Christians who declare their belief in Biblical creationism leave all sorts of unanswered questions in their wake.  Here are a few.

Question 1:  Why are there so many near-human animals?

Let’s say Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” and that one of the Bible’s two creation stories (yes, there are two in Genesis) correctly explains the origin of life on earth.  Why, then, do apes and monkeys exist?  Why did God create animals — especially chimps and bonobos — that are almost genetically identical to humans?  If God created us in his image, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense for no other animal on earth to be even remotely similar to us?  Why would God create so many other primates — ANIMALS — that share over 95% of our DNA?  Moreover, why would God give them social behaviors nearly the same as ours; language skills nearly the same as ours; emotions, the ability to use tools, even bipedalism, compassion and self-awareness all nearly the same as ours?  Indeed, if we look at virtually any metric of mental ability, the average rhesus monkey behaves more human-like than did the brain damaged Terri Schiavo, whom President Bush and many Republican Members of Congress rushed to “save” because they believed she displayed human consciousness.  Assuming that no species on our planet arose from evolution, but from instantaneous creation by God, why are there so many near-human animals?  Why would God do this?

Question 2:  Why are there so many dissimilar “intelligent designs” of the same animal?

Again, let’s assume Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” and that the creation stories in Genesis correctly explain the origin of life on earth.  Why, then, are there so many different versions of each animal?  Wouldn’t “intelligent design” require God to create the one perfect design of each species and to populate the entire planet with that one perfect design?  Why are there, instead, so many different species of the same animal?  Our planet has two species of alligators, more than 140 species of sparrows, over 360 species of sharks…and even 260+ species of primates, and this doesn’t include the species that have gone extinct.  How do creationists square their idea of “intelligent design” with the fact that God couldn’t even figure out whether camels should have one hump or two?

Question 3:  Why do invasive species exist?

Here’s another question about God’s so-called “intelligent design:”  why did God create so many inferior designs?  “Intelligent” design would suggest that each species would be the best possible “design” for the environment in which it lives, yet how many times have we heard of invasive species taking over a new environment and displacing the native species?   Examples abound:  zebra muscles have invaded the Great Lakes and displaced other aquatic life; Africanized honeybees have invaded southern U.S. border states and displaced the tamer European honeybees; European gypsy moths have invaded America and threaten to defoliate vast areas of the country.  Many more examples exist.  Why do these invaders thrive so well compared to the “intelligently designed” indigenous species?  What is “intelligent” about designing plants and animals that can’t survive as well as the invaders, which were presumably “designed” to live someplace else and should, therefore, be less able to survive than the native species that were supposedly “designed” to live there?

Question 4:  Where did human variations come from?

Here’s yet another question about God’s “intelligent design:”  exactly where did all the different species of human come from?  Regardless of which color skin and which type of facial features Adam and Eve had (religious artwork in America and Europe invariably show them as having white skin and Western facial features), why don’t all people on our planet have the same skin color and facial features?  If Adam and Eve were Caucasion (for example), then from whom did Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc., get their genes for non-white skin and non-Western traits?  And what about the pygmies in central Africa and on the islands of Indonesia — from whom did they descend?

Question 5:  Where did glacial valleys come from?

Deep river valleys — the Grand Canyon in Arizona, for example — are believed to have been created by slow water erosion over millions of years.  Nevertheless, Young Earth Creationists have another explanation for how such valleys were formed:  rapid erosion (i.e., over a few days or weeks) caused by a huge flood of fast-moving water.  This isn’t necessarily unscientific.  Reputable geologists have theorized that a huge flood might cause rapid erosion and large geologic features — the Toutle River badlands in the state of Washington is one leading candidate for this theory.  (Even so, no reputable scientist believes the Grand Canyon was formed this way, but this doesn’t, of course, prevent YEC folks from suggesting that it was.)

However, even if the YEC folks can convince themselves that all of our planet’s deep river valleys were formed by massive flood waters (namely, the Great Flood described in the Bible), their “theory” cannot explain deep glacial valleys.  Unlike river valleys, which are V-shaped, glacial valleys are distinctively U-shaped, so we know they were not created by rivers, and, unlike rivers, glaciers simply cannot move rapidly enough to carve out deep valleys in a matter of days or weeks.  So, where did deep glacial valleys come from, such as the ones that now form the deep fiords of Norway? 

Also, glaciologists tell us that periods of glaciation lasted 40,000 to 100,000 years, and we know from moraine deposits that our planet has had many such periods…yet there is no natural way for ice to create such formations quickly (i.e., in 6,000 years), so where did these glacial features come from?  God would need to be the Great Deceiver to create glacial valleys and moraines that fool us into thinking the earth is older than it is, but the Bible tells us that Satan is the Great Deceiver.  For more information about ice ages, see here and for more information about glacial valleys, see here.

These are just a few of the many questions that the Bible’s creation stories raise in my mind.  What questions do they raise in yours?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Evolution, Religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.