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The Darwin Dictionary

Your guide to things evolutionists say

by 

Keaton Halleyimaginary-apeman@300w
An example of one of those imaginary ‘apemen’ (in this case, an ‘apewoman’) that only exist in museums and textbooks

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with an evolutionist, and struggled to follow his logic? Has your head ever spun after being bombarded by a dizzying array of assumptions built right into evolutionary jargon? Well, have we got a tool for you! Announcing The Darwin Dictionary. This handy-dandy reference guide will teach you the true meaning of 40 terms in a typical evolutionist’s vocabulary. Want to know if a ‘human tail’ is a real thing? Just look up the entry below! Think ‘evolutionary stasis’ is a contradiction in terms? Now you have the answer on good authority! What are you waiting for? Start reading and finally unravel the mystery of what evolutionists are really talking about. Follow the links to gain an even deeper grasp of the serious teaching points behind the definitions.

Also, note that this glossary is meant to be light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek satire, so please be sure you have located your sense of humor before continuing. In other words, the entertainment here should provoke enlightenment, not offense. Our intention is not to attack people, but ideas … albeit really silly ideas. But, if you discover as you read that you are guilty of some of the fallacious thinking that we gently poke fun of below, perhaps you might take this opportunity to reconsider holding beliefs which so easily lend themselves to such fun-poking. We are here to help. As Proverbs 27:6 tells us, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” No matter what worldview you bring to the table, we hope your thinking will be challenged and sharpened by The Darwin Dictionary. Happy reading!

Abiogenesis, n. – Rocks begetting life, in violation of the most basic, observed law of biology.

Origin of life, Video: Life from non-life?

Apemen, n. – Ever-changing, imaginary creatures that inhabit museums and textbooks, concocted by speculation wrapped in conjecture bundled with an unhealthy dose of artistic license.

Making sense of ‘apeman’ claims, Video: Making sense of ‘ape-man’ claims

Big bang, n. – The logic-bending theory that everything was produced when nothing at all exploded.

Big bang beliefs: busted, Is the big bang really scientific?

Change over time, n. – An obvious, observable fact, discussed by Bible-believers well before Darwin, which is nevertheless all evolutionists think they need to declare victory. E.g., “Things change, therefore microbes and men are distant cousins. Checkmate creationists!”

Don’t fall for the bait and switch, Evolution: just a change in allele frequencies?, Has evolution really been observed?, Video: Change is not enough—it is the type of change that matters

Consensus, n. – What evolutionists appeal to when the evidence is lacking (for example: “all the time”).

Why consensus science is anti-science, Can they all be wrong?

Convergent evolution, n. – The position of refuge for evolutionists who think that complex, sophisticated structures like camera eyes, billed snouts, sticky tongues, and electrosensory organs must have arisen multiple times by coincidence on separate branches of the evolutionary tree. Don’t bother them with the odds.

Are look-alikes related?, Video: Convergent evolution conundrum

Dark matter, n. – The invisible, undetectable substance that supposedly holds the universe together, invoked liberally to prop up evolutionary cosmological theories that would otherwise fail to fit the evidence.

Why is dark matter everywhere in the cosmos?

Dysteleology (poor design), n. – The not-at-all-pretentious category into which evolutionists put the many ingeniously-designed biological features whose purposes they have failed to understand.

What about claims of ‘bad design’?, Video: Refuting ‘bad design’ arguments

Evolution, n. – The naturalistic story of how the universe and everything in it came to be, to which all contrary facts must submit.

Evolution: not just about biology, Evolution and creation, science and religion, facts and bias

Evolutionary stasis (lack of change), n. – The part of the evolutionary process which has by far the most abundant fossil evidence—during which no evolution occurs.

Evolutionary stasis: Double-speak and propaganda, Video: Stasis: Another problem for evolution

Gill slits, n. – Folds in the skin of a developing human embryo which are neither gills nor slits, but are so named in the service of evolutionary propaganda and its fraudulent ‘recapitulation theory’.

Creative design in the human embryo, A surgeon looks at creation

God of the gaps, n. – The deceitful charge, seemingly immune to correction, that the case for a Creator is based on ignorance rather than positive evidence—a misrepresentation which evolutionists believe will become legitimate if they just keep repeating it.

The god-of-the-gaps charge doesn’t stick

Human tail, n. – A birth defect typically associated with a pathology, which evolutionists mistake as having any relevance to the origins debate. Or, in some cases, the work of Photoshop.

Human tails?, Video: Humans with tails?

Junk DNA, n. – Highly functional parts of the genome that specialize in confounding smug evolutionary claims that these genetic segments represent nothing more than clutter accumulated in the distant Darwinian past.

The lingering death of junk DNA, Video: Junk DNA? There’s no such thing!

Living fossil, n. – An organism that refused to change over time, just so that it might bewilder evolutionary textbook authors.

Evolutionists can’t dodge ‘living fossils’, ‘Living fossils’ enigma, Video: Living fossils

Methodological naturalism, n. – The arbitrary rule (preemptively dismissing supernatural causes) to which all scientists must pledge allegiance—quick, before anyone notices the ingenious design everywhere!

The rules of the game, Historical science and miracles

Millions of years ago, adv. phrase – A heads-up that an ideologically-driven just-so story is coming next. Not so different from the phrase, “Once upon a time.”

The illusion of millions of years, Philosophical naturalism and the age of the earth: are they related?

Multiverse, n. – A desperate, evidence-free, unscientific gimmick to explain away the spectacularly precise fine-tuning of the universe without resorting to a Creator.

