Rosio Pavoris

I really wonder who Jack Chick’s target audience is. I find it hard to believe anyone could be so deeply ignorant of human nature and science they could find any of them at all credible. In fact, I’ve yet to meet any non-Americans who don’t think they’re parodies.
Outside of the US, depending on which people you hang out with, their tract on Dungeons & Dragons (Dark Dungeons) is probably the most famous one, but another one fundies are fond of throwing around is Big Daddy?, which (near as I can tell) they think is about evolution.

Needless to say, it’s full of straw men, non-sequiturs, and just made-up bullshit. The “six basic concepts of evolution”? The nonsense about circular dating methods? The idiocy about polystrate trees? Haeckel?

Judging by how long these claims have been discredited, you might guess this tract to be somewhere between 70 and 150 years old. You’d be wrong.
The first version of the tract appeared in 1972. The current version (which is also the one on the Chick website) was written in 1992 (by our good friend Kent Hovind).
Since even AiG refuses to endorse Hovind anymore, you might think it’s time to just let this tract fade into obscurity, but apparently a lot of creationists disagree. It’s still being pushed as fact, so I think it merits a brief response.

I’m just going to address the bit that seems to be subject of copy pasta most often: the faux “human evolution” chart.

(For the other claims, and a whole lot more, I refer you to TalkOrigins’ Index.)

I’m not sure why they’re presented as if they represent a direct lineage, as nobody has ever claimed they do.
Anyway, one by one.

Read the rest of this entry »

This news is actually a few days old, but it just hit our local newspapers, and now it made James Randi’s Swift, and given the fact that I seem to be keeping track of the march of fundamentalism in the lowlands, I guess it bears mentioning.

Chances are you’ve heard of David Attenborough’s BBC nature documentary series, The Life of Mammals. It’s a few years old at this point, and is comprised of ten episodes. It’s a pretty good series, which, apparently, is also what the Dutch TV station EO thought.
EO stands for Evangelische Omroep (”Evangelical Broadcast”), and due to the idiosyncracies of religious history in the Netherlands, it’s a public broadcasting association. And it is, of course, fundie. Young Earth Creationist, even.

Imagine its surprise when The Life of Mammals suddenly started talking about evolution, and things happening millions of years ago!

The short of it is that they cut an entire episode, and bowdlerised a few of the others.
It’s all documented in greater detail on this (Dutch) blog (including YouTube videos), which was also the first one to notice it. Basically, everything mentioning evolution, fossils, common descent, or the fact that the Earth is older than a few thousand years has been cut or mistranslated in the dub.

I wonder if the BBC knows about this. I know Attenborough wouldn’t take kindly to being censored like this.
The fact that a public broadcasting association gets away with this is shameful.

Quit sucking, Netherlands.

Pope Benedict admits evidence for evolution

POPE Benedict has said there is substantial scientific proof of the theory of evolution.

The Pope, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said the human race must listen to “the voice of the Earth” or risk destroying its very existence.

Welcome to the 19th century, Benny! Perhaps in a few decades, you’ll have caught up with the rest of us in the 21st, even?

In a talk with 400 priests, the Pope spoke of the current debate raging in some countries, particularly the US and his native Germany, between creationism and evolution.

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the Pope said.

“This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favour of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

But he said evolution did not answer all the questions and could not exclude a role by God.

Well, I guess not.

Either way, this is the guy who recently said the exact opposite (which itself was the opposite of what his equally infallible predecessor said), and claimed that passing laws to ensure our children get a halfway decent scientific education (that is, laws against the teaching of Genesis as a fact that is true) amounts to totalitarianism.
Too much of what is labelled as “flip-flopping” is just changing one’s mind when new evidence arrives, but this isn’t one of those. Not so infallible all of a sudden, are we?

Oh, and:

“Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question ‘where does everything come from?’”

Protip: evolution isn’t about the origin of the fucking universe. Any six-year-old could have told you that.
I guess this isn’t so much news as it is just business as usual.

(Via Pharyngula.)

This is something that’s been annoying me recently.
If you’ve ever had a discussion with a creationist (not, like, a run-of-the-mill creationist whose only argument is “evolution is false because my pastor says it is”, but a creationists who thinks his views are defensible), chances are that at one point, they said something like “evolution is false because it can’t even explain how life began”, or something along those lines.

