My favorite Creationist story.

[Kid_A]

In my high school biology class there was a guy swore up and down that evolution was bogus, and that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. But the funniest story about this guy was when we learned about vestigial organs, like the little bone that's left from when we had tails. Anyway, this guy said that his grandmother had to have surgery in which her tailbone was removed, and immediately following the surgery it hurt when she sat down. So therefore, God put that bone there to keep it from hurting when we sit down. True story.

Another time he asked me why I believed in the Big Bang, and tried to explain mathematically that the Earth could not have become what it is without God. He said "If you take a pocketwatch and smash it into billions of tiny pieces and then put those pieces into a box, do you think you can shake the box and the pieces will form a working pocketwatch?" I told him that yes that would happen, it would just take several billion years of shaking the box. He looked blankly at me and then shut up.

[shoelace414]

1. Pocketwatch

Well, It will not end up as a pocketwatch, but it will evertually be able to tell time.

Creationists seem to think that man is the ultimate goal of all life. All the life we know of is based on this perfect world.. the Earth is absoutly perfect for the life living on it.

however, it's perfect because the life evolived on it, if it wasn't perfect, life would have evolved differently.

[Ediacara]

4. Absolutely right!

As a matter of fact, if you had 35 shaking boxes with 35 smashed pocket watches, over the course of several hundred years you'd end up with 35 different time telling devises, some better, some worse, but all different from the original watch.

On the other hand though, this analogy is fatally flawed because smashed pocket watches aren't capable of evolving because they are not self replicating machines.... :-)

[Ediacara]

2. creationists like to talk about chance and prediction

But what they don't like to talk about AT ALL is deep time. Hell, you don't need to shake the box for several billion years, you just need several hundred :-)

Evolution is being witnessed on the small scale all over the place, which creationists grudgingly accept. What they refuse to accept however is that lots of microevolution is equal to macroevolution. They refuse to accept macroevolution because of their problem with deep time; you see... a young universe is the keystone in the whole mythology.

As an aside the dichotomy between micro- and macroevolution is completely bogus, and is simply a qualitative descriptor of the scale, not a distinction in the mechanism.

[Speck Tater]

3. That pocket watch question was put to me by a nun

in my catholic school when I was in fourth grade.

I told her the analogy was bogus. Physcial laws being what they are, the correct question is, if I put a bunch of magnets in a box and shake it up when I open the box will some of the magnets be stuck together?

There are no forces acting between gears of a pocket watch to draw them toegther in the right way, but their ARE forces acting between atoms that cause them to form particular molecules.

Of course such insolence got my knuckles rapped with a ruler again.

Like the time the nun told me "You can't add apples and oranges."
"Sure you can," I replied.
"Then what's 3 apples plus 2 oranges," she asked me smugly.
"Five pieces of fruit," I replied.
WHACK!
Back into the coat closet I went.

[troublemaker]

5. Actually, the watch would never reassemble

no matter how long it was shaken. Many parts would actively defy reassembly... the spring comes to mind.

The major problem with the question posed by the poor guy is that it's irrelevant.

If it's supposed to be about evolution why not cut to the chase and ask, "if you put an ancient simian in a shoe box and shook it would it turn into a person?" Nobody would have to puzzle over that very long. They would quickly answer, "No. Why? Did Charles Darwin say it would? I'd love to see the citation."

[Ediacara]

7. What're you talkin about? :-)

All of MY textbooks say that box shaking is the KEYSTONE of evolutionary thought.

[BigMcLargehuge]

6. And that little creationist ditty is a peversions of another argument

the Teleological argument. In that argument it is supposed that if you walked through a desert that you were certain no one else have ever walked through before, and in the center of this desert you found a functioning pocketwatch, then that watch MUST have been assembled by something. The idea that something as complex as a pocketwatch couldn't have spontaneously popped into being without a watchmaker to design and assemble it. The watchmaker, so the argument goes, is God.

This argument is pre-Darwin, and was shot down rather well by David Hume.

Hume's argument was all it proves is that there's a pocketwatch. But it doesn't mean it's a good pocketwatch, and it doesn't prove that there's a watchmaker. Anything else is no better than a guess.