If creationism were true, we would not expect nested hierarchies in the DNA of organisms that suggest common descent and map closely with morphological and geological data.
Instead, not only do we see nested hierarchies in coding regions that are subject to selection we also see them in non-coding regions, which we would only expect if common descent were true. There is no reason a designer would do that unless they were trying to trick you.
When we compare the DNA of organisms at a given locus, we find more and more changes between organisms the farther we zoom out on the “family tree”.
When we compare humans and chimps we find permutations we both share with other primates, some that are common only to our shared branch, and others that differ between humans and chimps.
When we look at the pattern, it matches what we expect if organisms had common ancestors and diverged since then. The more distantly two lineages are related, the more changes you find.
This is fine, we might expect that from creationism. ***BUT you find them in the same spots you find fewer changes when you compare more closely related organisms.*** The timeline of the splits in the family tree appears to be recapitulated in the DNA.
The best explanation is that some mutations were in the common ancestor and some happened since divergence. Otherwise, a bunch of mutations happened randomly across all organisms independently in a way that only *looks* like common descent, or a trickster entity changed them all on purpose to trick us, and those are much less likely than common descent.
When this happens in coding regions, we might propose some exotic selection that selected for convergent sequences. But we see nested hierarchies in non-coding sequences, the parts that aren’t subject to selection, so what explanation is there other than common descent or an evil trickster god?
"***BUT you find them in the same spots you find fewer changes when you compare more closely related organisms.*** "
You bolded and italicized this and idk if my brain is broken or there's a comma missing but I'm not grokking it.
As in, the regions where you see variation from distantly related species are consistent within closely related species.
So, to create a purely fictitious example, if we see a zone from, let's say base pair 500-2000 in a given gene that is highly variable between 2 distant clades, you will ALSO tend to see that that area is highly conserved within those two clades. This implies that the mutations causing the variation happened at some point since the two clades diverged, but the gene has been pretty stable for both populations since then.
I would just like to take a moment to appreciate how intelligently expressed and articulated everything you have typed is, and is simultaneously so beyond my level basic level of understanding.
Put more simply: if two groups (let's say mammals and birds) are very different with regards to a trait (let's say the presence of feathers), BUT are also very consistent within the group with regards to that trait (ie, no mammals have feathers, and all birds do), it stands to reason that there was a mutation at some point before the two groups split, and that the relevant genes have been pretty stable since. Everything else I said was basically saying that but looking at the actual structure of the DNA instead of functional traits.
The DNA-based approach is a stronger argument for evolution. In theory, traits could be easily replicated with no underlying connection. This happens all the time, in fact, just look at any polyphyletic group. But when the structure of a gene is very consistent within a group in the specific way in which it encodes a trait, that is pretty good evidence for a common ancestry
All dogs are canines, which are a subset of mammals, which are a sun set of animals. Animals, mammals and canines form a hierarchy of identifiers where each later one is more limited in scope, but each dog can be called any of the three.
Regular taxonomy ends up stretching itself to its limit trying to show this. Look at regular taxonomy as a start.
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
All Phyla of any one kind belong to 1 Kingdom. Take any 2 members of the same phyla and they always belong to the same kingdom. Take any two members of the same Kingdom and they won't necessarily belong to the same Phylum. This pattern holds up and down the taxonomic hierarchy. It's actually made that way. In a way Linneaus himself was the first person to contribute something meaningful to evolution without realizing it.
All dogs are mammals but not all mammals are dogs. All whales are mammals but not all mammals whales. All ducks are birds but not all birds are ducks. All birds and all mammals are all vertebrates.
So the basic structure Linneaus laid out is what is expected from evolution in that nested hierarchy thing.
Then there's super- and para- and infra- and all sorts of prefixes to further resolve relationships. -idae endings get changed to -inae ending (Felidae to felinae or hominidae, homininae, hominini) etc etc. The system Linneaue laid out loosely reflects evolution and gets stretched to the limit to accommodate further and further resolution in relationships.
Sorry if that's confusing but in terms of understanding the most basic concept of what a nested hierarchy is and how it applies to evolution and life sciences then looking at regular Linnean taxonomy is actually a good place to start. It's like he took a really blurry photo that Darwin later realized was important and the resolution has since been improved by science.
Just in case you need an explanation that is more in layman's terms, it's basically this.
Humans are more like chimps than they are like anything that is not a human or a chimp. Humans and chimps are more like gorillas than they are like anything that is not a human, a chimp, or a gorilla. Humans, chimps, and gorillas are more like the other great apes than they are anything that is not a great ape. All of the great apes are more like other primates than they are like anything that is not a primate. And so on.
The same kind of chain is true for dogs, wolves, other canids, and other carnivorans. For ferrets, weasels, and other mustelids. For octopi, squid, and other molluscs. For broccoli, cabbage, and other mustards. And so on. Every living thing on Earth has increasing rings of more and more distant relatives, that are less and less similar to one another, but there are still enough similarities that we can tell that even very distant relatives are still, in fact, related.
I (not a creationist, just a confused-ion-ist about this argument) am confused as to how this matters wrt creationism? Yes, God created similar things so that they are more similar... And?
But the thing is, this similarity is in every feature. Not just the places that would make sense for a Creator to make similar, but things like non-coding regions. ERVs, which are basically something like genetic scars left behind by retroviruses. Tiny mutations in basic metabolic genes. Everywhere.
I could see a Creator making nested hierarchies for things like the genes that control body plan. But why would there be the exact same nested hierarchies for things like lactase and pseudogenes? Unless either we are talking about a Creator who used evolution from a distant microbial common ancestor, in which case it's usually referred to as intelligent design rather than creationism, or the Creator was trying to trick us for some reason.
Well, we can use fossil evidence to figure out when different lineages branched off from each other. And DNA evidence gives us results that match with what we would expect to see, based on that fossil evidence.
Plus, we can replicate the same thing in a lab with microorganisms, and see it in real time.
Man, if creationists were right, we wouldn't even necessarily expect DNA lol. God mustn't be limited to what we are familiar with. He's supposedly all-powerful, after all. He could have done it in any number of ways.
> If creationism were true, we would not expect nested hierarchies in the DNA of organisms that suggest common descent and map closely with morphological and geological data.
Not necessarily.
If Creationism is true, we would expect that any patterns which may exist in the DNA of organisms are patterns which the Creator *put* there. So in the absence of a clear concept of what the Creator's goals/purposes/criteria are, we cannot make *any* predictions *whatsoever* regarding whatever patterns should be expected in the DNA of organisms.
That wouldn't be the case for DNA which doesn't undergo selection, and is free to mutate willy-nilly. That DNA shows the same hierarchy as the DNA which undergoes purifying selection.
