Famous Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga was interviewed in 2014 for the New York Times. He used three arguments that may have originated with him. These are not your typical arguments that end with “So therefore, God exists; QED,” but they could be elements in a larger argument.

The good news is that these are, at least to me, fresh arguments . . . but that’s the extent of the good news. Still, if you want some new chew toys, here you go. Have your way with these arguments and then read my critiques to see if I covered every point.

#1. Are there an even number of stars?

Plantinga said:

Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?”

His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’”

But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism. . . . Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

Let’s first address his statement, “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism.” For most of us, lack of evidence is excellent grounds for atheism.

The problem is his definition of “atheism.” A few sentences earlier, Plantinga had defined atheism as “the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.” That’s also the leading definition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This strong atheism, which accepts the burden of proof, is probably not how most of us define atheism, but Plantinga is on solid ground with that definition, and he did make his definition clear.

That means his “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism” applause line is correct using his definition, but it’s irrelevant to the question of God’s existence. Lack of evidence is indeed grounds for atheism if “atheism” is simply a lack of god belief.

Plantinga said, “The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism,” and I am indeed an agnostic because I don’t know. I’m also an atheist because I don’t believe.

Determining the number of stars raises practical questions, but let’s ignore that tangent and simply imagine a star counter changing rapidly (perhaps thousands of times a second). All we care about is that last digit—is it odd or even at any moment? This is identical to the question of whether a flipped coin landed heads up or not. It’s a 50/50 question (that is, 50 percent likelihood of odd or even, or a probability of 0.5).

But is the God question just a coin flip? Is God’s existence as likely as not? Of course not, and his comparison fails.

Plantinga seems to imagine “God exists—true or false?” to be like a stranger saying, “I have a bumfuzzle in this box—true or false?” We don’t know what a bumfuzzle is, how plausible it would be to have one, whether it would fit in a box, and so on, so without any data, we’re stuck at 50/50. If forced to guess at this point on the truth of the bumfuzzle claim, we might as well flip a coin.

By contrast, we already know much about the claims for God. We don’t start at 50/50 (that is, complete ignorance) on the God question. For example, I’ve written a series of silver bullet arguments against Christianity. Any one of these arguments make the God hypothesis very implausible, and I’ve written 26 such arguments (and counting).

Would Plantinga give a 50/50 chance to the likelihood of every supernatural being existing—Xenu, Poseidon, Quetzalcoatl, and all the rest? If instead he assigns the existence of each of these gods a very low probability (as I’m guessing he does), then consistency demands that he accept our doing the same for his god.

Burden of proof

I suspect apologists like Plantinga are simply tired of shouldering the burden of proof, and they want to start the debate at parity with atheism. To see why this fails, let’s return to the two relevant kinds of burdens of proof from a recent post.

1. The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proof, and the person making the mundane claim doesn’t. For example, if I state that many world leaders aren’t human but actually alien reptoids (and you argue that this hypothesis is false), I have the burden of proof because I’m making the extraordinary claim. If I fail to make my case, you are logically obliged to reject it.
2. Anyone who makes a claim is obliged to defend that claim, whether it’s extraordinary or mundane.

In that post, I examined cases where apologists confused these two burden-of-proof situations. Plantinga argues that God exists, which clearly puts him in category 1.

No one cares about the number of stars, but religious views are enormously consequential for some. I can appreciate that Plantinga may be tired of shouldering the burden of proof, but in that case he should stop making nutty claims.

Notice the irony in this comparison. We know stars exist. We know that countless things exist. God is the odd exception where we can’t get into a discussion of his properties until his very existence has been demonstrated, and there’s a mountain of evidence against it.

Bertrand Russell’s teapot

The interviewer asked Plantinga about Bertrand Russell’s hypothesized teapot orbiting the sun. Wouldn’t that be a better comparison than even-star speculation? Yes, such a teapot might exist, Russell said, but we have no good reason to think so, and the same thinking applies to God.

Plantinga responded:

Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism.

