Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - What Life was Like In Illinois

Tuesday, 22 July 2025

Refuting Creationism - What Life was Like In Illinois - 300 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Concretions

Recreating Mazon Creek’s 300-million-year-old ecosystem

A major difference between science and religion can be summarised as follows: science embraces reasonable uncertainty, while religion often promotes unreasonable certainty.

In practice, this means science always allows room for doubt—however small—and continually re-examines and reassesses evidence to determine whether a change of understanding is justified. Religion, by contrast, typically seeks reasons not to change its views, no matter how tenuous those reasons may be or how far removed from observable reality.

This essential feature of the scientific method is frequently misrepresented by creationists, who portray science as unreliable precisely because it revises its conclusions in light of new evidence. They contrast this with the supposed ‘eternal truths’ of the Bible, arguing that science books need constant revision while scripture remains unchanging.

One of those supposed eternal truths—about which creationists are not permitted to change their minds—is that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that all living things were created ex nihilo in their current forms, with no evolutionary ancestry or shared origins. Science, on the other hand, can re-evaluate the evidence from a 300-million-year-old fossil bed in Illinois and conclude that the original interpretation underestimated the complexity of the ancient ecosystem that once existed there.

A prime example of such a scientific reassessment has recently been published—open access—in the journal Paleobiology. The study was conducted by a team of palaeontologists from the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, in collaboration with Gordon Baird of the Department of Geology & Environmental Sciences at the State University of New York (SUNY), Fredonia.

The work is based on a comprehensive reassessment of the rich fossil deposits from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois, which, during the Carboniferous Period (~300 million years ago), was part of a vast area of tropical swamps, deltas, and shallow seas. These habitats were shaped by rising sea levels that inundated earlier coal-forming wetlands.

The Mazon Creek fossil bed and its geology. The Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois are among the most significant fossil Lagerstätten (sites of exceptional preservation) in the world. They offer a remarkable window into the ecosystems of the Carboniferous Period, approximately 307 to 309 million years ago. These deposits are globally renowned for preserving not only hard parts like shells and bones but also soft tissues of animals and plants—something exceptionally rare in the fossil record.

Location and Geological Setting

Mazon Creek is located primarily in Grundy, Will, Kankakee, and Livingston counties in northeastern Illinois, near the town of Coal City. The fossils are found within ironstone concretions (nodules) in the Francis Creek Shale, part of the Carbondale Formation, which is itself part of the larger Pennsylvanian subsystem of the Carboniferous.

The area was once a tropical coastal delta, comprising swamps, estuaries, rivers, and shallow seas near the equator. It lay on the western edge of the Pangaean supercontinent, in what was then a lush, equatorial rainforest ecosystem.

Formation and Fossilisation

The Francis Creek Shale was deposited as fine silts and clays, likely during flooding events or rapid burial in a deltaic environment. The key to Mazon Creek's exceptional preservation lies in:

Rapid burial of organisms in sediment, often shortly after death.
Formation of iron carbonate (siderite) concretions, which grew around organic remains before they decomposed, preserving them in exquisite detail.
Anoxic (oxygen-poor) conditions, which slowed decay and inhibited scavenging.

These conditions preserved both marine and terrestrial organisms, giving a rich and diverse glimpse into the past.

Fossil Diversity

Mazon Creek is famous for its extraordinary biodiversity and includes fossils from both the marine Essex Fauna and the non-marine Braidwood Fauna and Flora.

Essex Fauna (marine):

Tullimonstrum gregarium (the "Tully Monster"): the state fossil of Illinois, enigmatic and soft-bodied.
Polychaete worms
Horseshoe crabs
Cephalopods
Cnidarians (e.g. jellyfish-like animals)
Early vertebrates, including primitive fish

Braidwood Fauna (non-marine/terrestrial and freshwater):

Insects (e.g. giant cockroaches, early mayflies)
Millipedes and arachnids
Amphibians (e.g. early tetrapods)
Freshwater fish

Flora:

Lycopods (e.g. Lepidodendron)
Ferns and seed ferns (e.g. Pecopteris, Neuropteris)
Horsetails (e.g. Calamites)
Cordaites (ancient seed-bearing trees)

The plant fossils are especially abundant and well-preserved, giving insight into Carboniferous coal-swamp vegetation and environments.

