I’m glad you ask! If both theories make the exact same predictions, if your variety of creationism predicts that life will be most parsimoniously organized in a ‘tree of life’ shape, with predictable distance between organisms and their DNA according to how long ago they ‘supposedly diverged,’ then the better part of my complaint against ‘science-deniers’ dissipates. This would leave you in some version of omphalos, as the tree of life looks very much like it traces lines of descent, but I would have no beef with it.
If the predictions are not identical, then we have to look at both theories and go with whichever one makes more accurate predictions than the other. So for creationism to be taken seriously, it has to make predictions that evolution does not. For the record, well-meaning people have been attempting this for the past hundred and fifty years without success. In the modern day when we can directly compare DNA sequences between species and they look like the kinds of patterns we would expect to see from common descent, where non-functional DNA sequences are the same between closely related species and we can even trace the genetic trails of viruses that inserted themselves into our DNA in the distant past, it seems highly unlikely that a theory of created ‘kinds’ could make the kinds of predictions it would have to. Even the most basic prediction: life falls into a finite number of separate, unrelated types. Nobody is willing to give a number or say for sure what is a kind and what is not. I’ve looked at attempts at ‘baraminology’ and modern day versions are very careful to hedge their bets and not commit too firmly to what they’re saying because of how many times they’ve been wrong in the past.
But maybe there are accurate predictions that could be made by creationism and not evolution. I would love to see them, if possible.
Incidentally, when I was looking up gliding creatures, did you know that flying squid are a thing? I did not!
Anyways, back to the birds and the bats. It’s true that the putative common ancestor would have lived a long time ago: more than 300 million years, and looked a lot like a lizard. As tempting as it is to get caught up in all the differences, there’s also a lot of similarities. Both birds and bats have digestive tracts, spines, ribs, four limbs with broadly similar bone structure, lungs, blood, hearts, sexual reproduction, and lots of other commonalities. All that stuff evolved before the shift to living on land happened, and it’s all more similar in the way it’s coded for by DNA than it would have to be if common ancestry were not true.
I read Genesis over and over a few months ago, and it didn’t say anything about ‘fixity of species,’ this idea that there are invisible barriers between microevolution and macroevolution, that kinds could evolve so far and no farther. All it says is that God created (told the sea and land to bring forth) every kind (or all kinds, or according to their kinds, or after their kind) of animal (and plant, and bird, and fish).
Since God created everything anyway, there is no contradiction. Even supposing that it is a requirement that animals reproduce only their own kind, that is still not a conflict with evolution: contrary to oft-repeated claims, evolution never expects a rat to give birth to any other species. Every creature in the history of life has reproduced the same kind of animal as its parents (assuming it reproduced at all) because the changes from generation to generation are so minor.
But reading creationist commentaries on Genesis, they really put much more into the text than it says. They proclaim that it means all this other stuff that it simply doesn’t say, about species having inviolable boundaries between kinds, which simply can’t be pointed to in the real world.
I appreciate your response, even though I’m sure you have an enormous number of replies to get to on these forums! Discussing this kind of stuff is fascinating, and I’m always learning more as I go!
