Is there any scientific merit to creationism?

Creation of existence is actually meaningless because there should be no reason for spontaneous creation out of nothingness. As of today this is absolutely beyond human imagination. These statements are in fact mind boggling and paves way for GODs existence because if god has existed for ever (which is meaning less) only then at some point it created Universe (god knows why) and if that is the case then it can do anything even today by just modifying the algorithms or laws of physics or something like that.

P.S. what if god just went in the past and created the universe after being born in itself, does that makes any sense ?
 
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What if god simple exist beyond time, this would explain how it can be omnipotent, exist before the universe and why it doesn't seem to give a dam about us.
 
You might as well say god is not of, or in, this universe and cannot affect it and doesnt exist. i think. But I'm no cosmologist.
 
Edufer has hit it on the head with his post, I believe.

First we define science, and Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn provide the means to do this. That is, falsifiability. It boils down to the difference between belief (which is extremely subjective and completely dependent on the believer) and reality, which is independent of the observer. Scientific hypotheses are necessarily falsifiable. Beliefs are not falsifiable. They are unassailable (if you don't believe this, try to dissuade me from believing that there are pink elephants orbiting the earth).

Under this conceptual foundation, creationism can never be a science and hence can never explain natural phenomena.

That being said, there are some interesting contributions to evolutionary science from people who believed in creationsim.

For example, the natural historians from the 18th and 19th centuries attempted to explain biological diversity under the auspices of creationsim, which led to some important discoveries about biological diversity, and population biology.

There are many examples of this, see Ernst Mayr's The Growth of Biological Thought (who BTW will be celebrating his 100th birthday at Harvard University next month), and S.J. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.
 
I would agree that creationism is not falsifiable, and hence, not scientific, at least currently. However, it( and other potential theories of evolution) may have some scientific value IMO, despite the fact that they, themselves are not scientific. They may provide new approaches to looking at the data, which may lead to some future discoveries(as suggested by paulsamuel above).

It would not surprise me to learn, for instance, that evolution was a partially Lamarkian process, despite the fact that, in gross terms, it has probably been falsified.

Just for the record, I am NOT a creationist!

Cheers, :)
 
contrarian said:
I would agree that creationism is not falsifiable, and hence, not scientific, at least currently. However, it( and other potential theories of evolution) may have some scientific value IMO, despite the fact that they, themselves are not scientific. They may provide new approaches to looking at the data, which may lead to some future discoveries(as suggested by paulsamuel above).

It would not surprise me to learn, for instance, that evolution was a partially Lamarkian process, despite the fact that, in gross terms, it has probably been falsified.

Just for the record, I am NOT a creationist!

Cheers, :)
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Thanks for your reply.

I would be interested in why you would not be surprised to learn that evolution was partially a Lamrkian process, and why you think this has a connection to creationism.
 
Hi paul!

I simply meant that non-standard views of the origin/diversity of life are potentially valuable to science, given the relatively large(IMO) level of uncertainty associated with the process. Creationism and Lamarkism are simply two non-standard approaches.

I don't have time to go into my reasons in full, but I would not be surprised to learn that evolution was somewhat Lamarkian in character in the sense that acquired traits may have some nonrandom impact on changes in the heritable information. I believe there are many cases of starvation induced hypermutation, for instance, among bacteria. Sorry I don't have time to find links, but I believe adaptive mutations of one sort or another have been found in several cases

While there is good evidence that traits are not inheritted in a simplistic Lamarkian fashion(ie cutting mouse's tails off will not produce mice without tails), it is still tricky IMO to establish that all mutations are random wrt fitness. Tests of randomness wrt fitness typically take the form of the LUria-Delbruck comparisons of mutation rates in different selective environments. While this is effective at testing a simplistic Lamarkian relationship, other forms of nonrandom variation are not IMO ruled out.

Ultimately, however, I just have a difficult time believing that the precise 3-D structures of living beings can randomly pop into existence without the operation of some kind of mechanism.

Cheers,:)
 
contrarian said:
Hi paul!

I simply meant that non-standard views of the origin/diversity of life are potentially valuable to science, given the relatively large(IMO) level of uncertainty associated with the process. Creationism and Lamarkism are simply two non-standard approaches.

I don't have time to go into my reasons in full, but I would not be surprised to learn that evolution was somewhat Lamarkian in character in the sense that acquired traits may have some nonrandom impact on changes in the heritable information. I believe there are many cases of starvation induced hypermutation, for instance, among bacteria. Sorry I don't have time to find links, but I believe adaptive mutations of one sort or another have been found in several cases

While there is good evidence that traits are not inheritted in a simplistic Lamarkian fashion(ie cutting mouse's tails off will not produce mice without tails), it is still tricky IMO to establish that all mutations are random wrt fitness. Tests of randomness wrt fitness typically take the form of the LUria-Delbruck comparisons of mutation rates in different selective environments. While this is effective at testing a simplistic Lamarkian relationship, other forms of nonrandom variation are not IMO ruled out.

Ultimately, however, I just have a difficult time believing that the precise 3-D structures of living beings can randomly pop into existence without the operation of some kind of mechanism.

Cheers,:)
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Steele has some publications with data (the journal Science in the 80's sometime) wrt the inheritance of acquired characteristics as well as a book I believe entitled Lamarck's Signature.
 
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