He goes on to list a few things that argue against an orbiting teapot. Such a project would be in the news (like Elon Musk’s personal Tesla, which now orbits the sun), and a secret rocket launch would be unlikely. Space programs don’t have the budget for frivolous projects like this. Therefore, we have good evidence against Russell’s teapot.

Yes, Dr. Plantinga, I agree. Now apply that same skepticism to the God hypothesis and think of things that we would see if God were real.

• Europe during the 1000+ years when Christianity was in charge would’ve looks a lot more enlightened than other world societies. It wasn’t.
• Religion wouldn’t look like just another societal trait. It does.
• The Christian god wouldn’t need praise and worship, like an Iron Age dictator. He does.
• Christian televangelists would know that God’s favor would be far more consequential than mere financial donations, and yet they still ask for donations.
• And lots more here.

So the God question isn’t a 50/50 proposition about which we have no good information (like the number of stars), and it’s very much like Russell’s teapot (which has strong evidence against it). Plantinga is now back at square 1, advancing a ridiculous hypothesis.

And where is Plantinga’s evidence for God? He handwaves a reference to his famous “two dozen or so” arguments for God. He didn’t argue for them, so I won’t respond here, but if you want a critique, Richard Carrier did his typically thorough job on them here.

These Christian arguments are embarrassing and stupid. According to reputation, Plantinga is one of the best that Christianity has to defend their position, but smart high school students could take his arguments apart.

Continue to part 2 for an argument involving the moon.

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Two simple ideas work together to illuminate the hole the Christian apologist must climb out of when arguing for God. The first is the problem of God’s hiddenness (which I’ve discussed here and here) seen from a slightly different angle. The second compounds the difficulty.

1. God is a no-show every chance he gets

God ignores every opportunity to make his existence obvious. He’s never there to redirect the flood or reduce the earthquake or stop the tornado. The Lone Ranger occasionally rides into town to save the day, but God never does.

The curious skeptic following up on miracle claims always gets some variant of “You just missed him.” Someone beat cancer due God’s loving hand (and modern medicine), or a baby survived a plane crash (that killed everyone else), or there’s a vague appearance of Jesus or Mary (on burned toast), but these are easily explained without God.

Christian apologists defending God are like gnats defending Superman, and yet these gnats are the only evidence for God we have. They can handwave about Superman all they want, but the only tangible thing we have is the gnats. God apparently can’t get his message out himself but needs people to do it for him. He can’t even collect the money that his ministers say he so desperately needs. The message must be spread, but we humans have to (clumsily) do it, never God the expert.

The apologist always has an excuse for why God can’t get off the couch to make a personal appearance. Regardless of the need, from an individual hardship to a global pandemic, God is a no-show. Every claim that God did something is pareidolia, like seeing a face in a cloud or hearing a voice in radio static. The Christian claims to sense something, but this isn’t obvious to the objective observer. Sometimes the pareidolia is literal, such as seeing Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or Jesus in the flames of Notre Dame cathedral, but usually it’s injecting God into a situation with no evidence of God, like Jesus supporting you through a difficult time.

You’d think that the combination of grand claims for God supported by paltry evidence would embarrass Christian apologists into scaling back those claims, but they insulate their belief from the facts and just rationalize excuses. Why does the pope need a bulletproof Popemobile, and why do churches need lightning rods (more)? Why is God’s perfect message so ambiguous that we now have 45,000 denominations of Christianity? Why are there no simple and foolproof tests that winnow the true stories from the myths and reveal Christianity as the only religion that’s true? Why isn’t God’s existence obvious since he (reportedly) desires a relationship with each of us? And why have I been able to find 27 (and counting) silver-bullet arguments against God’s existence?

God is like a drunk wearing nothing but an unbuttoned raincoat, stumbling down the sidewalk with the Christian apologist holding a newspaper over the unpleasant bits. They have to protect his honor because he certainly won’t. Or can’t.

“It’s turtles all the way down”

For Christianity, it’s not turtles but people all the way down. Christians today believe because they were taught Christian dogma by other people. Those people might have been parents or pastors or university scholars. And they in turn were taught from people as well. Back through the centuries, it’s only people. Back to scribes making parchment copies, back to the original authors of the books of the Bible, back to the oral legends. The naturalistic explanation is sufficient, and at no stage is anything left unexplained by the “people all the way down” hypothesis.