And if this was on a public forum, chances are also good the very next reply was from a non-creationist, saying that evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life, only with how life behaves when it’s already there, and that what he’s thinking of is abiogenesis, and this has nothing to do with evolution one way or the other.
That possibly annoys me more than the actual creationist, because it shows that the person either doesn’t understand evolution, or that he’s copping out.

Evolution isn’t separable from abiogenesis; it doesn’t have to be. This is because evolution doesn’t just apply to living things (unless you specifically define life as “that which evolves”, which is probably too permissive a definition, in my opinion), and there is no clean break between life and non-life anyway.
The break between evolution and abiogenesis is artificial and contrived.

Evolution

How do you define (Darwinian) evolution?
There have been many definitions over time, but for the most part, they require randomly variable heritable traits on the one hand (genes, for example), and a (non-random) selection process on the other.

Does something have to be alive for evolution to apply to it?

When you’re talking about life, viruses always seem to come up.
By most accounts, they aren’t alive. They’re strands of genetic material in a simple protective coat of protein. They don’t eat, they don’t drink, they can only reproduce by literally being copied by a host cell’s copying apparatus, which is a relatively simple chemical reaction.
They’re large but simple aperiodic crystals, and they aren’t alive.

But evolution obviously applies to them. They grow resistant to medication used against them, they adapt to changing host environments, and they even speciate (though virus speciation isn’t entirely comparable to speciation of higher organisms, because they’re so damn simple).¹

Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis is simply about evolution applying to prebiotic molecules similar to viruses (but even simpler) and the chemical reactions they go through.²
It’s not something that magically happened before evolution kicked in. It’s inextricably intertwined with evolution, and evolution is a very important tool in understanding how it worked.

Now, it’s true that if we didn’t have any clue how abiogenesis could possibly have happened, evolution is still a fact, in the same way that umbrellas don’t stop working because we don’t know where rain comes from, but that’s no reason to claim rain and umbrellas are unconnected.

I can see the appeal of separating them. It catches the creationists off guard, and often destroys their entire argument. They don’t have a logical basis for their beliefs, so they often can’t adjust to that new bit of information by themselves.
It also gives theistic evolutionists something to feel good about, by allowing God to move into another gap. “See, evolution is real, but God still created life!”

However, when creationists say evolution is false because it can’t account for the origin of life, the mistake they’re making isn’t that they’re conflating evolution and abiogenesis—it’s that they assume we don’t have a clue how life started.

If you don’t want to explain the whole thing to them, or you don’t know enough about the whole thing to explain it to them in the first place, saying they should be separated is a handy cop-out, but a cop-out is all it is.

¹ If you do want to define life as “that which evolution applies to”, then yes, viruses are alive. But then you have to deal with things like the Weasel program also being alive.

² Darwinian evolution isn’t the only force that applied to these things, obviously—non-Darwinian selection played its part as well. But then, it still does.

… Penn & Teller are wrong (on their show Bullshit!) at least as often as they’re right. They’re right about religion and creationism, of course, but beyond that, their ability to identify junk science has less to do with rationality than it does with their ridiculous political convictions.
They get the obvious ones, like ESP, ghosts, and Bigfoot, and they even manage to get some political ones, like the death penalty, but they completely miss anything they just don’t want to believe, like gun control, the dangers of second-hand smoke, recycling, minimum wage, even global fucking warming.

I appreciate the importance of getting the message out, as far as religion and some of the more ridiculous superstitions go, but too many people seem to be afraid to call them on their bullshit because “they’re on our side against a greater evil”.
Nobody should get a free pass to be irrational.

(See for yourself, BTW. These guys have a few episodes of Bullshit!, Google Video intermittently has a bunch more.)

A person’s beliefs are a reflection of the way he approaches evidence of the world around him. When considering someone for tenure, which is meant to protect controversial academic research (that is, acquisition and interpretation of evidence), you’d have to be an idiot not to consider them.
Obviously, part of the tenure decision is political as well, with considerations made regarding whether or not a person would just fit in with the institution and whatnot, so beliefs enter into that as well.