Scientific Importance

Exceptional preservation of soft tissues provides rare insight into the anatomy of extinct organisms.
Paleoecology: Offers a snapshot of entire ecosystems, including predator-prey relationships and environmental interactions.
Taphonomy: The site helps researchers understand fossilisation processes in deltaic and lagoonal settings.
Evolutionary biology: Several fossils represent transitional forms or evolutionary experiments of the Carboniferous, especially among arthropods and early vertebrates.
Climate and habitat reconstruction: Mazon Creek helps reconstruct the palaeoclimate and sedimentary environment of equatorial Carboniferous forests and deltas.

Recent Developments
A 2025 study, referenced in this blog post, re-evaluated the Essex and Braidwood assemblages, suggesting more complex taphonomic pathways and environmental variation than previously understood. These findings imply that:

The boundary between marine and terrestrial environments may have been more fluid and dynamic.
Fossil preservation was influenced by microenvironments across a deltaic-estuarine system.
The ecosystem complexity of Carboniferous Illinois was underestimated in previous models.

Public Access and Collecting

Historically, Mazon Creek fossils were often collected as by-products of coal mining, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, some areas remain open to public fossil collecting, especially in places like the Braceville spoil piles and Pit 11, under state regulation.

Many specimens are held in museums such as:

Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
Illinois State Museum
Smithsonian Institution

Summary

Age: ~307–309 million years (Carboniferous, Pennsylvanian)
Location: Northeastern Illinois, USA
Depositional environment: Tropical deltaic-swamp system
Fossil preservation : Siderite concretions in shale
Key fossils: Tully Monster, early amphibians, insects, plants
Scientific value: Insights into Carboniferous ecosystems, soft-tissue preservation, evolution

A lay summary of the study has been published in a University of Missouri news release.

Recreating Mazon Creek’s 300-million-year-old ecosystem
A new study from the University of Missouri sheds light on how exceptional fossil preservation at Mazon Creek captured the diversity of life across land, delta and sea.
More than 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, much of northern Illinois outside Chicago — including what is now the Mazon Creek (“muh-ZAHN”) fossil site — was alive with ancient creatures thriving in lush, tropical swamps, river deltas and shallow seas.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science are collaborating with geologist Gordon Baird to reanalyze his massive fossil collection from Mazon Creek — currently housed at the Field Museum in Chicago — which includes 300,000 siderite concretions from around 350 different localities.

The Mazon Creek fossil beds are renowned for their exceptional preservation of both plants and animals, made possible by their unique geological setting. The fossils are encased in siderite — an iron carbonate mineral — forming abundant concretions that have become a treasure trove for scientists and avocational fossil hunters alike.

Thanks to decades of research at Mazon Creek, including foundational fieldwork by Baird and colleagues in the late 1970s, we now have an extraordinary view of life along that ancient coast.

Concretions

A snapshot of ancient life

Baird’s original work at the Mazon Creek fossil site helped distinguish two major faunal assemblages, or groups of animal remains. These assemblages helped scientists understand the ancient environments where the fossils originated. They were a marine assemblage comprised of life in offshore coastal waters, and a mixed assemblage from a river delta along the shoreline, where freshwater organisms and washed-in terrestrial plants and animals were preserved together.

Now, Mizzou’s team has confirmed a slightly more nuanced view of Baird’s original findings, using modern data analysis techniques coupled with advanced imaging at Mizzou’s X-ray Microanalysis Core.

We found three readily identifiable paleoenvironments, including the unique characteristics of a benthic marine assemblage representing a transitional habitat between the nearshore and offshore zones. These ancient environments were each dominated by specific groups of animals, for example freshwater animals nearest to shore, jellyfish and sea anemones further offshore, and marine clams and worms in the transitional zone.

different environments affected how quickly and deeply organisms were buried, and in what specific geochemical conditions fossilization may have started. That, in turn, shaped where certain microbes lived and helped form the minerals that make up the concretions surrounding these fossils today.

Professor James Schiffbauer, first author
Marie M. and Harry L. Smith Endowed Professor of Geological Sciences
Department of Geological Sciences
University of Missouri
Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A.

