Disprove Me Right

There is a lot of Creationist-bashing going around these days by right-thinking people out there, so I'm going to add to it. You know my stance on evolution, or at least you should. It's a fact, not a theory. You can believe that God created the world yesterday morning, but you can't deny that, if he did, he created it to give us the idea that, factually, there is such a thing as evolution, gravity, and all sorts of other groovy scientific things.

When it comes down to it, there's really not much to argue. Either you believe that scientific fact is scientific fact, or you don't. If you do, then you can argue about what theories fit the facts. But if you don't, then all the theories are wrong because there are no facts to fit.

Creationists are not alone in their delusions about logic; many people seem to feel that belief is an acceptable thing to argue about. Sorry, beliefs are axiomatic; they are the points we take for granted at the beginning of the proof. I begin to wonder whether I am the only person in the world who had to take geometry without a lot of algebraism. So if you believe that God created the universe yesterday, you can either attempt to justify your belief with facts that don't fit (for instance, I have left-overs in my fridge from several days before creation, by that reckoning), or you can simply take that belief as an axiom and posit that all facts of the universe were likewise created yesterday as part of a perverse plan by God to make people think that the universe is older than my left-overs.

Creationists like to try to poke holes in scientific theories. They say that Darwin doesn't fit the facts, so evolution must be a fraud. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. If I say that I have a theory of gravity which posits that our observations of gravity are actually caused by a giant magnet, and you think that my theory doesn't fit the facts, that doesn't make gravity any less of a fact. If you can prove that gravity is not a fact, you are probably crazy or too advanced for us common mortals; take your pick.

So creationists take a favorite cause célèbre like carbon dating or Darwin, and they poke holes in it, all the while saying that, "since science was wrong about this, we must be right." Sorry genius, it doesn't work that way.

Simply proving someone else wrong does not make you right. It makes someone else wrong (and I have my doubts about a lot of the proofs anyway, especially since proving anything conclusively is much more rigorous than many creationists seem to believe). "All men are mortal. Socrates is not mortal. Therefore Socrates is a cow." It doesn't fly.

So the creationists ought to be forced to prove themselves right, rather than simply poking holes in other theories and claiming victory. And when you get right down to it, the basic argument for Creationism is based on belief, which as I said before is notoriously difficult to prove (right, wrong, or lengthwise). I have a great deal of respect for people who can simply say, "I believe that God created the universe, and science merely reinforces that belief because only God could create something so wonderful." I don't happen to agree (I think the wonders of the universe are largely overrated) but I respect.

Prove me wrong.