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Originally Posted by AcGold

Is it possible to be a creationist and an evolutionist?

Depends entirely on what one means by those words. There's enough variation that it's better to be more specific since creationist could mean a deist who thinks the universe was put in motion by a god, or a young earth creationist who believes the universe and all extant species were created in a literal six day period thousands of years ago.

Evolution usually refers to biological evolution in that context but I have seen people arguing against evolution use the word to refer to the Big Bang and solar system formation and abiogenesis and everything else.

But in general lots are people are both to one degree or another.

http://biologos.org/

Originally Posted by AcGold

I see merits in both sides, but also huge flaws in both sides.

Merits and flaws can easily be a result of misconceptions and misunderstandings, of the cognitive biases I mentioned above and deliberate misinformation. So discussion is one way to dig through those and come to a better understanding, often if that happens people find they don't disagree as much as they had thought. I very often find the flaws people see in the "science side" (and I hate framing the conversation that way) are flaws in a misconception, not a flaw in what science is actually trying to say. Like Devils'Advocate's example of a common "flaw" some people see with evolution that isn't a flaw at all, it's just a complete lack of understanding.

Ultimately I think creationism has a basic flaw in that it is based on a way of knowing that cannot by definition be demonstrated to be true, and those that believe it either have to completely ignore everything we discover, or keep redefining their creationism as we understand more and more (depending on their definition of creationism).

The only "flaw" I see with the other side is that there's still things where the answer is "I don't know". Which isn't a flaw at all.

Originally Posted by AcGold

A lot of the time I just think it's people arguing to be right and not arguing to find out the truth, I mean isn't that the premise of a debate, you are supposed to pick a side.

In terms of a debate, sure it's a contrived scenario that has two sides presenting and arguing their view. At best it's interesting, but a debate should never be viewed as a method to discover truth. They're arguing to try and convince others (or just for the sake of arguing I guess).

In terms of a forum discussion, again yeah sometimes it's just arguing for the sake of arguing, but again always it's not a good way to discover truth (though it is much better than a debate)

Originally Posted by AcGold

I think once you do that you pretty much eliminate critical thinking from the situation.

For a debate yeah, the goal of a debate is to convince, not to discover truth. Rhetorical prowess alone can win debates, and the format favors superficial thinking and untruth. The universe can be complicated and it's easy to make a claim in a debate that would take an hour to explain why the claim is wrong. So gish galloping from one false claim to the next can easily look like winning.

Forum discussions have the potential to be different.