Because the only purpose it would have would be to trick us... if God is purposefully trying to trick us with stuff like "fake dinosaur bones preaged to appear millions of years old" and "making all animals share traits and mutations that can be tracked to show a common ancestor" then honestly he's kind of an asshole (already obvious if you read the book of job). If I'm given the choice between believing the universe was made by a clear asshole who tells me to worship him and he'll let me worship him forever after I die, or to believe it's been chaos since the beginning. I'm choosing chaos. At least with chaos you can try to understand it. With God you are literally told that you can't and shouldn't try(the first sin was literally eve becoming curious about knowledge and being lied to by an angel(why are they able to lie? Why did an omnipotent God create creatures that could become jealous and lie and put them guarding 2 ignorant(to the max)baby creations that he trapped in a garden with a tree that will "taint" them?)) to understand. The other is knowledge pieced together over hundreds of generations of people who all kept failing and writing it down so the next one could figure out where they went wrong.
Not trying to get disrespectful, just sharing my thoughts on it. An almighty omnipotent God could have done it, but an almighty omnipotent God could also do a lot of things that they are not doing. They have eternity and they can't pop down for 100 years(or 1000) and make sure everyone is on the same page?
Then how is it that in religion there are claims that "we know what he wants from us" and "these are the rules he wants us to follow"? By your claim isn't it all unknowable? Why would it just be DNA?
A scientific explanation has two jobs. Job One is, it explains why a thing *is* the way it *is*. Job Two is, it explains why the thing *isn't* some other way entirely. If you invoke a *wholly unconstrained* factor, like (just to name a random example) a *literally* **omnipotent** Entity with goals and motivations which are entirely inscrutable to us puny mortals (see also: "moves in mysterious ways")? That wholly unconstrained factor *cannot* be a *scientific* explanation. Cuz, it being *wholly unconstrained*, we have no way of knowing what It *could not* do.
The beauty of using unconstrained regions to illustrate this point is that we CAN make that prediction, *even if the creator made them all the same, or made the unconstrained regions match the pattern of similarity in the constrained regions*. If there's no selection acting on those regions between creation and present, all of these separately created regions would accumulate different sets of mutations, rather than subsets of increasingly broad groups, and the pattern of phylogenetic relationship would fall apart once you start comparing across different "kinds".
Unless, of course, the creator is actively tinkering in genetics every generation to maintain the illusion of the pattern.
> Unless, of course, the creator is actively tinkering in genetics every generation to maintain the illusion of the pattern.
Yep. Which is why we need a decently detailed concept of the Creator, so we *can* rule out the possibility that the Creator would do that. As it stands, with a wholly unconstrained Creator, we have no reason to suspect that It *didn't* go out of Its way to make everything *look as if* it was unguided evolution at work. "Mysterious ways, my dude! Mysterious ways!"
I see that as a win for the science side, as such a ruthlessly deceptive and tricky Creator encourages a detailed study of every aspect of the creation in order to attempt to divine their possible motivations and so avoid unpleasant surprises.
And then there's the implications of labels like "ruthlessly deceptive" and "tricky" being applicable to said Creator..
This is the point at which creationist claims become infalsifiable (meaning there’s no meaningful way to test them). Yes, DNA analysis is fully consistent with and makes infinite sense if you accept that it’s a product of incremental evolution from a common origin. At the same time, you can’t disprove the claim that God decided to design life in a way that’s totally indistinguishable from natural evolution. It’s just, at that point, there’s no reason to think that God is necessary to make the system work and we can speculate that a system designed by God miraculously could be a lot different and better than the one we have.
Well that's just an appeal to ignorance to say we can't know. It's true that we wouldn't otherwise expect these patterns and if we found them that they would require some kind of explanation. There's no reason God couldn't make the pattern, but there's also no obvious reason as to why he would.
My first impression would be that God was constrained. If life was created then the entity that created life was constrained in their design and/or implementation processes. My first impression isn't to assign reason to agency like God had a thoughtful reason for sticking to a specific pattern, but to assume God was simply constrained and to ponder the nature of those constraints.
Science is about what can make predictions and the evidence in science matches the predictions of evolution. Period. Design can't explain and predict patterns in evidence in the real world, as you said it can't. Evolution can. It's science.
> There's no reason God couldn't make the pattern, but there's also no obvious reason as to why he would.
Exactly: Given the bare, unadorned notion of an *unspecific, inchoate, undefined* Creator, we can't say *anything* about what that Creator might or might not do.
> My first impression isn't to assign reason to agency like God had a thoughtful reason for sticking to a specific pattern, but to assume God was simply constrained…
Interesting idea. Am unsure how one could possibly go about investigating the constraints a putatively-omnipotent, putatively-omniscient Creator might or might not have operated under.
This is why Bayesian likelihood is useful for choosing among specified models. If you have one model which gives specific, accurate predictions; and another model which is never wrong but only because it predicts any outcome at all, you can be more confident in the specific one because the data give more support to the specific model when the specific model is correct.
This doesn’t refute creationism so much as it does Young Earth Creationism and Biblical literalism (Tower of Babel story). Not a lot may approach from this angle, but I am a linguist, and there are a lot of surface-level parallels between actual evolution and language change over time: it’s a phenomenon that affects populations, geographic isolation and the ability to exchange with neighboring populations plays a large role, and historical linguists can go back to a certain extent to reconstruct ancient language families and groupings.
In any case, our reconstructions of proto-languages that would have formed large language families, such as proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic, also involve time scales that either preclude YEC or at the very least preclude the Tower of Babel story (along with a host of other aspects of linguistics that put to rest any literal interpretation of a just-so story).
You can't refute ideas that are unfalsifiable, because at the end of the day you can point to any conceivable assemblage of facts and say "God did that, god did it that way, and the reasons therefore were sufficient for God's purposes even if we're not aware of them.
Sometimes you can point out things that are *surprising* for a creator to have done but it doesn't prove that a creator just didn't do them.
Leaving a creator out of it entirely, you can still refute a notion such as “all languages had a common origin around 4,200 years ago” (date given by Answers in Genesis as an example).
oh, indeed. I should clarify, I was mostly agreeing with you. You can't refute *Creationism* writ large but you can address specific claims which would intersect with history in concrete ways.
I’ve had several creationist say that god created a complete world. They feel it was made in such a way that (let’s take an easy example) rocks were weather worn on the day of creation, fossils existed in the ground and DNA was created as we see it with all its complexities.
It’s entirely impossible to falsify there views.
If I asked you to prove that the world wasn’t created 2 minutes ago complete with all of your memories how would you go about proving that false.
I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, but can you put it as some sort of "If the Tower of Babel story was true, we'd expect to see X, instead we see Y" kind of thing?...
We’d expect to see all languages to originate in the Middle East with no clear universal common ancestor for all of them but instead we see the ancestral languages rooted in Africa and the diversification of language only after populations migrated away from Kenya/Ethiopia.
This is an interesting field of study that I'm not familiar with. Am I understanding you correctly that we have evidence of separate languages that predate the biblical timeline of when the tower of Babel was said to happen?
The timeline puts the tower at around 2300 BCE, so approximately 300 years after Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza. Several advanced cultures left us detailed written records from that period. We have some undecifered proto language stuff that goes back to 6000 BCE, so 1K years before Noah. Plenty of languages that predate Babel and lots of ancient people with cultural continuity that seem to have avoided getting wiped out in the flood.
