Jerry Coyne links the flip side of the Buzzfeed post the other day, this time with questions from evolution-friendly young folk to creationists. He doesn’t need to answer them, but has occasional comments:
[D]o creationists think that all evolutionists (and many of them are religious) are either deluded by evidence or perhaps (misled by Satan?) are in some huge conspiracy to either manufacture evidence or interpret it as supporting evolution? Yes, science has been wrong before, but there’s now so much evidence supporting evolution that it falls into the “unlikely to be proven wrong” category.
Another good set of answers to the creationists is this post from a blogger at Dead-Logic. He has less patience for some of the lame questions (e.g. about the 2nd law of thermodynamics) and is pointed with some of his replies, e.g. “Can you believe in the big bang without faith?”
If you find paw prints in the snow in your backyard, you can rightly conclude that an animal walked through there. That doesn’t take faith. Could you be wrong? Sure. Maybe some guy floated over in a balloon and made fake animal tracks with a plastic animal paw on a stick. But which is more reasonable? The Big Bang is a view based on evidence. Should we find our current understanding to be incorrect, we change it. Faith isn’t about change. Faith isn’t about trying to find better information, or letting go of old ideas once they’re shown to be inaccurate. It’s about holding on tightly to what one believes. Remember how Bill Nye and Ken Ham each answered this particular question during their debate:
“What would cause you to change your mind?”
Ken: “Nothing.” Bill: “evidence.”
