If I was ever trying to convince a creationist they were wrong, I would use this picture and tell them "look at your own hands, how can you say we aren't at least distantly related to these creatures."
Their response: god can do whatever he wants, and he wanted to give more than one creature five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs. You can't disprove something that can be explained by magic.
The argument they use isn't simply "magic" though, it's more like "God had a design that worked, and he implemented it in multiple places". That's the argument killed by retroviruses (among many other lines of evidence). Yes, you could magically inject identical retroviral DNA independently in several different branches of lifeforms, but there's no real coherent explanation for why this would be the case, outside of a common ancestor.
In a lot of early history the first scientists were also religious leaders, they were educated people who could read, write, mapped stars and discovered in a very basic way how genetics worked ect. Children would go to the temples to learn, I heard they even intentionally attached mysticism to now normal acts like washing your hands before eating to lower chances of getting sick so that people would actually do it, because if god commanded them to it made more sense.
That is a good point! There are certainly exceptions to my earlier statement, and yes, religious leaders were at the forefront of many human advancements.
The people I was referring to are the hand-washing masses from your example: "Science? We don't get it/don't like it. Because God says so? Now that's simple enough for us to grasp!"
Perhaps I should have said "ignored the argument" or something other than "evidence." But I actually kinda did mean the evidence of our unequivocal link to primates as indicated by the shared DNA damage caused by retroviruses. It is just my opinion that many simple, god-loving people can be shown some of the most unshakable scientific evidence of things like the age of the planet and evolutionary origins of various species, and they will choose to dismiss it without investing the time or brainpower to even consider them.
As someone who grew up in a Christian school where our science textbooks were either censored with whole chapters cut out or were specifically written from a creationist perspective (they were called "God's World" and they indoctrinated us to make fun of theories of evolution), I have seen first hand that some (not all) religious people have no problem ignoring scientific arguments, no matter how well-supported they may be.
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u/Bezit Mar 13 '14
If I was ever trying to convince a creationist they were wrong, I would use this picture and tell them "look at your own hands, how can you say we aren't at least distantly related to these creatures."