CREATIONISM IN A NUTSHELL, VOLUME I

"In truth, however, the controversy is ultimately between two religious worldviews. The belief in origins, whether from a creationist or evolutionist perspective, is outside the realm of scientific study, and is, therefore, a faith-based viewpoint."

Liar. Evolution does not connect to the issue of origins (i.e., the origins of life); you're thinking of abiogenesis.

"An individual’s idea about origins, which means going from inorganic to organic, or non-life to life, is not observable, testable, or able to be duplicated or proved by experimentation."

Miller Experiment. QED.

"It is, therefore, a belief about the past, but is not a part of empirical science. So, scientists are only able to interpret the observable evidence in the present universe."

Okay, can we move past the obligatory straw-man and see some arguments against TOE?

"Both creationists and evolutionists have the same facts, but have a vastly different interpretation of those facts. The existence of the Grand Canyon is a fact and is observable in the present."

Fair enough, though two interpretations are not equal unless they have equal amounts of evidence backing them up.

"However, an evolutionist would look at this fact and say that it was created by a little bit of water and a whole lot of time, while a creationist, who believes that a worldwide flood occurred, would look at this same observable fact and conclude that it was formed by a little bit of time and a whole lot of water."

I hate to break it to you, but that is what a geologist, or a scientist trained in that discipline would say. The observations of erosion do not pertain to evolution, which deals exclusively with the development of living organisms. Erosion and deposition are geologic concepts, and cannot be directly correlated to natural selection, genetic variability, etc. Brush up on your terms and definitions.

"These conclusions cannot both be right, and one of them is obviously wrong."

Obviously. A flood isn't going to randomly erode a canyon without eroding the land around it as well, and we've yet to see a flood of any size erode through billions of tons of rock in 40 days. The Flood fails from a geological view.

 "Fossils are facts and are observable in the present; however they too have to be interpreted. Contrary to what most people must think, the fossils do not come out of the ground with a label that says "Hi. I’m 450 million years old. How are you?""

Again, a valid point; that is why we use dating methods to determine the age of fossils and strata.

"The only thing the scientist knows for sure is that it is dead. Scientists do not know if the creature had any offspring, much less any that were different from itself."

That's why we correlate the record as a whole, instead of focusing on the trees at the expense of the forest.

 "Most people believe that the scientific community has proven the notion of evolution with the fossil record, but nothing could be further from the truth."

Again, this is at best misinformation, and at worst a deliberate lie. Transitional forms have been piling up for a long time now, and I don't see any viable explanations involving magic or deities.

 "The fossil record is actually the most damaging evidence against the theory. First of all, the existence of fossils at all is proof of a catastrophic burying of billions of creatures in sedimentary rock. That is sediment that has been laid down by water, like there would be in a flood. In order for fossils to have been created, the creatures would have to have been buried quickly before decay, and before parasites could destroy them. Some fossils are of fish actually in the process of eating another fish, or of jellyfish, which are 98% water. The existence of countless fossil beds, in which thousands of creatures were deposited and buried at the same place and time, is best explained by flooding, or some other catastrophic event."

And what our erstwhile champion of modern myths conveniently forgot to mention is that the fossil record exists in layers. Certain phylums and species exist on one level, decrease in population size over time, and eventually die out, and are replaced by different animals that were not previously present. This means that they either spontaneously generated or were descended from the extinct ancestor species. If evolution didn't occur, then life would have probably gone extinct at the end of the Proterozoic, when life was thinned by 90% (National Geographic). For example, if the Great Flood was really responsible for the geologic column, then these fossils would not be organized, they would be chaotically and randomly scattered up and down the time scale. Horses would found with T. Rex, modern insects and mammals in the Paleozoic, and correlating different periods of geological time would be all but impossible. As my link shows, this in not the case. Humans and their immediate ancestors are not found below the Pleistocene, which only makes up the last 2.6 millions years of earth's history. Furthermore, catastrophic events do not preclude evolution, they merely mean that many creatures were buried at one time. And just to compound the overwhelming ignorance of the author, the presence of many fossils doesn't necessitate a disaster, but could simply indicate a large and thriving ecosystem. Most periods that contain large amounts of fossils lasted millions of years, so that the fossils accumulate over time.

"Evolutionary geologists would love to use a flood to best explain the observable facts, if it did not happen to agree with the Biblical story."