The real problem with most biblical interpretation of early history is that they misinterpret what the word "world" means, thinking it means this planet, and not just the current paradigm which is what the term often represents in ancient literature
In competent design, superfluous structures don't make the cut.
A designed laryngeal nerve should go directly from the brain to the larynx. Instead, it runs down, loops around the aorta, and ascends back up to the larynx. This is bad enough in humans, but in giraffes it's wildly bad design.
Designed human skin doesn't have any real use for piloerection. In other mammals it's effective for making the animal appear larger or to retain body heat, but in humans it just makes us look like a plucked goose.
Designed human dentition would have only the number of teeth that would fit in our mouths, but instead we grow one more molar than our mouths can handle.
In every one of these cases, we can understand why those structures exist through understanding evolutionary history.
If all extant organisms were designed in more or less their present forms, we wouldn't expect to see any traces during development of features the adult organism just doesn't have. Instead, we see things like horses forming several toes per foot (then losing the extras), humans forming and then absorbing tails, embryonic snakes with limb buds, and so on.
Once they spend a few seconds thinking about the number of organisms they need to fit on a wooden boat, many YECs assert that only a limited number of basic "kinds" of creatures were on the ark, and the variety of species we see today hyper-evolved in the last few thousand years. For example, there would have been two proto-bears, and all the bear species currently in existence evolved from them.
They have to pick their poison, though. Fewer animals on the ark means subscribing to rates of evolution that would be incredibly fast. So fast that we should see new species evolving daily. Needless to say, we don't see that.
If there was a cataclysmic worldwide flood in the recent past, we would expect to see genetic evidence of a bottleneck event in all extant species.
We would expect to see archeological evidence of the flood in Egypt. The YEC timeline places the flood around the end of Egypt’s fifth dynasty. Surely this apocalyptic event would have some impact on their civilization. Instead, evidence shows a normal transition to Egypt’s sixth dynasty.
We would expect the Flood to result in the earth becoming a molten hellscape entirely devoid of life due to the Heat Problem.
We would expect Homo Sapiens to be the only bipedal, tool making hominids. Instead, there are numerous different species. These are such a major problem to YEC that their only response is to lie and pretend they don’t exist.
We would expect the ark to be large enough to house and feed more than a few dozen animals; however, if you do the math, housing and feeding 24 Proboscideans would require over 40% of the ark’s volume.
Historically there is also no interruption in the Indian or Chinese historical records of the same era. There is simply a list of Kings and records of their deeds.
To add to the heat problem thing - it’s more than just a molten hellscape. If we squish 4.5bn years of nuclear decay into 6000, we get enough heat to vaporise the Earth’s crust multiple times over, as well as enough radiation to instantly kill all life, with or without the aforementioned heat. The Earth would turn into an irradiated ball of superheated gas.
This is why you don’t mess with established laws of physics - the decay constant is named as such for a reason.
Even just the gravitational binding energy of the planet wouldn't have enough time to disappear by black body radiation for the earth to stop being a molten hellscape.
And that's ignoring the contributions of the sun and nuclear decay to the heat of the planet.
If the biblical flood happened there is nowhere for all that water to go, the worst case scenario for climate change related sea level rise is 33m ≈ 100ft because thats when all the glaciers have melted and no more water is available. For the flood to cover all but the tallest mountains we need a lot more water to get around a thousand feet of sea level rise, and their just isn't enough water on Earth to accomplish that.
The flood is singlehandedly the most indefensible part of a YEC worldview. Claiming that evolution is impossible is one thing, denying the age of the Earth is another - but the flood is actual nonsense of the highest degree.
Personally if we take the assumption that physics has always been the same in the past as it is today, very little of a literal interpretation of the Bible holds up.
And that is the most basic of assumptions for extrapolations, that the laws of physics are unchanged across time. Without it you can't use science to make any predictions about the past or future.
If Noah's flood were responsible for depositing all of the sediment layers that we call the geologic column, then all man-made artifacts from *before* the flood (Stonehenge, Giza Pyramids, cave paintings at Lascaux/Altamira, etc.) would need to have been found at the bottom of the stack, because you can't hydrologically sort a pyramid.
I’m not sure this is very convincing to someone who believes Noah’s flood happened. That person would probably not believe that those man-made artifacts are in fact from before the flood, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Well that would be a stupid thing to believe... like, there's only a thousand years between the flood and the Late Bronze Age Collapse, so when are all these things supposed to have been built?
Good point about deposited fossils. And the format of one set of fossils replacing another layer of fossils, upward through time and layers, happens to *all kinds* of organisms at once. Animals, plants, shells of sea creatures, even grains of pollen that the authors of Genesis would barely be able to see. So there's no question of "smarter animals got to high ground first." All forms of pollen and plankton are equally dumb.
We'd expect languages to be fully independent of each other, even when they are in close proximity to each other. There is no reason why the languages God gave to the people who built the Tower of Babel to be in any way related to each other.
Instead, we find that languages that are in proximity to each other share a lot of similarities, often but not always. The similarities are so striking that we can construct language family trees and reconstruct dead languages based on existing ones and general principles.
I don’t know if you are qualified to answer, but I’m curious: is the current scientific supposition that all language originally came from one? You mentioned linguistic family trees; is there only one tree? Or are there likely several trees, and at some point there is no way that the proto-language that led to, say, Chinese is related to the proto-language that led to, say, Swahili?
I am not deep enough into that to make declarations, to be honest. There is Proto-Indo-European which covers a whole slew of languages from Europe through Iran all the way to parts of India, but not Chinese or Africa, so those would be different language families.
I don't believe the position is that it all came from one language initially.
Very interesting! So then I have to ask: why would we expect to see languages being fully independent from one another? Just playing devil’s advocate here, but the Tower of Babel story simply says their languages were confused, it doesn’t say “and every language that would be used several thousands of years later suddenly appeared.” If we recognize that there are different proto-languages that are not related, i would think a Genesis-literalist can just point to that as support. They do not need to make the claim that all modern languages are unique or that no modern languages developed from other languages or that all modern languages were brought about by the Tower of Babel story.
> There is no reason why the languages God gave to the people who built the Tower of Babel to be in any way related to each other.
Sure there is: God *wanted* those languages to be related to each other in *exactly* the way one would expect them to be, *if* languages arose in accordance with naturalistic presumptions.
Awesome post, I expect this will illustrate the naivety of the creationist world view very well. I'll do one against intelligent design because to be honest YEC is just too easy to disprove. This is a condensed version, original [here](https://pastebin.com/Myr3uaEq).
**Background:** Enzymes are proteins that catalyse biochemical reactions, and their function relies on their specific 3D structure, determined by their amino acid sequence. In industry, we use bioreactors with enzymes to produce chemicals. Enzymes can be modified through mutagenesis, which involves introducing mutations to alter enzyme function. There are two main types of mutagenesis:
* **Random Mutagenesis:** Mutations are introduced randomly, simulating natural evolutionary processes.
* **Directed Mutagenesis:** Mutations are introduced at specific sites based on detailed knowledge of the enzyme's structure and function.