The fossils formed during a phase of sea-level rise and flooding of what used to be large coal swamps.

Next steps

In current and future research, Schiffbauer and Baird are using this information to create a sedimentological model to show how the Mazon Creek ecosystem connects to the Colchester coal layers below — where coal mining led to the fossil site’s original discovery.

Given that multiple episodes of rapid coastal drowning events occurred in the U.S. midcontinent during the Carboniferous Period, refinement of information from the Mazon Creek locality will lead to a deeper understanding of similar deposits in other coal basins.

Professor Gordon C. Baird, co-corresponding author
Department of Geology & Environmental Sciences
SUNY Fredonia
Fredonia, New York, U.S.A.

Mizzou’s new collaborative analysis with Baird, colleagues from the private sector and the University of Toronto is the most comprehensive and data-driven picture of what Mazon Creek’s ancient ecosystem looked like long ago. This knowledge contributes significantly to our understanding of the Carboniferous Period’s biodiversity and paleoecology.

It offers a real snapshot of the incredible diversity present in the late Carboniferous Period and allows for inferences about the complexity of food chains and how this ecosystem functioned. Now, we have an unparalleled and statistically supported look at the interconnected terrestrial, estuarine and marine life of the Carboniferous Period.

Professor James Schiffbauer.

Other co-authors are John Warren Huntley and Tara Selly at Mizzou; Charles Chabica at Northeastern Illinois University; Marc Laflamme at University of Toronto Mississauga; and A. Drew Muscente at Princeton Consultants, Inc.

Publication:

Schiffbauer, James; Baird, Gordon C.; Huntley, John Warren; Selly, Tara; Shabica, Charles W.; Laflamme, Marc; Muscente, A. Drew
283,821 concretions, how do you measure the Mazon Creek? Assessing the paleoenvironmental and taphonomic nature of the Braidwood and Essex assemblages.
Paleobiology (2025) p. 1-19, DOI: 10.1017/pab.2025.10045

Abstract
The Mazon Creek Lagerstätte (Moscovian Stage, late Carboniferous Period; Illinois, USA) captures a diverse view of ecosystems in delta-influenced coastal settings through exceptional preservation of soft tissues in siderite concretions. The generally accepted paradigm of the Mazon Creek biota has been that of an inferred paleoenvironmental divide between what have been termed the Braidwood and Essex assemblages, wherein the former represents a freshwater ecosystem with terrestrial input and the latter a marine-influenced prodelta setting with abundant cnidarians, bivalves, worm phyla, and diverse arthropods. Here, we revisit the paleoecology of the Mazon Creek biota by analyzing data from nearly 300,000 concretions from more than 270 locations with complementary multivariate ordinations. Our results show the Braidwood assemblage as a legitimate shoreward community and provide evidence for further subdivision of the Essex assemblage into two distinct subassemblages, termed here the Will-Essex and Kankakee-Essex. The Will-Essex represents a benthos dominated by clams and trace fossils along the transition between nearshore and offshore deposits. The Kankakee-Essex is dominated by cnidarians, presenting an ecosystem approaching the geographic margin of this taphonomic window. These new insights also allow a refined taphonomic model, wherein recalcitrant tissues of Braidwood organisms were subject to rapid burial rates, while organisms of the Essex assemblage typically had more labile tissues and were subject to slower burial rates. Consequently, we hypothesize that the Braidwood fossils should record more complete preservation than the Essex, which was exposed for longer periods of aerobic decomposition. This is supported by a higher proportion of non-fossiliferous concretions in the Essex than in the Braidwood.