While people cause a great deal of harm (Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Kahn), they also create a great deal of good. Raising money for people in need, creating vaccines and antibiotics, developing Green Revolution technologies that have largely eliminated famine—it’s all people. There’s no evidence for God being behind any improvement in society, and “God” is just a reflection of the primitive people who first wrote about him.

2. What good is God?

And it gets worse with the second point. Getting past the lack of evidence, the God hypothesis doesn’t even explain anything—it just replaces a question with more questions. God is a solution looking for a problem.

God created the universe, you say? Or designed life on earth? Or caused (or prevented) a disaster? Explain how God did this. What laws of nature did he use? Which ones did he break? Where did God come from (or why does God exist in our reality)? The Christian has no answer.

“God just spoke the universe into existence” or “God is causeless by definition” are meaningless. Scientists won’t abandon their research, thinking that whatever scientific question they were working on has now been resolved by “God did it.” It’s just another way of saying, “I don’t know,” and it advances the conversation not at all. Worse, it wants to turn areas of active scientific research into closed and unquestionable dogma.

First, God might as well be nonexistent given his impact in the world. Second, “God did it” explains nothing. These are two Achilles’ heels that together incapacitate the Christian position.

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Heard any stupid Christian arguments lately? Here are some more to slap down. For the first post in this series, go to part 1.

Stupid argument #35: Christianity is pleasing.

True/false is such a harsh dichotomy. Aren’t there other metrics we can use to illuminate Christianity’s role? For example, Christianity can be pleasing. Apologist Greg Koukl asked, “Wouldn’t it be more satisfying” for God to ground morality? (audio @16:25)

Huh? You want to know if some aspect of reality would be more satisfying if God was involved? Who cares? If Koukl is trying to brainstorm possible new realities, why bother with ones that don’t exist? Living as a character in your favorite movie might be more satisfying, but it’s not reality. And if we all knew that God existed, listing reasons why that’s a good thing would change nothing.

This is the Appeal to Consequences—something is correct or not based on whether it would lead to good or bad consequences. And it’s pointless speculation until he’s shown us that God exists. (More here.)

This apologetic stance reminds me of the commercial for HeadOn (“Apply directly to forehead”), a product that implies that it will relieve headaches but doesn’t actually make a single health claim. I heard of someone seeing a tube of HeadOn on a night table and commenting on it. The reply: “I know it doesn’t work, but it works for me.”

This is related to Stupid Argument #1: The consequences of atheism are depressing.

Stupid argument #36: Nature is intelligible.

Apologist Frank Turek demands* that the atheist explain these challenges: “Why is there evidence at all? Why is this universe rationally intelligible? . . . Why is the world rational to begin with?”

Who says the universe is rational? It’s only as rational as it is, which isn’t particularly rational. It’s certainly isn’t simple or easy to understand, as anyone who’s gotten a doctorate in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science will tell you.

Turek looks at science’s conquests and dismisses them as not that big a deal, as if they were common sense. No, science has fought a long uphill battle to learn things that are very much counter to common sense: atoms and quantum mechanics, DNA and cells, galaxies and black holes. Science still has plenty on its plate—questions about dark matter, abiogenesis, extraterrestrial life, epigenetics, consciousness, the multiverse, prime numbers, and much more—which is yet more evidence that declaring the universe “rational” is an inept approximation.

What fraction of the realities of nature do we understand now? What fraction will we? Do humans have the ability to understand everything? This certainly doesn’t look like a reality with a god who designed a simple and obvious universe, smoothing the way for us to understand it all. That is what you get from the Genesis creation stories, but that’s not the way reality actually is. (More here.)

When Turek imagines that reality is easy to get our minds around, he defeats another argument he likes to try, “Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God” (Stupid Argument #20a).

In fact, nature’s complexity likely encouraged religion. There must be a powerful force behind an unpredictable nature—likely an anthropomorphic one. Storms and famines must be caused by someone; if we could only figure out what pleased and displeased this great being . . . (h/t Birdman Bryant).