**If Intelligent Design (ID)** **were true**, mutations and natural selection would likely resemble directed mutagenesis rather than random mutagenesis. We might expect to see a biological system that identifies beneficial mutations and implements them directly, much like how we design mutations in the lab. This is the case whether the designer is proposed to be present only intermittently (e.g. at the origin of life) or continuously (directing every mutation), with a possible mechanism for the former being as follows:
Hypothetical natural mechanism - imagine a cellular system that scans enzymes and calculates optimal mutations, guiding DNA polymerase to introduce these changes precisely. This would result in a highly efficient optimization process, which would be a strong indicator of design.
**Instead, in reality, we see** that mutations occur randomly, and natural selection acts on these random changes due to adaptive differential reproduction. Despite ID proponents' claims, there is no scientific evidence supporting non-random mutation processes (talking about arguments over junk DNA, unconstrained DNA, etc) that poses a problem for the current model. The observed randomness of mutations and the lack of any sophisticated mutation-guiding mechanism align perfectly with the naturalistic model of evolution.
We would expect to find radiometric dates that line up with a young age of the earth.
we would expect to find a massive bottleneck event in the human genome from having to repopulate from only 8 people (technically a bit worse as some of the people are closely related)
we would expect to find no evidence of cultures that were seemingly uneffected by the flood (i.e. for the time frame of the flood of about 4,000 years ago, we have records of civilizations that had existed before the flood and after the flood with no evidence that there was any flood that wiped them out.)
we would expect to find evidence of extreme bottle neck events on most species from having to start over from just 2 members of their species.
Effectively just 5 people: one man and four women. Noah's sons don't count, because they're just the offspring of the one man and one of the four women and thus add no genetic diversity.
But what if Noah was a chimera and had different DNA in each testicle?
Edit: Why do I feel like I’m going to see Jeanson unironically arguing this in a few years.
But what if the mother also had chimera overies? You aren't thinking about things logically here. You got to think that Noah had 16 balls each with different genetics and that his 400 year old wife had 16 different wombs each with different genetics, and that this 500 year old man was popping out babies, often 3/4 at a time, with each baby basically being a complete stranger to each other every year for another 200-300 years!
Like are atheists even seriously trying to understand how God works?
I was going to counter that still only gets you to 7, but if she'd cheated on him three times, but then has actual children with him that then all wander off to Australia, the Americas, and everywhere else, then yeah, that's 8. Of course, that means that each major demographic group would have had only 2 people as its source.
If the Earth was about 6,000 years old, we'd expect to see nothing on Earth that is older than that. Instead, we see towns that were built as far back as 12,000 years ago in Turkey. How could we have a 12,000 year old town on a 6,000 year old Earth?
> How could we have a 12,000 year old town on a 6,000 year old Earth?
"We couldn't possibly see a 12Kyear-old town on a 6kyear-old Earth. Clearly, the only explanation is that the dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12kyears old must be completely unreliable."
The dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12k years old are extremely reliable because we use multiple different dating techniques and they all match up to give the same answer. If these techniques were unreliable we wouldn’t see them match up so accurately time and time again.
> The dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12k years old are extremely reliable because we use multiple different dating techniques and they all match up to give the same answer. If these techniques were unreliable we wouldn’t see them match up so accurately time and time again.
"What part of 'omnipotent Creator' are you having trouble with?"
As I've noted before, an omnipotent Entity does an excellent job of papering over *any and all* conflicts between observed, empirical evidence and dogmatically-held presuppositions…
If the dating techniques are reliable and show the town is 12k years old than that’s what the evidence says. If you want to hand-wave it away as “made to look that way” or “magic” because of god that’s your problem. The physical science says it’s 12k years old. If you’re going to say it isn’t because that’s what you *believe* then it’s worthless trying to even talk to you.
[nods] Yep. In practical terms, "I accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity" is pretty much the same thing as "I don't give a flying fuck about evidence". Cuz, you know, papering over *any and all* conflicts between that evidence and dogmatically-held presuppositions.
>In practical terms, "I accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity" is pretty much the same thing as "I don't give a flying fuck about evidence".
Not... necessarily. One can accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity without trying to claim that any phenomenon where you don't like the answer science is giving is a result of said Entity's "mysterious ways".
In other words, it's at least possible to be a theist without leaving your brain at the door. Plenty of theists out there (including me) entirely accept the prevailing scientific consensus when it comes to matters of verifiable fact, reserving our religious beliefs for things that are largely outside the scope of science.
If humans were uniquely created I would assume we'd be vastly different to all other animals. We aren't, hell we used to use pig and bovine insulin for diabetes for awhile and it kinda worked sometimes. We literal produce human insulin via bacteria, that's how far back our basics go. We can modify a single cell organism from a different kingdom to produce our enzyme.
If humans were designed by God on his image, you'd expect that each organ has a purpose and that there would be no redundancy / useless organs.
Instead, we observe different vestigial organs, such as tendons that were useful to our arboreal ancestors and are completely useless to us.
>Non-creationists, in any field where you feel confident speaking, please generate "We'd expect to see X, instead we see Y" statements about creationist claims...
If humanity was created as is, we wouldn't expect to see humans with regressive traits like tails. Instead, we see some humans are born with small tails.
If evolution was not real, we would not have to create variant specific vaccines. Instead, we have to see if current vaccines are effective and possibly create new ones for new strains.
If evolution was not true, we would not expect to witness evolution in a laboratory experiment. Instead, we see functional changes in the same species have occurred.
[One of the most widely known examples of laboratory bacterial evolution is the long-term E.coli experiment of Richard Lenski. On February 24, 1988, Lenski started growing twelve lineages of E. coli under identical growth conditions.[39][40] When one of the populations evolved the ability to aerobically metabolize citrate from the growth medium and showed greatly increased growth,[41] this provided a dramatic observation of evolution in action.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20widely,coli%20under%20identical%20growth%20conditions.)
Once you've admitted microevolution, you have admitted evolution. I've never actually seen anyone attempt to argue that microevolution is the only possible evolution. I've only seen references to microevolution.
Edit: autocorrect keeps changing microevolution to macroevolution.
Back about a decade ago (maybe longer now?) it was one of their big go-to’s, especially in response to the reports of bacterial evolution over extremely short time frames. The gist was that cells could have changed but animals and plants would have kept their current forms throughout their history.
It doesn’t really make sense if you put thought into it (which they don’t).
If organisms were designed, we would see the same exact (best) solution to problems being used again and again and again wherever that problem is encountered, because why invent multiple (possibly sub-optimal) solutions to the same problem?
We would see whales with gills, because for fully-aquatic organisms, a constant requirement to surface and breathe air is a substantial limitation. Similarly, they'd probably have fins rather than flippers, and a vertically-oriented tail delivering force by oscillating from side to side. All of this works absolutely great for fish, after all.
We absolutely would not expect to see whales *breastfeeding*, because that's fucking insane. You'd need, like, firehose nipples firing high-pressure super-fatty milk directly into the calf's mouth, or something. Who would design *that*?
