The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

What most creatards do no not understand in relation to evolution is also contingent on their belief that the world is not as old as science has accurately predicted it is.

Evolution is not a finger snapping event as described in Genesis in the bible performed by a magical sky daddy.

Evolution takes place over a long period of time, and the fact that the earth is billions of years old supports evolution.

Very good point: so much of the language that AJW and others use focuses on species-to-species transitions as though they were instantaneous events, as opposed to lengthy, subtle gradients taking place over many, many generations. I suppose a lack of subtlety and nuance is par for the course for creationist argumentation, but part of me does wonder whether it's at least a little intentional: this "single cells turning into dogs and cats!" thing may not be anywhere near accurate, but it is the most effective way of making a reasonable process that we can easily observe in nature (and do, on a daily basis) seem like crazy witch magic.

But part of the reason that strawman works is a misapprehension of how "species" as a definition works. When a creationist talks about the development of "completely new species," it's this mystic sort of big leap, but "species" is just a word we use to describe sufficiently different organisms, not an inherent biological fact woven into the DNA as this hard line that can never be crossed. It's just a word: a dog is different from a cat in the same way as ice cream is different from a root beer float. They're definitionally different things, but there's nothing preventing ice cream from becoming a root beer float, assuming the correct additional aspects are present. There's no objective entity "ice cream" that cannot change due to the laws of the universe, there's just one object we've assigned a label to, another object we've assigned a label to, and a means by which the one can become the other as a function of those labels.

In terms of life forms, we use species as a category based on physiological and genetic traits specific to each individual species, and when we find a new animal that doesn't fit into the established physiology and genetics of a known species, then it's a new species. This is the way it's worked throughout the history of biology, and it's exactly as trivial as turning ice cream into a float. We already know that genetic traits are both malleable and an influence on physiology, and since species is just a word and not a natural barrier that genetics bumps up against, there is no reason at all why the genes of any one organism might, over time and generations, drift from one human-invented species categorization, into a new human-invented species categorization.

Proper understanding and application of the terminology involved in evolution completely robs the misleadingly instantaneous rhetoric of creationism of all its power.