| Haiti Disaster Relief Donation Links |
|---|
| RationalWiki would like to make it easy for people to donate directly to major relief organizations helping in the Haiti earthquake aftermath. All donation links on this page are direct to the organizations. No money goes through any hands at RationalWiki or its members.
Red Cross Relief |
Random chance
From RationalWiki
A common claim by creationists is that evolution is nothing but random chance and then claim that there is no way random chance could produce a particular adaptation or animal. This is most commonly used in association with an argument from design.
The "random chance" criticism is actually a straw man since evolution does not rely only on random chance. While some elements of evolution are random, most notably mutation, the corner stone of Charles Darwin's theory is natural selection which is the opposite of chance. Natural selection is non-random and is one of the primary shaping forces for adaptation in nature. By ignoring natural selection in evolution creationists are better able to argue that a god must have intervened but it is a complete logical fallacy.
It is fascinating that because creationism makes no attempt (for it would represent a merely human limitation on divine power) to describe any regularities about the world or to discriminate between what might happen and what might not happen as a consequence of creation (or intelligent design), there is no difference between the results of creationism and random chance. While evolutionary biology rules out certain things - it is extremely unlikely that there would be a rabbit with ceramic armor or a supersonic hawk (except if a mad scientist would decide to design one) - there is nothing that is less plausible than anything else in a creationist world of life.
