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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2005
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Claim CB990:

Evolutionist explanations are just-so stories. They are entirely speculative and do not qualify as evidence.

Source:

Dembski, William A., 2002. No Free Lunch, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, chap. 6.

Response:

  1. It is indeed wrong to offer a just-so story as evidence that something happened a certain way. However, such stories still serve a purpose as hypotheses. They present a model that can be tested by further research and either rejected or qualified as more probable. For example, the just-so story that horns on horned lizards evolved as defense has now been supported with experiments (Young et al. 2004). Science makes little progress without hypotheses to test.

  2. Such stories also function to rebut claims that something could not have happened. If a plausible story is presented, the claim of impossibility is shown to be false. This is true whether or not the story is speculative.

  3. Creationists have almost nothing but just-so stories to back up their models (such as they are). For example, every detail creationists give about the Flood is a just-so story, due to a lack of basis for anything more than the broad outline given in Genesis. And no research is ever done to test their stories.

Links:

Lindsay, Don, 1998. Scenarios and "just so" stories http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/stories.html

References:

  1. Young, K. V., E. D. Brodie Jr. and E. D. Brodie III, 2004. How the horned lizard got its horns. Science 304: 65.

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created 2003-5-18