Assertion 4.11: Mutations are rarely beneficial, so they cannot drive evolution. Would you want your house built by a carpenter who made 99 bad houses for every good one?
Analysis:
This kind of criticism simply rests on a bad analogy, something like saying that since you stand little chance of winning the lottery with one ticket, therefore you stand little chance of winning the lottery with 10 million tickets. Here is a better analogy for the way mutation and natural selection work to improve things:
Suppose your house is able to reproduce itself at no cost to you. You allow it to reproduce until you have 100 new houses. Then you ask the carpenter to work on each of the houses, trying to improve them. If the creationist is right, the carpenter will damage 99 of the houses, but will improve one of them. So you throw away the 99 damaged ones, and keep the improved one. That one then reproduces itself 100 times. The carpenter goes to work on the 100 copies of the improved house. He damages 99 of them, but improves one of them further. One can easily see that if the reproduction is fast enough, you will soon end up with a mansion despite the general incompetence of the carpenter.
The problem with the creationists' analogy is that it implicitly assumes only a single chance for mutation to produce a beneficial result. Naturally, if God offers to mutate your DNA, you should refuse, because you are liable to end up worse. However, if God mutates the DNA of every person on earth, someone is bound to end up better than he or she was before. It probably will not be you, but evolution does not require everyone to become improved; even a single improvement will spread as organisms reproduce and compete with one another.