This whole persecution-complex-based argument is perilously close to declaring any random idiot should be able to do anything he wants to (such as achieve tenure or be taken seriously for books on scientific subjects when he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about), which is perhaps typically American rather than typically DI. It doesn’t matter.
Quit whining.

(I’m talking about Guillermo Gonzalez, of course, the IDiot astronomer and DI fellow who was denied tenure at Iowa State. He doesn’t seem to understand how the process works, and the Disco Institute is crying persecution, obv obv.
PZ summed it up quite neatly, as he is wont to do:

Complaining that one met all the requirements is like proposing marriage, getting turned down, and then protesting that one has a good job, a nice apartment, and excellent personal hygiene. That may be true, but it’s irrelevant. The university does not want a long-term, committed relationship with you–nothing personal, you can still be friends.

)

This discussion is still going on, and it’s surprising how wrong some people who are otherwise quite intelligent manage to get it.

John Wilkins links to this opinion piece by a Washington Post writer (not one of the intelligent people I mentioned; we’ll get to those later). She argues that asking who believes in evolution was unfair and didn’t serve a purpose other than to make people look like idiots.

As debate audiences were pondering the meaning of Darwin in the Oval Office, McCain asked permission to elaborate. McCain then added: “I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.”

Note to George Tenet: This is what you call a slam dunk. McCain was able to acknowledge both science and religion — evolutionary theory and creationism — and make them mutually inclusive.

Except that’s not how most Republican voters will see, or how most rational people would. He managed to give an answer that would annoy both sides and appeal to the “moderate” religionists, a group whose size I think he greatly overestimates.

The truth is, each man took a calculated risk — or a courageous stand, depending on one’s view. To say “yes” would have been to betray many evangelical Christian voters, 73 percent of whom believe that human beings were created in their present form in the past 10,000 years or so.

Protip: presidents don’t get define reality, despite what the neocon movement seems to believe. If 73% of the people believe God created the universe 6,000 years ago, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not that’s true.
Of course, she means it more cynically than that: the people want a president who’s willing to lie to them and betray his own beliefs entirely in order to tell them what they want to hear. That’s a sad state of affairs, but the truth of it does not mean that’s the sort of president people need.

To these folks, “no” didn’t mean anti-science; it meant pro-God and conveyed a transcendent, nonmaterialistic view of the world.

Even to the worst of the appeasers, it should be obvious that in this case, that’s the exact same thing.
(I’d argue that it’s the exact same thing in any case, obviously.)

In a conversation after the debate, Huckabee said, “I wish life were so simple…. If I’d had time, I would have asked whether he meant macro or micro evolution.”

That’s a different sort of answer than what is inferred from a simple “no” forced by the manic pace of a 90-minute “debate” among 10 candidates, none of whom is qualified to seriously debate scientific theory.

Is it? Is it really?

Anyway, moving on.
Mitt Romney (that secksy, secky man-beast) casts himself as a theistic evolutionist, and people seem to be going nuts over it. I’m not sure how the conservative blogosphere is reacting (right-wing blogs tend to make me physically ill), but for the most part, our side thinks it’s great.

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

This of course is the standard theistic evolutionist response. Boilerplate, banal, and politically safe… but also essentially pro-science.

No, it really isn’t. On the face of it, it may look pro-science enough that it’ll cause future candidates to avoid any move towards publically accepting reality after Romney inevitably loses, but it’s still firmly in the anti-science camp.

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Translation: I’m not touching ID with a ten-foot pole.

… What?

“I don’t know what ID is, but I believe God guided evolution” translates to “not touching ID with a ten-foot pole”? If anything, it’s worse than standard ID positions, since they at least try not to invoke God a lot of the time.

You disappoint me, Panda’s Thumb.

PZ has more on this, including links to more disappointments.

To sum up: Republican candidates are still as anti-science as they’ve ever been. You could make a case that they’re trying to be more subtle about it, but they aren’t improving.
The sad part is, I’m not sure any of the Democratic candidates are any better, in this area.

