Aim64C
Anbu Operative 🎭
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No, the two are not opposites. It doesn't surprise me that people believe it, because most are completely ignorant to both Evolution and Creationists.
To understand where Creationists come from, you have to first understand the progression of Evolutionary theory. Up until around the 1980s, Evolution was largely an intellectual curiosity. It was a theory - but until the discovery of DNA, there was really no vehicle for the theory. The idea that life somehow absorbed information and then passed it down to future generations was an interesting idea that made sense... but how would life go about doing that? The only self-replicating systems known at the time were crystals, and theories were that proteins were like a sort of crystal.
The entire thing was about as grounded in science as the idea that a deity simply 'poofed' everything into existence. In fact - Occam's Razor would suggest divine intervention was the more probable.
That lasted until DNA was discovered - and it took some time for DNA's role in procreation to come to light. It was then that it was speculated that DNA somehow served as the vehicle for information passed from generation to generation - and that it could somehow adapt.
The problem was, and still is, that DNA is poorly understood. Even today, we have barely cataloged the various entities in the cell - much less assigned and described their function within the cell. Recently, evidence has come to light that certain enzymes responsible for transcribing DNA into RNA undergo various changes and can change how or what is transcribed.
This didn't stop certain groups, however, from insisting that they had an answer that could shove superstition out of the way and prove that God had nothing to do with life. DNA was stapled atop the old arguments for the fossil record and foisted upon the public as the definitive answer to the origins of life. We now knew how life went from being nothing but goo to the beings we are, today. All it took was a little time and a lot of attrition, and bingo-bango ... here we are.
Problem is that it doesn't work. Evolution makes huge claims that are both unsubstantiated by the evidence claimed, and either can't be supported, or are still awaiting proper experimentation.
It's one thing for an existing organism to spin off a new protein or to have some changes in morphology. It is an entirely different thing for a new organ to be developed in whole or in part. The kidney, for example, is a quite-essential organ yet there exists no experimental data to show that random mutations are capable of producing something of that intricacy.
'Creationist debates' developed out of internal resistance to the championing of Evolution as the one-stop theory to explain the origin and current state of life. They started not out of religious belief, but from an adherence to the integrity of the Scientific Method. Simply saying: "Ah, well, a million years is a long time and you'd be surprised..." doesn't suffice in the world of Science. Science is loaded with examples where the behavior at one end of the spectrum does not reliably indicate what happens at the other end. You would never suspect water would boil after only seeing it rise in temperature a few degrees. You would expect that it could be heated indefinitely. Then it would be curious that it boiled at 100 degrees celcius and never got any hotter.
Likewise - the power of random mutations may seem impressive if we try and extrapolate it over inhuman scales of time... but without being able to run experiments to test the hypothesis, we have little to go on, Scientifically.
Fact of the matter is that this is the distinction between Evolution and Creation:
Creation: Arbitrary act of God created life and its diversity.
Evolution: Spontaneous probability created life and its diversity.
Since we are almost exclusively dealing with the past - the probability of all theorized events is 1. Logically, whether we are just the fortuitous chain of improbable events... or the treasured creation of some deity - Science would be incapable of distinguishing between the two.
The best Science could ever do is ascribe a probability to our current existence... which is impossible to test by its very nature - and even if it could be illustrated that our probability was only 1 in a googleplex, our experience is constrained to being that one... it's not like we've witnessed a million different universes where things went way different for life on Earth and can appreciate this one as yet another verse of the multitude...
So, Science can never rule out the idea that something is operating to manipulate probability in our favor, and Science can never prove any theory - only prove a theory incorrect. Since it can prove neither idea incorrect - neither Creationism or Evolution are all that scientific - although Evolution does have the theory that new species can spontaneously arise from existing species - which can be tested at some point, either through observation or attempts to engineer a new species.
Of course - they have to figure out how to define a species, first... and that's proving a bit more challenging than it first seemed.