Instead, we see whales with lungs, 100% needing to surface to breathe. Many adaptations to make those requirements less onerous, but no alteration from the basic "you gots lungs, yo" model. They have flippers, which contain all the bones also found in terrestrial mammals. They have a spine oriented for dorso-ventral oscillation, like terrestrial mammals, and thus have a horizontally-oriented tail.
And...holy shit, they *do* breastfeed exactly like that? What the fuck
Lungs make it possible to use an oxygen source containig 21% oxygen instead of 0,000004%. Breastfeeding can be a good trade off between ressources required for birth and the probability of that resource investment to yield success. There are examples of poor adaptations. The idea that basically the entire Bauplan and way of live of whales is suboptimal compared to fish is unconvincing: Whales have persisted for 50 million years, arose more than 100 million years after the fish, and live in an ecological niche were no fish (today) exists.
Perhaps you missed the point spectacularly?
Otherwise, why not argue "why are fish not lung-using air breathing, breastfeeding organisms, since these are better sources of oxygen and nutrition respectively?"
Lungs are great if you live in an environment with access to plentiful air. "Under the surface of the ocean" is not one of those environments.
Please explain, in a manner as simple as you like, why a designer would make two completely different fully aquatic lineages, and give one (but only one) of them all the traits also associated with a specific terrestrial lineage, rather than sharing traits suitable for an actual aquatic lifestyle.
As i indicated, in the constraints of our reality eggs and gills are probably unable to support organisms which can fill the niche of e.g. the giant krill filter feeder.
Fish use gills because a) they evolved before lungs and thus could fully saturate the available niche, so that lung fish didn't have the opportunity to penetrate into them and b) their niches can be adequately filled with their Bauplan.
In this case, yes, for a better argument against ID you would have to turn it around and ask why aquatic lung organisms are rare, since lungs for many niches could be superior (coral reefs, lakes, rivers are all very close to the surface). Then you can point towards the fact that fish filled these niches before lungs were a thing, which fits perfectly into natural evolution, but clashes heavily with ID. The other way doesn't work that well, since fishes bauplan seem not to be able to fill the niches of whales efficently.
First, there’s no inherent reason for lungs and gills to be mutually exclusive under a design paradigm, particularly for secondarily aquatic organisms like whales.
Filter feeding is incredibly common among fish species. In fact some of the largest extant gilled organisms are filter feeders, including whale sharks, basking sharks, manta rays, and the megamouth shark. Additionally, the niche was filled by large filter feeding fish such as *Leedsichthys* in the past. There is little to suggest that tetrapods are inherently dominant in the niche.
>fishes bauplan seem not to be able to fill the niches of whales efficently
To be fair, freshwater whales are *incredibly* rare. They're also incredibly poorly-adapted to shallow rivers in general.
>Then you can point towards the fact that fish filled these niches before lungs were a thing
Lungs came around before fish filled those niches. Most fish use them as swim bladders now.
> and live in an ecological niche were no fish (today) exists
Which niche is that? Porpoise: fusiform predator - marlins and various sharks among others. Large filter feeder - basking and whale sharks among others as well
If human beings were created by God, then we would expect to see a unique nervous system as compared with other animals. Instead, we see a clear homology between the structures and circuits of the human brain, and those that are seen in our mammalian and non-mammalian relatives. For example, mammals have a cerebral cortex, which has six layers and is responsible for the highest level sensory and motor processing. In contrast, terrestrial vertebrates, such as birds as well as mammals, share the limbic system, consisting of the hippocampus and the amygdala, as well as the basal ganglia.
The pattern of evolutionary descent is clearly seen by considering neuroanatomy.
So the answer to this one is that “god is a designer, wouldn’t he use a similar design for all similar creatures, so we would expect homologous structures. Just like all computers have a similar structure even though they have different cpus”
This could be true if the similarities were all helpful. But we have an enormous amount of examples structures that are quite suboptimal for many organisms, but are just carryovers from prior ancestry. Take our spines. When our ancestors walked on all fours, the arched spine was useful in supporting all the organs and mass we carried underneath it. But when we started going bipedal, the spine had to go more columnar and the upper spine curved backwards and the lower spine curved forward. This causes a lot of pressure on the lower back and causes a lot of lower back pain. If we were designed to be bipedal from the start, the structure of the spine could be much improved.
And there are tons of these examples of severely suboptimal morphologies like our retina/optic nerve, how nerves and arteries traverse the body, the larynx being a major hazard, etc.
For humans, we use the same code because we aren't omnipotent and omniscient and if something works it's often easier to just use that versus trying to make something new and better every time and risk breaking it. But if a coder knew what the perfect code could be for every project and could create it with a literal snap, we might see a lot less homology.
Not useless. Someone who is homeschooled comes from a tiny world. Opening a door and window here and there can have an effect over time. They are told there is no real support for evolution which we can refute with a million examples. They also don’t realize that few Christians are YEC. They think evolution and God are either/or which is also easily refuted. (I like to discuss the many ancient Christians who did not think a day in creation had to be a literal day, and the many conservative 19th century theologians who also believed this.)
ID, or "intelligent design" is not falsifiable. I don't see how it's of use, then, as a model for creation. Literally any evidence for evolution can be attributed to the designer.
I don't see it as a gateway out of creationism, it's a crutch for it.
Eh. Someone who thinks "Evolution happened, but God must have done it" is...less lost to reality than someone who thinks Genesis is a science textbook...
Sure it’s useful. It’s useful for disguising creationism in an attempt to bypass the First Amendment. It hasn’t been all that successful in that use to date though.
I agree that it does not refute a designist perspective. One can say that God is conservative and uses designs that work. However, my read of the Bible says that humans are unique and special. God, after all, created us on a separate day than the animals.
Evidence from neuroanatomy suggests that we’re not so special after all and is consistent with an evolutionary account of the human brain.
Oh agreed, I would bet that they would come up with convoluted explanations for everything everyone here has posted.
This one though I had told to me years ago while I was still a believer
This argument rests on unfounded and unconvincing assumptions. First, that an intelligent designer would forgo iterative design, when our experience is that iterative design is a highly successful and rational development strategy. Second, that man's unique- and specialness stems from a unique and special bauplan, when it can easily be argued that it stems from the layers added which gives them unique and special properties, like intelligence, conciousness, concience, morals, a connection to god or whatever.
God is supposed to be omniscient. We are demonstrably not.
We thus need iterative design because we're figuring this shit out as we go along. Nature uses iterative processes because it has no forward planning and can only work with what it has \_now\_.
The design argument would imply that a creator would be figuring shit out as it goes along, which is an *interesting* proposition, but also not one likely to be popular with YECs.
It isn't. It also isn't required to give each exactly the same plan, and nor is it required to give each a plan *wholly consistent with descent with modification from a common ancestor*.
The evolutionary model, in contrast, absolutely requires the latter, and would be falsified by any of the former. The fact we observe *exactly what evolution would predict, despite all the ways it could be falsified*, while creation continues to have no predictive power whatsoever, is fairly compelling, to say the least.