This guy has videos (and part 2 here).
The Nightline version itself seems to have been pulled (part 1, anyway), but from what I’ve heard, it’s heavily cut to make it looks like Comfort and Cameron actually had half a clue what they were trying to do anyway. Bashir’s own beliefs may have something to do with that.

I can’t seem to find a decent, embeddable version of the Comfort/RRS Nightline “debate”, but fortunately, there’s no shortage of inanity on the side of the Way of the Master. Most of you will have seen this one already.

Evidence in favor of God: non-slip surface, perforated wrapper, intuitive ripeness indicator, pull-tab, hand-and-mouth-fittery, ease of digestibility. Apparently.

Behold, Ray Comfort’s nightmare:

That’s a wild banana. It’s marginally edible, if you aren’t too picky, but that’s about it.
(Click for to make bigger; there’s another one here.)

The banana Comfort is waving around (a dessert banana) is the result of many, many generations of careful selective breeding, and even within the category of fruits that most people would consider to be a banana (that is, not including wild ones), there are plenty which are only worth eating after extensive preparation (the plantain comes to mind).
Comfort’s banana isn’t evidence of God so much as it is evidence of human ingenuity and, ironically, evolution.

Ah, but of course, they do believe in micro-evolution~

Incidentally, Nick Gisburne made a video response to the banana video. Included behind the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

Most of you have at least heard of this by now: Young Earth creationists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, of banana fame, “debated” some representatives of the Rational Response Squad a few days ago. They called the debate because they wanted to present scientific evidence for the existence of God.
ABC is supposed to air their video today somewhen, but until then, here’s a brief thing the RRS hacked together. Quality isn’t awesome, but it should give some idea of the debate.

It’s impressive how many fallacies Comfort managed to fit into that brief clip. Argument from ignorance, argument from personal incredulity, argument from ignorance, argument from design, argument from ignorance, circular reasoning, argument from ignorance, ignoratio elenchi (I so rarely get the chance to use that term), argument from ignorance, appeal to authority, argument from ignorance, tons of straw men and red herrings, and, of course, the argument from ignorance.
Actually, it might not even qualify as an argument from ignorance (being ignorant isn’t the same as saying that we don’t know, therefore God). He just genuinely does not understand what parsimony is, and there’s a fundamental (I do think that’s the right word) disconnect from reality there.

Brian Flemming posted a press release sent out by the idiots.

(From here, via here.)

I’d like to think that the fact so few people (three out of ten is few, in the US; even more so considering this is a Republican debate) raised their hands is a reflection of a growing understanding that while creationists form a majority in the US, most of them are too stupid/brainwashed to find a voting booth, so it’s time to stop catering to them.
I think PZ might have a more likely explanation.

Link.

McCain then went on to weasel about over the beauty of the sunset and the Grand Canyon and whatnot, obviously.
We knew Brownback (the talking fetus guy) was an idiot, and Huckabee (though I thought he dropped out of the race), and it turns out Tancredo has a history of this sort of thing, so I guess the fact they raised their hands isn’t too surprising.
Still, considering this was an all-Republican debate, three is a pretty good number.

Though if they’d been asked if competing theories should be taught, I’m sure the number would’ve been much higher. McCain said he was in favor of that (and of letting the states decide) a while ago, though obviously that’s no guarantee he really is, with him.

Roy Zimmerman appears to be awesome.

(Via this person.)

When I was in the Fnac today, I noticed that in their tiny science section, on the same shelf as Richard Dawkins’ books (right next to them, in fact, even though they should’ve been further to the right to be properly alphabetically sorted), there were a few copies of this book:

“Schitterend Ongeluk of Sporen van Ontwerp?”, to the people who don’t speak Dutch, means “Magnificent Accident or Traces of Design?”. Yes, it’s about Intelligent Design creationism. And no, it’s not critical of it.
If the title is any indication, it just repeats the old canard that evolution happens by pure chance. No doubt the hurricane-in-a-scrapyard analogy is in there somewhere as well.

So why do I care? People write about ID and creationism all the time, don’t they?
Well, no, they don’t. Not in (most of) Europe, anyway. Creationism really is overwhelmingly a US-specific problem.