See also: “A Universe That’s Understandable Points to God,” but How Understandable Is the Universe?

Stupid argument #37: Joshua made the sun stand still.

There’s the story about how NASA scientists were running calculations forward and backward in time to check where all the celestial bodies were and would be. They came across a missing day that could only be resolved by factoring in the sun stopping for Joshua and moving backwards for Hezekiah. Check with NASA—they know about it.

Yes, NASA knows all about it, and the story is nonsense. They’ve reportedly issued a press release dismissing the story. Even young-earth Creationist organizations such as Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International advise against using it. (I discuss the story in more detail here.)

Stupid argument #38: Christian atrocities? Atheistic regimes did much worse!

Think of Stalin in the Soviet Union or Mao in China. These have been terrible countries, and atheism drove the persecution. Atheism has no moral compass. While atheists as individuals might be nice enough, they’ve invariably created murderous regimes when given the chance. They can’t be trusted with power!

This is the thesis of Patheos evangelical blogger John Mark Reynolds (I’ve responded here and here), but it fails in several ways.

First, atheism has no tenets or philosophy by which to do anything, let alone declare that a group must be killed. Atheism is nothing more than an absence of god belief, and it has as much of a moral element as stamp collecting or cat fancying. For a moral foundation that would appeal to many atheists, look to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Humanist Manifesto, or the Satanic Temple’s Seven Fundamental Tenets.

Second, the problem in the Soviet Union or China was that they were dictatorships. Religion competed for allegiance, so it had to be eliminated. Atheism was a consequence of the dictatorship, not the cause. (More here.)

Finally, while atheism doesn’t have a moral element, Christianity does. If you want murderous regimes, consider God commanding genocide. Or creating the Flood.

Reynolds says that a bad priest can be reprimanded by Christian beliefs, but of course that bad priest can also be supported by Christian beliefs. About atheists, he says, “A bad atheist cannot [be rebuked] since atheism has no creed or necessary beliefs beyond not believing in God, a life force, or a higher power.”

Correct! That’s precisely the point. Atheism is no more than a lack of god belief, and no one has been killed in the name of atheism.

If only Christianity could say the same.

Continue: Stupid Christian Argument #39: Were You There?

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* This is from Frank Turek, “Doubting Toward Faith with Bobby Conway,” 9/9/15 Cross Examined podcast @43:21.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/17/15.)

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Many technology companies are working on different approaches to quantum computers, and Google recently claimed an impressive success. Their Sycamore quantum processor did in a few minutes what the most powerful supercomputer would take 10,000 years to accomplish. Performing a calculation with a quantum computer that would be practically impossible for a conventional computer is called “quantum supremacy.”

IBM rained on the parade by stating that that supercomputer would’ve completed the calculation in just 2.5 days. Regardless of whether a conventional approach would’ve taken 10,000 years or 2.5 days, it was an impressive achievement, but it did lead to an amusing article title, Google both has and hasn’t achieved “quantum supremacy”.

We need a brief detour to make sure we’re on the same page about why this title is clever, and then we’ll search for that quantum feature within Christianity.

Quantum computers use quantum superposition. A quantum particle that could be in one of two states—let’s say spin up or spin down—can be spin up, spin down, or a superposition of probabilities for being in either one. The superposition goes away if the particle is forced to pick one or the other. It’s a quantum particle’s ability to hold two states at once (or something like that) that allows remarkable parallelism compared to a conventional computer, which uses bits that are either 0 or 1, and that’s it.

Superposition of two states—two states being held at once—is the key to quantum computing, and that was the allusion behind the title, “Google both has and hasn’t achieved quantum supremacy.”

We can find that superposition within Christianity, too.

Christian superposition: what is prayer good for?

My macro-world example of superposition is not Schrödinger’s Cat but Christian apologists. Christians often respond to challenges without considering the consequences so that they’re saying one thing to respond to a challenge but the opposite to respond to another. They answer with blinders on, determined to find a pleasing answer but uninterested in or unaware of how their conclusions will affect the rest of their Christian worldview.