Non-technical Summary
Recognized since the nineteenth century, the Mazon Creek (pronounced “muh-ZAHN”) fossil sites in northeastern Illinois have become some of the most well-known and well-collected exceptional fossil deposits in North America. Their popularity with avocational fossil hounds and research paleontologists alike grew substantially after the 1940s, when strip-mining practices began uncovering the Colchester Coal, leaving abundant fossil-bearing siderite concretions in their spoil piles. And they became even more popular with discoveries of enigmatic icons of evolution like the Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium Richardson, 1966). The work by Gordon Baird and colleagues in the 1980s provided an extensive understanding of these sites, their preservation, and their paleoecology—which they suggested to represent deposition along a muddy Carboniferous-aged coastline, capturing a distinct delta-to-offshore transition in biotic assemblage composition. Sites containing the more terrestrially influenced Braidwood assemblage hosted abundant plants, washed-out terrestrial arthropods, and freshwater organisms, while the Essex assemblage was characterized by marine bivalves, abundant Essexella cnidarians, and other unequivocally marine taxa. While the distinctness of these two assemblages was recently challenged, we provide here an assessment of nearly 300,000 concretions and illustrate that there are instead three discrete biotic assemblages—the nearshore Braidwood assemblage and two marine Essex assemblages represented by more abundant benthic taxa–like worms and bivalves versus cnidarian-dominated localities—an idea that Baird and colleagues had postulated in an early paleoecological summary four decades ago.

Introduction
The Mazon Creek Lagerstätte (~310 Ma; Moscovian Stage, late Carboniferous Period; pronounced “muh-ZAHN”; Brandt 2025) is arguably one of the most well-known American fossil deposits, yielding nearly 800 species of crustaceans, insects, cnidarians, plants, and other organisms (Baird 1979; Baird et al. 1985a; Wittry 2012, 2020; Clements et al. 2019). With fossils hosted within siderite (FeCO₃) concretions of the Francis Creek Shale, the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte is not a singular locality, but instead occurs in more than 270 known localities spanning numerous counties of northeastern Illinois, representing an ancient equatorial delta–sourced clastic wedge (Baird et al. 1986; Baird 1997). Various taxa, such as the putative hydroid Drevotella; diverse phyllodocid polychaetes, including Homaphrodite, Rutellifrons, and Esconites; and of course the enigmatic, charismatic, and recently intensely debated “Tully Monster,” Tullimonstrum gregarium Richardson, 1966 (e.g., Clements et al. 2016; McCoy et al. 2016.1; Sallan et al. 2017; Rogers et al. 2019.1; McCoy et al. 2020.1; Wiemann and Briggs 2022; Mikami et al. 2023), are unique and only found in the Francis Creek Shale in the states of Illinois and Missouri (Briggs and Gall 1990). Other broadly contemporaneous fossiliferous deposits, such as the Hamilton Quarry in Kansas and the Kinney Brick Company Quarry in New Mexico, were also deposited in estuarine to prodeltaic environments of the latest Carboniferous (~300 Ma; Feldman et al. 1993), but their fossils are not hosted in siderite concretions. While these others may be similar in age and depositional paleoenvironment, the Mazon Creek stands out as the most diverse, species-rich, and both heavily collected and studied, with new reports continuing to be published (e.g., Dvořák et al. 2023.1; Selden and Dunlop 2024) well after the former mining operations have been closed or flooded. In short, the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte has offered no shortage of paleontological information.

The Mazon Creek fossils have been recognized since the nineteenth century (Nitecki 1979.1), but their plenitude and diversity did not become fully apparent until strip mining of the area to expose the Colchester Coal began in the 1940s. The Francis Creek Shale hosts the fossil-bearing siderite concretions and was removed as Colchester Coal overburden during the mining process, leaving numerous localized shaft mine spoil piles and large strip mine areas of similar dumped overburden rich in concretions to become prime targets for fossil hunting by both avocational and professional paleontologists. The work by Baird and colleagues in the mid-1970s through mid-1980s (1985a, 1985.1b, 1986) to characterize this deposit was foundational for our understanding of the Lagerstätte and set the stage for future paleontological work to build upon. Baird et al. (1985a, 1985.1b) argued that the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte was exceptional not only for its concretionary style of preservation and broad range of late Carboniferous taxa but also because two distinct biotic assemblages could be observed, varying by location of collection.