The main writer, Cees Dekker, is a Dutch teacher at the Technical University of Delft. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that he isn’t a biologist: he’s a physicist and an engineer. He does apparently specialise in molecular biophysics, though. (The other two authors aren’t even on Wikipedia; not even the Dutch version.)
The Netherlands does have a notoriously backward Bible Belt (de Bijbelgordel; still nothing compared to the US Bible Belt, of course), and while neither Delft nor Dekker’s native Groningen are in it, if any European country had to produce something like this, I’m not too surprised it would be the Netherlands. Other suitable candidates include the UK and the Mediterranean countries.

The fact that the Fnac would think the book is important enough to import is worrying, but again, not too surprising considering the very alarming thing Dutchiepedia told me:

Voor de publicatie van dit boek had Maria van der Hoeven, Nederlands minister van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap een gesprek met Cees Dekker, en schreef in haar weblog naar aanleiding hiervan onder meer: “Als we erin slagen om wetenschappers van verschillende geloofsrichtingen met elkaar te verbinden, kan het [Intelligent design] uiteindelijk misschien zelfs wel worden toegepast op scholen en in lessen.” Maria van der Hoeven beoogde daarmee een debat over intelligent design te laten voeren tussen wetenschappers en het onderwijsveld. Naar aanleiding van de betreffende tekst op de weblog werden zelfs Kamervragen gesteld.

Translated: Maria van der Hoeven, the former Dutch Minister of Eduction, Culture, and Science, talked to Dekker, and wrote on her blog, among other things: “If we succeed in connecting scientists of various religious traditions, it [Intelligent Design] may eventually even be applied in schools and in classes.”
Apparently the blog entry generated some commotion, and she further clarified her position later on, confirming that she was indeed saying what she was saying.
Van der Hoeven is a member of the Christen Democratisch Appèl, which is (not surprisingly) a Christian Democratic party (like Belgium’s CD&V; also like the CD&V, it’s centrist-conservative). It’s also the Netherlands’ majority party, and it’s actually quite moderate. Van der Hoeven herself is Catholic, though of course the Vatican’s stance on evolution changes with the wind.

Van der Hoeven was predictably and fortunately shouted down, but it’s still quite frightening that it could come to this as nearby as Dutchieland.
Add to that most of the comments on this post, and the future of the Netherlands (and, by extension, Belgium) isn’t looking too promising. I don’t want to have to move to Sweden.

At least Van der Hoeven has been replaced with Ronald Plasterk now, who is a molecular geneticist, an atheist, and a vocal opponent of ID creationism.

(If you speak Dutch, there’s a good review of Schitterend Ongeluk here.)

This has been covered extensively by several people, but in case people still missed it, here’s the short of it:

A Young Earth creationist, Marcus Ross, enrolled in a post-graduate program at the University of Rhode Island to get a PhD in geology so he could teach at Liberty University (Falwell’s fundie factory), and he got one, despite not believing a word he wrote in his thesis.
Should he have gotten that PhD? After all, the work he did was apparently good enough.

If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, but you parrot the things the board wants to hear (otherwise known as “facts”), you’re intellectually dishonest, and thus violating everything science stands for. So no.
(Whether or not you’ve also broken one of the Ten Commandments (the one about false witness) depends on your interpretation of the text. I don’t speak enough Hebrew to say.)

He stated he regards paleontology as one “paradigm”, and scripture as another, demonstrating his complete ignorance of the scientific method.
This renders him incapable of performing real research. All he did was mindlessly gather facts (the stamp collector approach to science, as I’m sure I’ve called it at one point). That doesn’t deserve a PhD, and the fact that the thesis committee failed to catch it reflects very poorly on them. If they knew about his Young Earth beliefs (which it would appear they did) but didn’t question him on them, I’d say it’s time for a few people on said committee to resign.

Ross made a mockery of academics and science, and the University of Rhode Island destroyed whatever credibility it may have had.
If I had a PhD in geology (or a related field) from the URI, I’d be rather upset at them pissing on my accomplishments like this.

People make me angry.

(Incidentally, something similar has happened before, but the advisor involved was much more embarrassing that time.)

