Creationists think all science contradicting their own ideas belong to the same unified system of thought.  That unified system is imagined as constructed to allow life to change over time.  Apart from this being conspiracy talk this thinking treats science as divided differently than it really is.  In reality science is divided in many largely independent subjects.  They ultimately depend not on biology but on physics.  Its laws of nature have to remain the same over time or life of Earth would be impossible.

When The Origin of Species was published in 1859 it was already known that life had changed over time.  Charles Darwin was just the first to propose a working mechanism for this.  It is called natural selection and was compared to artificial selection.  Later he added sexual selection to his explanations.  These were just the beginning of evolutionary thought which has developed greatly since.  However, evolution theory only applies to things which reproduce.  It does not even apply to individual development.  Evolution is something happening over many generations and not to a single life-form.

Young Earth creationists deny all of prehistory.  This means they deny the existence of any time before written history.  The trouble is the idea of deep time is considerably older than evolution theory.  It developed out of investigations of rocks and finding natural explanations for how they formed.  By the 1850ies the world was already thought to be at least a hundred million years old.  Charles Darwin’s only contribution was suggesting the world to be at least 300 million years old.  He thought it would take this long to evolve the animals he knew about from the four or five ancestral species he could identify.  This presupposes acquired characteristics to be inheritable which is usually not the case.  The mentioned process is now considered to have taken about twice as long.  Anyway, buy the time of his death the Earth was thought to be hundreds of millions of years old.

There are several more specific scientific ideas denied by many creationists.  These are neither part of nor dependant on evolution theory:

Abiogenesis is about the origin of life.  It is different from spontaneous generation which was disproved in the 19th century.  But this does not mean the impossibility of life from non-life.  This only means it can’t happen under certain limited circumstances.  Current hypotheses actually say life originated under circumstances which don’t exist on the Earth today.  If anything, pre-existing life-forms would eat any macromolecules before they had a chance to become life.

Big Bang theory developed out of astronomy which works independently of biology.  Interestingly, scientists had hard to accept the idea because initial estimates suggested the universe to be younger than the Earth.  Later it was found that the astronomers had misjudged what they had seen.  Other galaxies turned out to be much further away than previously thought.  It is now established the universe is about three times as old as the Earth.

Formation of the Solar System belongs to astronomy and physics.  These two can be used to explain the origin of the Sun, the eight major planets, their moons, asteroids and comets.  For the most part these processes are thought to have taken place thousands of millions of years ago.  Only the ring systems of the gas giants are thought to have changed drastically in a much shorter timeframe.  Still, we are talking about tens of millions of years.

Radiometric dating developed out of chemistry which led to the discovery of radioactivity.  Since the laws of nature determine the rate of radioactive decay its measured rate can be used for absolute dating.  The fist measurement of the age of rocks by this method actually came as a chock.  All of a sudden, the Earth turned out to be ten times as old as previously thought!

Relative dating was developed before evolution theory.  It begun with geologists realising the borders between rock layers and the way they protruded into each other could be used to tell which formed first.  Then it was discovered certain fossils were only found in certain rock layers.  Moreover, the order in which they occurred was always the same.  The later means the relative ages of rock layers could be correlated across the world.  This principle was used for decades before anyone knew why it was so.

Stellar evolution does not depend on biological evolution but was named in honour of it.  Astronomers can see stars of various colours and brightness.  This is explained by them being of different masses and ages.  Moreover, stars take hundreds of thousands of years to form.  Dependant on their mass stars have different lifespans.  The most massive ones only exist for a few million years.  The least massive ones have so long lifespans no-one of them have reached their later stages yet.  All this is calculated based on physics alone.

Dividing science into many different subjects has some advantages.  If you find you have been wrong about some detail, you just modify the relevant explanation to account for it.  This way science become more and more correct over time.  Scientists are talking about scientific progress.  This in contrast with creationists which sees their entire worldview threatened by unexpected finds.  I have read about a creationist which made his entire worldview dependant on specific information literarily not existing.  When he was told this specific information had existed for decades, he broke contact with the person who told him.

Generally, science requires nuanced thinking to be properly understood.  A good metaphor for this is the existence of grayscales.  Science does not only have grayscales but also red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and brown.  The boundaries between these different colours are not that obvious either.  However, a fuzzy boundary is not the same as no boundary at all.  In some cases there is a general consensus among scientists on where to set the boundary.  In other cases one has the specifically state where one’s boundary is set.  Otherwise, there is a high risk one will be misunderstood.

 

Uploaded on the 29th of November 2023.