In terms of their taphonomy, high sedimentation rates and rapid burial were key components leading to the exceptional preservation of the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte, evidenced by features such as tidal laminations (Kuecher et al. 1990.1; Feldman et al. 1993; Archer and Feldman 1994; Baird 1997), escape burrows (Baird et al. 1986; Baird, 1997), and apparent death by smothering (Baird et al. 1986; 1997). Lamination thicknesses in the Francis Creek Shale have been interpreted to suggest a sedimentation rate of up to a maximum of 1 m/year, which was likely influenced by the creation of accommodation space due to compression of the peat layer in the underlying Colchester Coal (Feldman et al. 1993). This rate of burial, combined with the exhaustion of oxygen due to high influxes of organic matter, presumably created low-oxygen to anoxic environments inhospitable to scavengers (Baird et al. 1986; Clements et al. 2019; see also Bailey 2011). Under these conditions, anaerobic microbial decomposers and autolytic processes would have taken over the degradation of organics. While anaerobic decomposition does not necessarily slow the degradation of soft tissues (Allison 1988), these metabolic processes are often invoked as providing key building blocks for the precipitation of minerals that encase, replace, or replicate organisms and their tissues, leading to their preservation as fossils (Woodland and Stenstrom 1979.2; Baird et al. 1986; Schiffbauer et al. 2014; Cotroneo et al. 2016.2; Locatelli et al. 2016.3; Muscente et al. 2017.1; Clements et al. 2019).

The two distinct paleoecological assemblages—originally defined as the Braidwood- and Essex-types and named for nearby towns (Johnson and Richardson 1966.1)—correspond to a regional paleoenvironmental shift from nonmarine to fully marine biomes following a delta-plain to prodelta transect from the modern-day northeast to the south and west. The inferred habitats of the preserved taxa and the community structures of each individual sampling locality (Shabica 1970, 1979.3; Richardson and Johnson 1971) were thus interpreted to record deposition and paleoecology ranging from estuarine to marine settings. In the first collection of Mazon research works, following the Symposium on Mazon Creek Fossils (held at the North-Central sectional meeting of the Geological Society of America, 1978), Baird (1979) described the northeastern Braidwood assemblage as representing fresh- to brackish-water taxa that included significant components of terrestrial and freshwater animals and plants—such as syncarid shrimp; the xiphosuran Euproops; lower haline-tolerant bivalves; rare terrestrial arthropods, including insects, spiders, and millipedes; and finally, tree ferns, lycopods, and horsetails—presumed to have washed in from the nearby river drainages. Conversely, what was defined as the Essex assemblage included a variety of soft-bodied marine invertebrates—commonly represented by Essexella, originally interpreted as jellyfish medusae but more recently “flipped” as sessile anemones (Plotnick et al. 2023.2) and other squishy taxa like worms, holothurians, and the infamous Tully Monster, but also including abundant bivalves and crustaceans and with minimal plants—that comprised a decidedly more marine-influenced paleocommunity. Furthermore, Baird and colleagues (1985a) had postulated that there was an ecological transition captured within the localities they defined as Essex-type, although this was not tested in any rigorous manner. They comment that the northern end of Essex-type assemblages had observably higher prevalences of benthic animals, such as Mazonomya bivalves (formerly misidentified as Edmondia; Bailey 2011), polychaetes, and burrows, whereas southern Essex-type localities showed more abundant pelagic organisms. Following their initial suppositions and to quantitatively examine their intuition, we added informal qualifiers to the Essex-type deposits in our data compilation. Retrospectively named for the Illinois counties in which they are most common, these qualifiers were based on the observations of: [Will-Essex] occurrences of the marine clam Mazonomya, trace fossils, holothurians, and worms, versus [Kankakee-Essex] communities dominated by Essexella or other cnidarians, formerly and informally referred to as “blobs” (e.g., Baird et al. 1985a), and the absence or near absence of benthos and plants.

While the extensive work of Baird and colleagues in the mid-1980s stood for several decades as the primary paleoecological interpretation of the Lagerstätte, a recent review by Clements et al. (2019) called into question the validity of past models of deposition and the characteristic marine versus nonmarine assemblages. Specifically, Clements et al. (2019) instead propose that the Mazon Creek deposits represent marine-brackish bay coast sedimentation (e.g., Schopf 1979.4). A central tenet of the Clements et al. (2019) argument is that the terrestrial and freshwater components of the Braidwood assemblage were merely taxa that washed into the bay and that there was no truly distinct freshwater ecosystem preserved in the Mazon Creek system. Clements et al. (2019) argue three primary points: (1) the freshwater/marine divide was largely based on plant fossils, which become rarer and less diverse basinward; (2) stenohaline organisms have also been found among the Braidwood fauna; and (3) contemporaneous marine fossils of the late Carboniferous are only found distally, beyond where the Francis Creek Shale pinches out, thus suggesting that the entire system was likely a distinct, concretionary taphonomic window and a brackish marine environment deposited in a shallow, nonturbulent bay setting. This argument was emphasized with the statement that there is no discernible geographic demarcation between the distribution of freshwater and marine organisms.

