About 650 people filled the South Ballroom and Great Hall of the Memorial Union Monday night for a four-hour debate between a creationist and an evolutionist.

Audience members listened to the supporting and refuting remarks between Duane Gish, vice president for creation research at Cornell University, and John Patterson, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Iowa State.

Patterson argued in the opening presentation that science is “atheistic.”

“There is no such thing as supernatural,” he said. “There is no God.”

Patterson said creationists rely on a fatalistic circular tautology. He likened the creationist arguments to a situation in which police find a murder weapon in a car. The owner of the car tells police someone else put it there. When they ask for the evidence, the owner says it’s there because that person put it there but supply no hard and fast evidence.

“You are flatly incompetent in science if you’re a creationist,” he said. “Creationism is but a bald assertion for which there is no valid evidence.”

Gish argued that the theory of evolution is no more “testable” than the theory of creation because the creation of the world can never be repeated. Since neither theory can reproduce the event, both resort to explaining past events through theory and finding evidence to support them.

“It’s not about theology or the age of the Earth,” he said. “The basic issue is how the universe and living things come into existence.”

Patterson said “genuine explanations” must serve to do several things: be more understandable and less bewildering; more predictable and less capricious; more controllable and less fatalistic; and more subject to natural laws. He further argued that by invoking God, miracles and the like, creationists invoke exactly the opposite results.

“All supernatural explanations are counterfeit,” he said. “They’re not just worthless, but they’re worse than none at all.”

Patterson said answers to questions about DNA commonalities, homology in the species and among fossils and biogeographical relations are not sufficiently explained by creationists because their only explanatory argument is, “It so pleased God.”

Gish said biologists cannot explain from an evolutionary standpoint the genetic variability that would have led to a process such as the metamorphic changes of a butterfly from its chrysalis state.

He said there are gaps in fossil records, which fail to show a transition from fish to invertebrates. He said invertebrates “abruptly appear in the fossil record.”

In Gish’s other main argument, he said the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that an isolated system can only become less ordered, less organized and less complex, and it can never go in the reverse direction.

“How could the natural laws destroying the universe create it?” he asked.

Gish said he finds the evolutionists’ inability to explain the origin of everything problematic.

“Did the ‘Cosmic Chicken’ lay the egg?” he asked. Gish further quipped, “Hydrogen: A tasteless, odorless gas, which, given enough time, becomes human.”

Patterson concluded his presentation by arguing that individuals are left with two options. They can adhere to the theistic, supernatural miraculous and live in bewilderment, relying on no technological power but on prayer, or they can accept atheistic, naturalistic mechanisms which provide better understanding, better prediction and control. The latter, he said, frees explanations from all “counterfeiter and vacuous circularity that plagues” the former.

“Reject this [creationism theology] and your understanding increases, and your standard of living increases,” he said.

In the end, Patterson and Gish agreed both evolution and creationism should be taught simultaneously in the public schools.

Gish said he felt both should be taught because he doesn’t want to impose his beliefs on others.

Patterson said he wants both taught to expose phony science.