Geologists don't use your "Flood" story because one flood happening at one time cannot account for the half-dozen major extinction events that clearly occurred at separate periods from each other; not because they don't like your bible stories. Nor can it randomly organize the entire geologic column to make it appear as if evolution had occurred. Or did this magical flood happen several times?

"Certainly, from an evolutionary viewpoint, anthropologists would expect to find countless fossils of buffalo that were killed by the millions and left to rot in the American West of the 19th century. Why don’t they? It is because they were not buried quickly. For this same reason, fossils should be extremely rare; but they are not."

Creationism in a nutshell; misrepresenting the facts in a profoundly stupid manner. The buffalo were killed off to the brink of extinction in just over four decades[Source]. If it had been an extinction by natural processes, i.e., environmental pressures that the buffalo was not capable of adapting to, then it would have been centuries at the very least, and we would be finding loads of buffalo remains. Of course, it's interesting that we are finding them even now since they roamed the plains for centuries. One wonders why the author makes such an incoherent and self-defeating analogy.

"If evolution were true, the fossil record would look much different than it actually does."

As I outlined above, this is a lie that depends upon the reader being totally ignorant of geology.

"In order to prove the theory, it must be demonstrated that there had been incremental changes, or transitional life forms that existed and would certainly be preserved in the fossil record."

Transitional forms.

"In fact, transitional life forms should easily outnumber identifiable life forms one thousand to one."

Upon what principle is that assertion based? And why is there a distinction made between transitional forms and "identifiable" life forms? Many transitional creatures, like Tiktaalik, an amphibian ancestor to reptiles, are unique organisms that thrived for vast expanses of time, and whose direct descendants, modern croctillians, still retain many common traits with their ancestor, including the same basic skull structure[ Source].

"Evolutionists commonly attempt to use academic "sleight of hand" to demonstrate their idea. They will present a simple variation within an original created kind; such as Darwin’s finches or the popular peppered moth example which is in every evolutionary textbook, and then infer that these variations will eventually transmute one "family" of creature into another."

*sigh* There is no "sleight of hand", unless you're talking about the absurd rationalizations that creationists conceive to explain little problems with their religion, like how Noah's three sons managed to avoid inbreeding after the flood. There is no such thing as an "original created kind". The fossil record clearly shows us that present species on Earth haven't been that long, geologically speaking. There is not one single living species which has been present, unchanged, since the emergence of life in the Archean. And where does "kinds" fit into modern taxonomy?

"However, this is conjecture beyond the observable evidence. There is an insurmountable difference between a simple variation within a phyla and the leap from one to another."

Again, the fossil record clears that objection up.

"Dr. Colin Patterson, who was the senior paleontologist at the British Museum Of Natural History in London which housed several million fossils, was challenged in a letter as to why he had not displayed any transitional fossils in his book. Dr Patterson’s response was, "I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would have included them. I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."(1)"

Oh really?

"In reality, what the fossil records actually show is abrupt appearance and stasis. Creatures appear abruptly in the fossil record, and then stay within the same created ‘kind’ throughout the existence in the fossil record. This would seem to fit much better with the creation model than with the evolutionary model."

First off; [citation needed]. Secondly, how did these creatures "abruptly" appear at different times if they are all supposedly "original created kinds"? Shouldn't all of them be present on every level of the strata? You're contradicting yourself. This is why the fossil record fits much better with evolution than with creationism.

 "When Darwin’s Tree Of Life is presented in the textbooks, it has the very ends of the branches covered with fully formed, living or extinct creatures and then naked lines of imagination connecting them to what is considered to be a common ancestor: "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil records persists as the trade secret of paleontology" (Evolutionist Steven Jay Gould) (2) The connecting lines are all conjecture and do not have any support in the fossil record."

Wrong. These "lines of imagination" are based upon observations of common characteristics shared by the organisms of that same kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc. That's why cephalapods like the nautilus, squid, and the octopus are classed together, with their tentacled ancestors.

"Scientists have attempted to develop elaborate theories to try to explain why this evidence does not exist, such as the Hopeful Monster Theory and Punctuated Equilibrium. (3)"

As has been pointed out, the evidence not only exists, but exists by the ton (literally). The "Hopeful Monster Theory" is a possible interpretation of fossils and experimental data, just as punctuated equilibrium is an explanation for evolutionary jumps in the fossil record. The fact that scientists debate these matters does not alter the physical truth of evolution, anymore than Einstein's debates over gravity negated or canceled out it's effects.

And so endeth Volume I of this refutation to the nonsense presented here. Expect Part II very soon....