Here, using the most comprehensive and systematically sampled Mazon fossil suite known—comprising outcomes from nearly 300,000 individual siderite concretions across the region—we employ multivariate statistical methods to explore the veracity of the Braidwood and Essex biotic assemblages detailed in the Baird et al. (1985a, 1985.1b) seminal works, including further exploration of the Will- and Kankaee-Essex subassemblages described earlier. In addition, we integrate new preservational details revealed by X-ray tomographic microscopy of concretions with our paleoecological investigation to generate a cohesive view of the paleoenvironment and taphonomy of the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte.

Schiffbauer, James; Baird, Gordon C.; Huntley, John Warren; Selly, Tara; Shabica, Charles W.; Laflamme, Marc; Muscente, A. Drew
283,821 concretions, how do you measure the Mazon Creek? Assessing the paleoenvironmental and taphonomic nature of the Braidwood and Essex assemblages.
Paleobiology (2025) p. 1-19, DOI: 10.1017/pab.2025.10045

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Cambridge University Press. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

How the Mazon Creek Study Refutes Creationism

This paper highlights everything that creationism cannot accommodate: deep time, evolutionary change, ecological complexity, and an empirical, self-correcting scientific method.

Evidence of Deep Time: The fossilised remains come from organisms that lived over 300 million years ago, as dated through stratigraphy and radiometric methods consistent across geological formations worldwide. This utterly contradicts the creationist claim that the Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old.
Ecological and Evolutionary Complexity: The Mazon Creek site preserves fully formed, diverse ecosystems with both marine and terrestrial organisms—arthropods, early vertebrates, ferns, seed plants, and more—showing a clear continuity with earlier and later life forms. This supports evolutionary theory, which predicts such complexity developing gradually over time, not all at once in a single 'week of creation'.
Fossilisation Conditions Incompatible with a Global Flood: The fossil preservation at Mazon Creek occurred in specific deltaic and coastal swamp environments, under low-oxygen conditions and over extended periods. The formation of siderite concretions around individual organisms takes place slowly and requires stable sedimentary conditions — entirely incompatible with the chaotic, turbulent conditions of a single global flood as described in Genesis.
Scientific Reassessment vs Dogmatic Certainty: The fact that scientists revisited the data, revised their understanding, and published their findings exemplifies the adaptive strength of science. In contrast, creationism holds dogmatically to predetermined conclusions, refusing to revise its views regardless of contradictory evidence.

In short, the Mazon Creek study not only affirms evolutionary science but also illustrates the kind of robust, evidence-based inquiry that is entirely absent from creationist thinking. It highlights the strength of a system willing to correct itself when new evidence emerges—a process creationism fundamentally rejects.

As a service to creationists who will need to find a way to cope with this information without changing their minds and so they can try to prevent others from leaving the cult, the following is a selection of lies, evidence-free assertions and misrepresentations of the science they can try to get away with:

“It’s all just interpretation”: They may claim that the dating and conclusions are based on assumptions, and that a different "worldview" (e.g., biblical literalism) leads to different interpretations.
“Post-Flood deposition”: Some may argue that the Mazon Creek fossils were deposited during the receding phase of Noah’s Flood, citing the mixed marine and terrestrial organisms as "evidence" for catastrophic burial. This ignores the actual sedimentology and geochemistry of the site.
“Rapid fossilisation is possible”: They often point out that fossilisation can occur quickly under certain conditions, ignoring the geological context and vast timescales required for the formation of the surrounding rock layers and concretions.
“Satan planted the fossils” or “God made them to test our faith”: These are fallback positions that, while theologically creative, remove themselves from any rational or falsifiable discussion, and thus cannot be taken as scientific arguments.