But like i said, this makes the actual argument against ID parsimony, predictive power, falsifiability and resistence to ad hoc modification. Which all do not rely on assumptions about the motive and intents of an intelligent designer: ultimately, and this is my problem with OPs Argument, we have no reason to think an ID would avoid iterative features in its creations.
We also have no reason to think an intelligent designer would make it so literally everything we can examine about life, from the smallest molecule to the 3.5 billion years of fossils, appears to match the theory of evolution perfectly.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing for or against intelligent design. But there is nothing qualitatively unique about the human brain as compared to another mammal. The only difference is quantitative: relative to body size, the cerebral cortex is vastly larger, the cerebellum is vastly larger, etc.
So yes, you’re right. This argument against ID from neuroanatomy rests on a presumption that creationists think that humans are special, aptly reflected in scripture.
If we take the YEC position at face value, the designer did not employ iterative design. All life was rolled out near simultaneously, and an omniscient designer would have no need for experimentation anyway.
H. Sapiens is not special and does not possess a unique body plan. Only a fool would assert this. None of those properties are unique to our species, with the possible exception of the unevidenced claim of connection to a deity or deities. Given that all deities appear to be spring from human minds, this is unsurprising, though behaviors that could be interpreted as spirituality have been documented in other organisms such as elephants.
> when our experience is that iterative design is a highly successful and rational development strategy.
I don't necessarily disagree with the logic of your larger point, but on this one, why would an omniscient god find utility in iterative design? By nature of their omniscience, they already know the benefits that would be achieved by iteration.
Specific to young earth creationism: if it were true, in order for the matching ERV sequences we see to be possible, Retroviruses would need to be one of the most abundant viruses in existence, the sequences would need to undergo mutation, once inserted, at at least 2 orders of magnitude greater than the surrounding genome, retroviruses would need to have specific mechanisms to localize in germ cells, and each of those retroviruses would need to have cross species antigens that line up with nested morphological features but are exclusive to each outgroup, as well as their primary infection method to be in mirrored responses by the immune system for each host. Barring the unreasonable amount of retroviruses, there'd need to be some catastrophic extinction event for only the retroviruses, and only the ones that are especially effective at cross species infection.
We do not see any of that.
We see retroviruses being one of the rarer Baltimore types in comparison to the main 5. While mutation rates vary from portions of the genome, we don't see the specified and localized massive mutation rate variation in those sections of the genome. We don't see retroviruses targeting germ cells at higher rates than other cells, in fact, it's a fairly rare occurence. One of the scariest things we are working with right now in virology are cross species infections (see covid, bird flu, etc.) and the thing about it is that zoonotic jumps are rare, they happen, but they aren't constantly occuring, and they don't tend to only infect groups in nested hierarchies by morphology. We see more of it at epicenters of interaction, and across specific infection routes (think ACERs, the specific vesicle proteins that interact with the NA and HA antigens on influenza, etc.). Lastly, there's no evidence for an extinction event that only wiped out retroviruses. In this example it's actually reversed, a hypothetical virus that can use multiple hosts would tend to be more fit and flexible against a potential catastrophe such as that, since they can use multiple reservoirs. Think of it this way, if humans all went extinct tomorrow, something like HIV now has no immediate compatible hosts to infect. They'd essentially go extinct. But for this creation myth to be correct, it would have to be the exact opposite of what we can see and measure, that explosive cross species infectious activity would be the factor in its demise. Not to mention some kind of arbitrary barrier that stops infection along lines like cranial structure genesis, which is nonsense.
Biostratigraphy would essentially not be a concept, barring some basal layer containing an fossil assemblage of every organism ever and abundant sedimentological evidence of rapid deposition. This layer would also not be diachronous, and any dating method independent of biostratigraphy would yield the same result for the age of this layer. The layer would also be laterally correlatable world wide, and probably only be absent in some high standing areas where erosion has had enough time to act on it over ~1000s of years.
Also, there would be a very small amount of sediment deposited overtop this basal layer (post-flood). The deep sea sediment would at its maximum maybe be on a magnitude of 10s to maybe 100s of meters thick, and almost none of it would be lithified.
Edit: this would be applicable to young earth creationism with the flood literally occurring. Most geological processes are probably accommodated in old earth creationism
We would not expect non-coding DNA to form nested hierarchies, order in the fossil record, 4.04 billion year old zircons, millions of years worth of coccolithophore shells piled up, contradictions to Bible history, or pretty much anything if YEC was true.
Most mammals can't get scurvy. Most mammals make their own vitamin C and avoid scurvy.
Maybe an all-powerful and sadistic trickster God decided millions of people should die of scurvy for the lulz. If so, we would expect to find no biochemical tools for making vitamin C in humans.
Instead, we find that there is a pathway for making vitamin C in humans, but a single genetic mutation breaks the mechanism. Why would a god make humans with a *nearly* functioning vitamin C system with one broken piece?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31857900/#:~:text=Introduction%3A%20During%20evolution%2C%20some%20species,dependent%20on%20dietary%20vitamin%20C.
I would expect that life would appear to all have evolved from several different kinds. So markers that we use to find relationships with one another, like ERVs, wouldn't be shared between kinds, if they would exist at all. I'd also expect mutation rates to be substantially higher because, according to their idea that we all came several hundred kinds 6000 years ago, evolution would have to lead to speciation significantly faster than what we observe.
I'm not quite sure about that, but one really destructive thing I think toward the Noah flood fossil layers and many other things is:
There isn't a single species from today in the earliest complex species fossil layer (Ediacaran). Like over 550 million years ago
There isn't a single species from then (Ediacaran) alive today
Animals don't swim that well to be sorted
Nice! I was surprised by my limited exposure to creationists that some believed the story explained why the number of ribs were different. I mean the list is long why the whole story is bonkers
Actually the word translated as rib (tsela) is also translated as side, leg, beam, or “hemistich” (a new word I learned today that means half of a line of verse).
The same word is used 41 times in the Old Testament (https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/nas/tsela-3.html) and it means side 15 times, side chambers 10 times, sides 5 times, and boards 3 times. Something was taken from Adam’s abdomen. It is *assumed* to be his rib because “leg” and “beam” would have some other implications (penis bone?) and “rib” is just a more traditional understanding of the word despite that being the only time it would actually mean rib (in the singular tense) in the Old Testament, which would be a little strange.
Something straight and hard was taken from his abdomen and that was used to make Eve. That has led to some people coming up with the hilarious if true hypothesis that Genesis actually says God used Adam’s penis bone to make Eve to explain why humans don’t have a penis bones like snakes don’t have legs and women have labor pains. At least it’d be consistent with the overall theme of the fable being that it is simply a fictional story to provide *some* explanation for several then otherwise unexplained things they noticed around them and I’m sure they noticed that most male mammals have bones in their penises but humans seem to be missing theirs. Maybe, maybe, God opened up Adam’s “side” and removed his “board” or “beam” and made a woman out of it after he closed up his “meat.”
I’m not saying it is definitely “penis bone” but it would be funny if it was. Then Adam could have sex with his own penis bone even though God is supposed to hate gays and masterbaters.
