I recently got into a debate over young earth creationism. One objection to the view went as follows: “A scientific theory is a concise set of statements which has broad explanatory and predictive power within its purview. In order to be considered scientific, a hypothesis must predict what must or must not be observed if it is true. If such things are not observed/observed, then the hypothesis is considered falsified. [Scientific Creationism] does not espouse any idea which makes exclusive predictions about what must or must not be observed. Every biological observation falls under “God made it that way” or borrows from evolutionary theory and says “it adapted that way.”…
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Why Young Earthers are Not Nutters…
Being a “nutter,” for my non-British friends, means being crazy, doolally, mad and irrational. And young earthers, those who hold to the view that God created the universe six to ten thousand years ago in roughly six twenty four hour days, are, according to many people (mostly in academia or media), nutters. The reason they might be deemed nuts is mostly a matter of supposedly ignoring what’s in front of them – the evidence. Of course there might be more to it than mere stuff (see here for my comments about the logic of evolution), but let’s leave that aside for a minute. I want to suggest that it is not nuts to think…