As an example, I wrote about a blatant contradiction within Greg Koukl’s Stand to Reason ministry. During Christmas season last year, one of their staffers (Melinda) suffered a serious head injury. Koukl said:

I don’t know what God’s thinking about things, but I know what Christians are doing and I hope you’re doing with us—you’re praying like crazy. And that’s what we want you to keep doing—praying Melinda out of this.

That’s not surprising. That’s a typical Christian approach to prayer. But six weeks earlier, Koukl responded with a very different response to another tragedy, a mass shooting in a church that killed 25 and injured 20. Those people were very likely praying, but it obviously didn’t do much good. Ever eager to explain away God’s absence, Koukl inverted his argument and stated that it’s foolish to expect God to answer prayers for protection.

Why expect God to help Melinda’s injury but ridicule the idea that God would help Christians praying for their lives in a church? Koukl treats God as a sock puppet whose viewpoint can change completely if necessary.

Christian superposition and the structure of a sitcom

Seeing unchanging and omniscient “God” dance between alternatives as his master demands reminds me of a popular structure for a television comedy. TV Tropes calls it the “Fawlty Towers Plot” (Fawlty Towers was a British sitcom) though it’s evident in I Love Lucy and many others. First, someone tells a small lie. To avoid getting caught, they tell a larger lie, and so on. The snowball rolls downhill until eventually crashing into reality in the end.

In a similar way, the Christian feels obliged to defend Christianity, the Bible, or God regardless of the evidence or the consequences. When that answer is shown to be in conflict with something else, out comes another rationalization that may in turn come back to bite them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Christian superposition: contradictions

Perhaps the clearest example of this superposition is monotheism vs. the doctrine of the Trinity. Muslim apologists gleefully point out the contradiction since both Islam and Christianity inherited the primacy of monotheism from Judaism. Nevertheless, it’s hard to shoehorn “the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty” (from the Athanasian Creed) into a single god.

I attended a Sunday school class on biblical inerrancy. The teacher’s stock answer when faced with two seemingly incompatible Bible passages was, “They’re both true.” The differing numbers of women or angels at the tomb? Jesus’s differing genealogies? How Judas died? Somehow, both options are always true.

Useful homework for Christian apologists would be to create a gospel harmony, a single document that attempts to collect and make sense of every declaration in the four canonical gospels. Tatian’s Diatessaron from the second century is the most famous, but many harmonies have been created. None resolve the contradictions. The naturalistic hypothesis is hard to beat: the Bible is a manmade document composed of mythology, legend, and wishful thinking, plus some accurate history.

The fundamental that apologists always seem to miss is that their goal isn’t to find an answer to every challenge but to find the best answer.

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Image from IBM
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This is a continuation of my response to the Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Read part 1 here.

Design Argument

Geisler and Turek (“GT”) tell us that DNA is complex, and complexity points to a designer.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that something beautifully designed requires a designer. (page 111)

Beautifully designed? Like what? Like parasites, bacteria, and viruses? Like birth defects, cancer, and Alzheimer’s? Most of earth and pretty much all of the universe are inhospitable for humans without technology. I don’t see the hand of a particularly benevolent designer. The Design Argument fails.

And if something is beautiful, why must it be designed? Simple laws of physics give us beautiful crystals, delicate snowflakes, and stunning sunsets, for example.

A world designed by an all-wise god would be elegant—simple, efficient, and effective. All the Creationists can propose is that our world is complicated—awkward, coarse, and good enough.

Francis Collins, evangelical Christian, biologist, and current head of the National Institutes of Health, says that DNA evidence for evolution is stronger even than that from fossils. Nevertheless, many apologists push DNA as exhibit A. They’ll say that DNA is information, and information means intelligence. They’ll demand that we show them a single example of information not coming from intelligence. In response, I ask for a single example of intelligence not coming from a physical brain.