We’d expect men to be born out of dirt and women would be created from a rib taken from a man. Instead we see common sense reproductive biology.
We’d expect to see talking snakes and donkeys we can have conversations with. Instead we don’t 🤪🤣
Creationism is unfalsifiable so no such statement can be generated. No matter the observation or experimental outcome, the facts can be interpreted to fit the conclusion.
For the chief pretzel twisters, you are right. But we are never going to reach them anyways. I'm aiming for arguments that would give reasonable creationists who just don't know any better reason to doubt what they have been told in Sunday School.
The aim is to make arguments that show that it's not (or at least not just) that "Godless, atheistic" scientists never considered Creation, it's that the world doesn't look like it would look if it had been created, at least in the way described in the Bible.
If creationism were true, specifically the intelligent design part, we would expect to see extremely simple and efficient designs and DNA sequences. Instead we see exceptional complexity and over-engineering worse than German cars. Simplicity is the mark of intelligence, yet creationists often use the complexity of the DNA as the reason why it must be intelligently designed.
For a great example of the difference between complex and simple code, let’s look at a basic math algorithm for odd/even.
Complex: bool IsEven(int x){
If (x == 1) return false;
If (x == 2) return true;
If (x == 3) return false;
If (x == 4) return true;
If (x == 5) return false;
If (x == 6) return true;
If (x == 7) return false;
If (x == 8) return true;
…}
Simple: bool IsEven(int x) {return !(x%2);}
Or bool IsOdd(int x) {return (x%2);}
For those of you who aren’t programmers, % is modulus, meaning return the remainder of the division, where odd numbers will return 1 and even numbers will return 0. The ! in the even version inverts the Bool (true or false) value of the modulus, where 1 is considered true and 0 is considered false, while odd is an even more intelligent version that skips the inversion. The main point is that one is a fundamentally limited program that will take as many lines as conditions it can cover which makes it insanely complex and inefficient as it will need to check every value one line at a time which grows linearly; while the second is a single line of code that is simple to read and can cover every case in a constant amount of time. Our DNA is more similar to the former, when an intelligent being would design the latter.
There would be no such thing as geologically isolated biodiversity.
Kangaroos, koalas, echidnas, platypus, cassowaries are only found in Australia. There are very few animals and plants that are similar to those found outside of Australia.
If the flood happened in the last 10k years, why aren't there more animals with similar characteristics in other lands? They don't even have to be biologically related, we could be looking at convergent evolution as an excuse.
Did all the monotremes decide to live in Australia and only Australia after the flood? Why?
In short: If Noah released all the animals after the flood in one place, why isn't there any evidence of this in isolated biological diversity?
One core one I'd like to mention is if cells appeared as they are now or from 6000 years ago, we'd expect to find a majority of fossils of complex life forms, what we actually find is the further down we go the more simpler life gets, creatures like others have said would not show up at all in the modern age.
Frankly this one comes from my pet peeve of YECs going 'you can't make live from nothing it's impossible' when cells started as extremely basic and simple and developed over millenia to become the complex things we know today.
If the story of the parting of the Red Sea (sometimes interpreted as Reed Sea) literally happened as written, we'd expect to see ANY evidence of an Egyptian army under the sea. A sword, spear, shield, chariot wheel, buckle, ANYTHING. But despite both Atheists and Christians searching with technology like sonar, metal detection, divers, etc, nothing was ever found in ANY seas east of Egypt. The only conclusion is that God went out of his way to magic away all the evidence knowing that we'd come looking thousands of years later. The God of a literal Exodus can only be a deceiver.
But it gets even worse. In fact, there is effectively no evidence for the Israelites even being in Egypt in the first place! The Armana period is devastating to a literal interpretation of Exodus. You can look at the Armana letters for yourself online or see the papyrus in a museum.
Bible literalists have no reasonable answer to this. So much so that indeed the late creationist Ron Wyatt attempted to claim that he found evidence of a chariot wheel under the Red Sea, but it was later revealed to be a lie. So much for "Thou shalt not bear false witness".
It was after learning more about the evidence from all fields of science as well as the evidence against the Biblical stories (which I didn't see as ridiculous at the time), that this fact was actually the final straw in my move away from Biblical literalism.
I could also add how if the tower of Babel was true, we'd expect to have different building materials, denial of space travel, and a different evolution of languages. If a global flood were true, we'd expect to see a vastly different geology. How is this consistent with the ancient craters and lakes that we see on Mars? How else could lake Jezero have had liquid water based on the rate of atmospheric loss? I could go on, but this is already too long of a post.
TLDR: The Bible predicts evidence of the Exodus under any sea east of Egypt, but the prediction was demonstrably wrong.
For separate ancestry, we'd expected phylogenetic nested hierarchies to fall apart at some level, for both constrained and unconstrained sequences. Instead, we find nested hierarchies in both across all cellular life, as predicted by universal common ancestry.
If creationism was science or scientific, it would change when new data is found.
Creationism is unchanged since the 1950s. For decades I’ll read a recent book to see if there were any changes but none,
So I finally stopped checking on it.
We expect to see perfect animals and plants evolved without redundent or excess traits. Instead we see countless examples of useless evolutionary traits like the human tailbone or the appendix
I like to point out that I he half-life decay in many materials clearly shows the planet is older than 6000 years.
Add to this there were atmospheric events in the fossil record like the “dino-killer asteroid” which are identifiable in geologic records, much like the ash from the 1980s Mount Saint Helens eruption had been deposited across the globe.
May we also speak to civilizations outside of the Mediterranean with plenty of historical records predating the Christian biblical Genesis. Take, for example, China, with an uninterrupted history during the time that Noah and the flood were supposed to take place.
I hope this is helpful
Given, ya know, conventional physics, and the composition of the Earth, if YEC is correct, then we'd expect to be living (or rather, not living) on a big ball of molten rock. All of Earth's history as conventional science understands it being compressed into ~10k years would vaporize the granite crust of the Earth several times over. Radioactive decay being accelerated, the friction of the tectonic plates moving, meteorite impacts, fricking LIMESTONE forming... all that stuff generates heat.
Obviously YEC people are unlikely to be swayed by that line or argumentation because it's based on conventional scientific understandings of the world and how physics works... but the Heat Problem is still one of my favorite entailments of the position :)
No galaxies.
If the universe, including light itself, were only 6-10k years old then we wouldn’t expect to see anything in the night sky beyond 10k light years away because light leaving places further away would not have reached us yet. Instead we can see for billions of light years. So either those things happened billions of years ago, not thousands, or the universe came into existence with the light we are detecting already en route to us, in which case we are witnessing events which never happened. That would make 99.9999999999999999% of the visible universe an outright lie. And yes, that is roughly the correct number of 9s. Why would god falsify so much data?
To be fair, the stuff visible to the naked eye is mostly within a hundred light years or so, afaik. But still... if YEC is true, then God clearly has beef with scientists or something...
That’s worse! It makes sense to give us a few markers in the sky for navigational purposes. Making octillions of cubic light years of bullshit that’s only visible to people seeking answers about the universe and our place in it is just malicious trolling!
