by experiment, and then independently reviewed and replicated.

What is a "law", then? It is not a proposed explanation for anything, but rather something which is observed to behave a certain way with perfect reliability/consistency, so far as we can tell. The word theory, in scientific context, means what creationists mistakenly believe "law" means.

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See above. They really get a lot of mileage out of the whole "evolution is just a theory* line. They're coached on what slogans to use by guys like Ken Ham and Kent Hovind, then they need to be patiently, carefully corrected one by one. It's a losing proposition, isn't it? A lie gets around the world seven times before the truth can get its pants on.

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This one is really sort of charmingly naive. I would be patient and kind to this person. Indeed, if you look at the world without knowing anything about the natural processes which formed it and all living things upon it, your strong first impression would be that it was created by something unfathomably smart.

That's for the same reason that somebody who has never seen a snowflake before and doesn't understand how water crystallizes when freezing might understandably assume that something as geometrically intricate, unique and symmetrical as a snowflake could not have formed by itself, and must instead be the work of an unseen artist.

This article of mine goes into more depth about how it is that scientists can tell, by the close examination of natural formations (living things included) that they originated by natural processes over long timescales rather than deliberate engineering.

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Ahahaha! Haha...ha. I'm sorry, shame on me. Holy moly, though. Part of the challenge of unfucking these peoples' brains is that somebody already got to them before you did, and intentionally fed them misinformation about what evolution, abiogenesis and the big bang even are.

For example when I attended a Christian middle school, we were taught that "evolutionist scientists believe all life came from rocks". This was of course done to make evolution seem absurd and impossible, so that we would reject it. They feel justified in lying to children like that because they believe the end result is that we will wind up in Heaven rather than Hell.

Anyways of course the big bang was not an exploding star. He's confused it with supernovas. Rather it was the expansion of spacetime from an infinitessimally small point, when the only form of matter in existence was superheated hydrogen. What followed was cooling, then the gravitational accumulation of hydrogen into stars (as we still observe today occurring in nebulas) then the explosion of some of those stars when they were sufficiently old, which released every element on the periodic table other than hydrogen.

Those elements were gravitationally captured in orbit around other stars, and by the same principle of gravitational accretion that formed the stars, planets accumulated from that debris. Since stars didn't even exist until well after the big bang, it should be apparent why this dude's question is a non-starter. His head has been deliberately filled with nonsense, and that his question has nothing to do with anything scientists have ever said about the big bang.

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Again, repeating commonplace creationist apologetics. Probably Lucy is the only hominid fossil she knows about, because it's the one many creationist authors have focused on. Note the extra c in 'necessary'. Anyways contrary to her sign, in fact a shitload of hominid fossils have been discovered and you can go see them with your own eyes in natural history museums.

The basis for claiming that these don't count as "real" hominid remains is that creationists arbitrarily divide them into the ones visibly closer to monkeys and say "those were never human ancestors, just monkeys" and those visibly closer to humans, saying "these were always human."

They use a similar strategy to reject fossils like the archaeopteryx, which is very plainly a feathered dinosaur demonstrating common ancestry between dinosaurs and birds. They say "It's just a weird looking bird". This ties into their notion of "kinds", which is much less rigorously defined than the scientific concept of species. A "kind" is just what type of animal something looks like to a creationist.

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More focus on Lucy. Probably this guy and the person above read the same apologetics handbook. There's only one Lucy because that's what they named that specific individual fossil, and because it was the oldest taxonomically human remains ever found up to that point.

There's only one tallest building in the world. Why? Is that some big mystery? There's only one fastest car, only one oldest living person and so on. What's being done with Lucy, by creationists, is to focus on the fact that it's a one of a kind fossil (in the sole respect that it was the oldest known hominid remains at the time) and try to twist that into "it's a hoax of some sort because if it were real, there would be more".

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Look at this dumb fucker. Look at his smug grin, as if he's asked a real head-scratcher. Why are there still monkeys? Gee, I don't know. If dogs came from wolves, why are there still wolves? If Americans are descended from the British, why are the British still around? This is not a hard principle to figure out.

Creationists stumble over this issue because again, they were deliberately given a wrong idea of what evolution is so they would reject it. Consequently they typically imagine evolution means every monkey in the world, everywhere, should constantly be evolving towards becoming human.

Evolution does not have a pre-determined "goal" like that. Monkeys are not inevitably going to become more humanlike. Their evolutionary path has continued independently of our own, such that they do indeed differ in many ways from the common ancestor we share.

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There's that smug, Dunning-Kruger smile again. The second law of thermodynamics is misunderstood by Christians to mean that everything deteriorates, all the time, everywhere, with no exceptions. That's their layman's notion of entropy.

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...Aaaaand another one, asking the same dumb question.

What the second law actually states is that within a closed system, the amount of available energy cannot increase. You can't get more energy from nowhere basically. So indeed the entire universe is slowly running down as stars burn out, the built up thermal differential equalizing over the eons.

However, this does not prevent localized "islands" of complexity from forming. The Earth for example, which is not itself a closed system but instead receives a constant supply of energy from the sun. This influx of outside energy is what has powered the formation and evolution of life on Earth, and explains how on Earth complexity is able to increase rather than decrease, even though the universe on average is progressing in the other direction.

Anyway that's all for this article. If you're curious you can go check out the rest of the questions here.