Multiverse theory

Natural selection, n. – The process that is alleged to perfectly illustrate the compelling logic of evolution, in which new genetic information surely must be produced by the elimination and proliferation of pre-existing information. “If only those silly creationists had eyes to see.”

Natural selection ≠ evolution, Muddy waters, Video: How natural selection supports a recent creation

Nebular hypothesis, n. – An easy way for solar systems to form from gas clouds, as long as the laws of physics (such as the conservation of angular momentum) need not be a constraint.

Solar system origin: Nebular hypothesis

NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria), n. – The proposed relationship between science and faith which attempts, by fiat, to relativize and marginalize religion and concede all factual ground to evolution—a position that evolutionists themselves cannot even maintain for long with a straight face.

Stephen Jay Gould and NOMA

Overwhelming evidence for evolution, n. – A refrain commonly spoken by evolutionary professors, synonymous with, “Trust me.”

National Geographic is wrong and so was Darwin

Panspermia (life seeded from outer space), n. – The proposal that moves the spontaneous-origin-of-life hypothesis into outer space where it can safely avoid the pesky scientific criterion of testability.

Panspermia theory burned to a crisp

Peer reviewed, v. – Vetted by the evolutionary echo chamber.

Creationism, science and peer review

Phylogeny (evolutionary tree), n. – Patterns of lines, allegedly representing the evolution of life, that will need to be redrawn yet again after the next fossil discovery.

David Attenborough: Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, The evolutionary parade of ‘missing links’

Pseudoscience, n. – Any field of study that poses a challenge to naturalism.

It’s not science

Punctuated equilibrium, n. – The convenient theory that evolution occurs in episodic bursts, at just the right speed to be both unobservable in the present and untraceable in the fossil record.

Punctuated equilibrium: come of age?

Quantum fluctuation, n. – The phenomenon of subatomic particle materialization which strictly obeys the well-established laws of physics, yet which big bang proponents confusingly invoke in their attempts to circumvent these same laws of physics (i.e., postulating that something can spontaneously come from nothing for no reason).

In the beginning God created—or was it a quantum fluctuation?

Quote mining, n. – The reasonable creationist practice of accurately citing a leading evolutionary authority figure whose comments somehow escaped censorship from the Darwinian thought police.

‘What if Jesus tells you you’re wrong?’

Radiometric dating, n. – The tool evolutionists love to invoke when the results agree with their predetermined conclusions, but which is dismissed out-of-hand when tested on rocks of known age.

The way it really is: little-known facts about radiometric dating, Video: Radiometric backflips

Science stopper, n. – An evolutionary label for the reasonable conclusion, arrived at by evidence, that ingenious design points to a Designer—as opposed to the evolutionary practice of hoping against hope that a plausible naturalistic explanation will one day be discovered.

Arthur Jones: Creationism is not a science stopper

Self-correcting (as in, the ‘self-correcting’ nature of science), adj. – The propaganda-style positive spin evolutionists always put on their multitudinous past mistakes and hoaxes—a mercy not afforded to the church.

Can all those scientists be wrong?, Plumbing and paradigms, Is science self-correcting?

Settled science, n. – A phrase evolutionists find useful to preemptively shut down critical thinking.

“This changes everything!”

13745-simple-cell
A ‘simple cell’, if technology that outcompetes us at every turn is really simple

Simple cell, n. – A biological entity that contains more interacting parts than a modern city, equipped with dizzying, mind-boggling, labyrinthine complexity, light-years beyond anything built by man.

Cell systems, Fantastic voyage

Skepticism, n. – The distorted lens that makes every materialistic claim look attractive and every supernatural claim look suspicious (sorta like ‘beer goggles’ for atheists).

Evolution and creation, science and religion, facts and bias

Transitional form (also, missing link), n. – Any fossil (or fossil fragment) that, when subjected to an overactive imagination and a disregard for real-world engineering constraints, can be shoehorned into a speculative evolutionary sequence.

Abandoned transitional forms, Argument: The fossil record supports evolution, Video: Transitional fossils? Where?

Uniformitarianism, n. – The philosophical doctrine that dictates to rocks and fossils that they must form slowly and gradually over deep time, thus attempting to make the denial of Noah’s Flood appear scientific.

Charles Lyell, The origin of old-earth geology, Hutton’s a priori commitment to materialism, Video: Uniformitarianism and the age of the earth

Vestigial organ, n. – A body part with important functions that should not be investigated, lest yet another evolutionary claim be exposed as a vestige of Darwinian misinformation.

Vestigial arguments, ‘Vestigial’ organs: What do they prove?, ‘Vestigial’ organs Q&A

War on science, n. – The fearmongering ‘sky-is-falling’ narrative spun by evolutionists whenever their unscientific worldview is challenged in public.

National Geographic claims creationists are at war with science, Intelligent Design—‘A War on Science’ says the BBC

Who designed the Designer?, interrogative – The ‘gotcha’ question evolutionists take to be so devastating that they see no point in engaging with sound creationist responses.

If God created the universe, then who created God?, Video: Who created God?

Conclusion

It has been said that many of the skirmishes in the culture wars are really battles over the dictionary. For this reason, we offer The Darwin Dictionary as a unique tool to help you engage specifically in the battle over origins. Our hope is that, having worked through the definitions and hyperlinks above, you are now better equipped to defend the truth of God’s Word against many common attacks of our age. Once you grasp the convoluted thinking that evolutionists smuggle into their very terminology, you will be better prepared to spot core evolutionary assumptions in the future, and challenge them. So, thank you for reading. We hope you have enjoyed this attempt to shed light on various fallacies of the evolutionary mindset, making proper use of God’s good gifts of satire and sarcasm, just like the prophets before us (1 Kings 18:27).

Published: 19 November 2019