My argument reaches the opposite conclusion from theirs: I say that DNA alone makes a clear rebuttal against the Design Argument. My full argument is here, but let me summarize. First, think of the attributes that all designers use. They might want to make something durable or economical or strong or beautiful or lightweight, for example, but no designer will add junk. And yet when we examine DNA, we find:

• pseudogenes (broken genes, like the broken gene for making vitamin C in every cell of your body),
• fragments of endogenous retroviruses (8% of human DNA are these bits of virus),
• vestigial structures such as nonfunctioning eyes in cave fish and a pelvis in whales, and
• atavisms (archaic DNA that occasionally gets switched back on, such as legs on snakes and teeth in chickens).

DNA length is also not proportional to the complexity of the animal, and lots of species have far more DNA than humans, including salamanders, fish, amoebas, and even the onion. Can GT be saying that the onion really needs five times more DNA than humans? Or that some amoebas need 200 times as much?

This kind of sloppy DNA is not something a designer would create. That doesn’t prove that God didn’t create DNA, just that the Design Argument fails. And don’t tell me that God’s ways are greater than ours, and we aren’t in a position to judge him. We don’t start with the God hypothesis; rather, we follow the evidence, and this DNA mess doesn’t point to God.

The Christian response is often to handwave that the DNA got corrupted over time. Yes, it’s adulterated today, they’ll admit, but that’s just a product of living in a corrupt world.

Let’s think about this remarkable, evidence-less claim. Presumably this means that, going back in time, we would find progressively cleaner DNA until, at some time, the DNA was perfect and flawless. Was human DNA perfect 3000 years ago when the stories that became our Bible began to be collected? Was it perfect six million years ago when we had our last common ancestor with chimpanzees? Was it perfect four billion years ago in the first life form? And whatever your answer, where’s the evidence? Evolution is the scientific consensus, and it doesn’t support this claim.

(My response to “information requires a Programmer” is here.)

Thermodynamics revisited

GT put on a lab coat again to give us a lecture about thermodynamics.

How did life arise from nonliving chemicals, without intelligent intervention, when nonliving chemicals are susceptible to the Second Law [of Thermodynamics]? Darwinists have no answer, only faith. (p. 125)

Here again is that denigration of faith that seems ill-advised in a Christian apologetics book.

High school students who’ve been paying attention in class know how this complaint fails: the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy (“winding down” or disorder) in any system is increasing overall, but that doesn’t mean that it’s increasing everywhere. When a seed turns into a plant, that’s an decrease in entropy (because it’s an increase in order), but overall entropy in the earth/sun system is still increasing.

What makes this more entertaining is that other Creationists make clear that this appeal to thermodynamics is embarrassing. Answers in Genesis (“an apologetics ministry dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith”) says that the argument should be avoided. Creation Ministries International (“Proclaiming the truth and authority of the Bible”) says the same.

I do enjoy watching Creationists bash each other.

Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis is the process that turned nonliving material into primitive life. Evolution only works on living things, and it needed abiogenesis to create the first life. Plenty of hypotheses and scientific puzzle pieces exist, but there is no theory of abiogenesis yet.

Science has lots of unanswered questions. GT’s only argument here could be, “Science doesn’t know; therefore, God,” which is no argument.

GT use science when it suits them (thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology) and reject it when it doesn’t (evolution, abiogenesis). One wonders who died to leave them the Judges of All Science. One also wonders what they think of their readership that none will care enough about science to be offended at their arrogance.

In several places (pages 115 and 120), the book uses the term “spontaneous generation,” an idea discredited almost two centuries ago. That they use it as a synonym for abiogenesis shows again their disdain for science. For them, it’s a tool to be used or discarded as suits their agenda.

Evolution

Hatred of evolution colors much of Frank Turek’s work in particular (I’ve responded to his musings on evolution before). In this book, chapter 6 is titled, “New Life Forms: From the Goo to You via the Zoo?” This presumably means that evolution can’t be true because it’s yucky (“People came from pond scum? Eww!”), as if yucky has any bearing on truth. These are often the same people who believe God made Adam from dirt.

It’s telling that they must stoop to schoolyard taunts to make their case.

For more on Creationism vs. evolution, see my recent post responding to a Yale professor’s dismissal of evolution.

Continued in part 5.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/2/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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