Webdesign is a pathetic course.
The first hour and a half (the computerless bit) was spent talking about what we’d be talking about. I think he spent a full hour apologising to people who weren’t completely oblivious to the internet they use daily for starting with the very, very basics. The rest was pretty much explaining the assignment (making a website for a random third party we were supposed to find) a bit more; 90% of our total grade will be on this website. The final 10% is the exam, which will involve defending individual decisions regarding that website.
The other two hours, we mostly just looked at websites made by previous years. It’s sad how shockingly badly made websites could be while still receiving a passing grade.

During the break I got into an argument with some guy in my class over creationism (the same guy we said hi to here). Apparently he’d seen a documentary.
I doubt I managed to convince him creationists are, more than just being wrong in practice, also wrong in principle. I had to use big words he probably didn’t understand, like “parsimony” and “abiogenesis” and (apparently) “instinct”. He’d heard of the Big Bang and tried to make the cosmological argument, but failed miserably. Not that the cosmological argument isn’t a miserable failure in itself.
Either way, the entire thing came down to “you can’t prove a negative”, which isn’t a very interesting debate. If I didn’t know he was deliberately playing devil’s advocate I’d be more worried. At least everyone who joined in was firmly on the side of mocking creationists.

Hedgehogs!

I was looking around on the internets for the source to Dawkins’ original biomorph program, but apparently it isn’t available. The Blind Watchmaker had a form in the back that you could fill out so they’d send you a copy of the (compiled) program on diskette for a small fee, but that didn’t seem to be worth doing.

I did, however, find this applet, which simulates the original program quite well, though it starts with a dot rather than the small tree (which just means it takes a bit to get going), and it has more genes than the original, including a few for color (but not as many as the version Dawkins would write later on) and what appears to be roundedness.
It has a higher mutation rate than I would like, but it works.

If clicking stuff is too much work for you, you could also try this, which does the evolving for you. It’s simpler than the other one, and it’s genetic drift versus artificial selection, but the point is still made.
And the source code is available!

On a reasonably unrelated note, I just came across the following quote by Antony Flew, the atheist-turned-deist philosopher:

It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the finding of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

Apparently Flew has never read any book Dawkins has ever written, because he does touch on the subject of abiogenesis a number of times.
And apparently he doesn’t even recognise a God of the Gaps argument when he sees one (though fallacies are always harder to spot when we make them ourselves), if that’s the reason he turned away from atheism, as this interview (caution: PDF file) suggests.

Still, the issue is important. I’ll devote a post to abiogenesis in the near future.

In the evolution/creation* “debate”, there are always some people who seem to think there is merit in proposing a middle ground, most often in the form of “special creation”, which posits that animals evolved, but humans were created by God.
People who suggest these sort of middle ground theories tend to be pretty smug about it, as if the other two positions are both “extremists”, and they’re exceptionally wise for seeing a more moderate point of view.

What these people, and the people they fool, seem to be forgetting is that it’s possible for one side to just be wrong.
When one person claims 2 + 2 = 4, and another claims 2 + 2 = 6, the person who suggests that 2 + 2 = 5 does not get tolerance points for finding a middle ground. He’s an idiot for lending a random shot in the dark as much credence as rational thinking.
The false dichotomy is a logical fallacy only when the dichotomy is truly false. This is a middle ground fallacy.

I’ll repeat again: the theory of evolution is not in doubt. It is widely supported by tons of data from a variety of sources, including DNA evidence, anatomical evidence, fossil evidence, &c.
In scientific usage, “theory” does not imply uncertainty. Simply put, a theory is a collection of facts put together in an explanatory model. Compare, for example, germ theory, the theories of relativity, or the theory of plate tectonics.
Evolution is quite possibly the most well-supported theory in science. Without it, we wouldn’t have modern medicine.

Creationism, on the other hand, has nothing to support it. The argument from design is a god-of-the-gaps type fallacy which evolution itself did away with quite easily, and irreducible complexity has been shown to be bunk often enough now, so all creationism really has left is the argument from authority (”The Bible says it’s true!”), which, honestly, isn’t even worth addressing.
Creationism is worthless bullshit.

People need to think before they speak.

* Yes, just creation. Intelligent Design does not qualify as a third option. It is very transparently repackaged creationism, plain and simple.