Arguments to Avoid with Creationists

Here I collect bad arguments which I have seen people use in an effort to convince science deniers. These arguments are not good, because they fail in most cases to address the issue that the science denier hold, or else present in a way that gets interpreted incorrectly.

Common Features Implies Evolution

The argument is this: Many different species have the same arrangement of parts, and in some cases we will find the same flaw in many species, and this means that they must be inherited, thereby providing evidence that evolution is true. For example the basic brain structure of brain, or the structure of the eye. The argument is that because all mammals have mostly the same internal organs, they must have been inherited. Some post the question: if all these feature are the same, how could this be the result of creation.

Light from Andromeda

The Andromeda galaxy. We OBSERVE that galaxy as it existed around 2-1/2 million years. Which one fact alone proves that the entire notion of young earth creationism is factually wrong.

This "proves" nothing. The light could have been created a few thousand years ago in route as if it had been travelling for millions of years. But there is no actual way to tell the age of a photon. The world could have been created last Tuesday. I am not a creationist, but I am saying that you should not use this argument because it proves NOTHING.

The right argument against the creationist who says the world was created 6000 years ago, but looks billions of years old, is to point out that this would mean God is trying to deceive us. Christians claim that God never tries to deceive -- it is not in his nature.

I point out the fallacy anyway: The only way we "know" that the photon is that old, is that we have a theory about how far the galaxy is away. How do we know that? More theories. For example, the theory that red-shift is uniform, that expansion of the universe is uniform. how do we know that? Or because of cepheid variable stars. but again, how do we know that such stars 2 million years ago acted the same as they do today? to a person who denies science, all of this is just science is just fabricated stories.

Or to flip the table: the Christian says "because Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected PROVES that he was a god." to anyone who denies the reality of Jesus this is nothing more than a fabricated story.