Creation Bits

The Nike Metaphor

Is macro evolution just micro-evolution carried out for 3.5 billion years? Personally, I don't like using terms like micro- and macro-evolution, because there's some much confusion about what they mean. I prefer using things just as gaining complex information or just lateral or downward change. Gaining complex information in the creationist perspective is the result of creation, and lateral or downward change is the result of evolution. I like to illustrate this with an example from Nike:

It's like buying a shoe at the shoestore. If I buy a shoe, when I first get it is fairly stiff and rigid. However, as I walk in my shoe, it will "break in" and become more comfortable. However, the breaking-in process tells me nothing about how my shoe originally got here nor why there are differences between a Reebok and a Nike. It won't get me air pumps in a shoe that doesn't have them, and it won't generate new kinds of material.

Likewise, creationists believe that complex systems do not originate by chance alone. There are small changes, but they are more akin to "breaking in" (whether good or bad changes -- note that good changes are not increases in complexity) than to creating. Now, creationists believe that the "breaking in" process is much more complicated than my description of shoes (which includes modular genomic elements that can rearrange as a result of environment), but ultimately, complex systems are not built from the result of chance and law, but need a designing agent. ID'ers call this the Law of Conservation of Information.