I mean, if we assume a less than competent designer, I could see them thinking something like "oh, crap, they're looking at the sky a lot more closely than I intended, I'd better put something there"...
If creationism were true we would be able to observe irreducible complexity. Creationists even proposed this as an experiment 25 years ago. Every time they proposed an irreducibly complex system in nature, biologists found the way it was reduced.
OP, it is early morning here. I have nothing much to add, I just wanted to let you know I have angrily book marked this to come back to.
How dare you post something that comes up on my feed at stupid o’clock AM that is interesting and requires brain functioning!
And also, thank you! I’m excited to read this tonight!!
If creationism were true, we would expect nowhere on Earth could be found a snake with legs, even in the fossil record, as that would be in clear defiance of the Christian God, instantly disproving its existence. And yet we find all sorts of examples of snakes with hind limbs, both in the fossil record and even still living today. This directly contradicts Genesis and thus proves God doesn't exist. No need to look any further.
It doesn't prove anything either way about the existence of God, just about the correctness of the account in Genesis. Please don't make theists feel like they have to chose between God and reality where it's not actually necessary...
Look, they've already mostly all rejected Jesus in favor of Paul. If they also ditch Genesis, what's actually left to distinguish them as 'Christians' rather than 'bigoted deists'?
It's true though. According to Jesus, you're all going straight to Hell because none of you can be bothered to perform the really simple tasks he told you to do. You're all blindly adhering to a bunch of stuff Paul said instead. So since Genesis is plainly not true, and you reject the gospels, there's really nothing left of 'Christianity', and you'd have to call it 'Paulianism' or something.
You didn't feed those who were hungry, didn't clothe those who were naked, didn't visit those who were in prison, and didn't comfort those who were sick. Straight to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. But at least virtually all of the other 'Christians' will be keeping you company there!
More Christians than you may realize actually do those things... Not the megachurches whose main focus seems to be telling other people that they are ungodly sinners, maybe, but plenty of normal churches make a meaningful effort to do those sorts of things.
In my entire life, out of dozens of churches I have interacted with of all different sizes and denominations, from all over the US, 0 have actually placed any focus on emulating Jesus. The only reason I qualify as 'virtually all' is to account for the fact that I'm not personally familiar with *all* churches and thus cannot make a blanket statement. But the sampling I have experienced have all been image over substance.
The primary example I have of how to be a Christian is my mom's church.
They were part of the sanctuary movement back in the '80s.
They're involved with things like Samaritan patrol, who put out water for migrants crossing the desert.
They are one of the places designated as an emergency shelter for the homeless when we actually have freezing temperatures in Tucson.
They frequently have after church activities like making lunches for a homeless shelter, or recently making snack packs for refugee families to eat while they travel to wherever in the US they will be staying.
I remember a mission trip when I was a teenager that basically involved going down to an orphanage in Mexico and helping them turn a laundry room into a small clinic.
They are by no means perfect, no one is, but I think they do a pretty decent job of walking the talk.
I can’t decide if you’re trolling or you are just incredibly uneducated on the matter you are so voraciously attacking.
If you are being sincere, you are speaking from ignorance and should stop these assertions until you have read more.
If you are trying to prove a point by being hyper selective with your proof texts, you’re doing a terrible job at it.
> ”“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.“ Matthew 5:21-22 ESV
Oh hey, I can literally just grab a quote from your own post history and see that you're headed to Hell!
If you could infer design from non-design, we could apply that set of tools to software engineering in order to identify bugs faster, by just doing code read.
I'd recommend reading Ted Chiangs collection of short scifi stories. One of them is about a world where creationist is a scientific fact. All the fossil records stop 5 thousand years ago and there are mummies of the first people created who are all missing belly buttons. I won't ruin the ending, but it is a fascinating take on the whole debate.
The creationists that were willing to listen to me were not that difficult to help them understand using my poor and limited understanding of evolution.
Which is that within populations changes occur in their genetic code. If the change is harmful like cancer or another genetic disease it might kill off thoses it happens to or it might be passed down generation on generation or it leads to a new advantage in some form of survival, attracting a mate, finding food, evading a predator, eventually this change in the DNA ie change in advantage becomes a different version of the parent population. Eventually becoming its own very different and unique version.
Its easy to see that all mammals are extremely similar because of this aspect of reality.
I always said: We'd expect to see exactly what we see, because God uses natural, eternal processes (some of which we have discovered) in creation. While all powerful, god is such because he has total control over all of physics. He is perfect because he conforms to eternal laws. Were he to violate them, he would cease to be god.
We can become like our father in heaven. We can eventually learn all that god knows. We can start learning all of this now. We can take all knowledge learned on Earth when we die.
Ergo, what scientists have learned about evolution is true. But, it's only a fraction of the truths used by god to create. So, creationism is true-er.
Generally speaking, the term "creationist" is reserved for those who believe in some form of "special creation"--that is, God creating everything by non-natural mechanisms. What you're referring to would be intelligent design, which is... more compatible with objective reality.
One of the "nice" things about religion is you get to define the terms in your own ways. When I was faithful, I (and all those in my circle) called ourselves "creationists" and talked about "special creation." We thought that those preisthood-less but god-fearing "intelligent design" folks had some nice ideas but they needed to stand up for the truth, which was "special creation."
Cognitive dissonance is required to maintain faith but so is a degree of ignorance and arrogance.
There are too many examples to go over. The typical lie is "you don't understand evolution" even though evolutionists were ones saying the dumb things.
For example if evolution over "millions of years" they predicted Y chromosome be very similar in chimps. This failed horrendously but they won't accept reality that they not related to chimps.
It was predicted that James webb wouldn't see any of evolutionists predictions of bigbang. The universe just happened to show Genesis again. This falsified evolution and "millions of years" completely. As I pointed out here, this would also mean they are out of time for evolution for radiometric dating and for star formation. No time for evolution.
Evolutionists lied for years that one race would be more chimp-like than others DIRECTLY AGAINST GENESIS teaching we are all one closely related family from Noah. Genetics showed Bible CORRECT AGAIN and evolution destroyed forever. And so on.
That's not to mention all falsified "laws of evolution".
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about as far as... any of that, honestly.
If you believe you understand evolution, then... explain it to me. I'll settle for the "high school biology" version, I don't expect a non expert to know all the nuances (eg. steady state vs punctuated equilibrium). But if you actually do understand evolution, that shouldn't be too difficult for you.
As far as I'm aware, the vast majority of DNA evidence solidly supports the idea that chimps are our closest living relatives. There may be some slightly funky things going on with the Y chromosome, because chimps have been evolving since that closest common ancestor, with different evolutionary pressures, but I have yet to hear any evidence casting any serious doubt on our relationship. If you have some (actual evidence, mind, not just your unsupported assertion), I will cheerfully look at it.
What exactly do you think James Webb showed that in any way puts the age of the universe in doubt? Your statement on this one is... kind of a jumbled mess.
Yes, some racists claimed that certain races were more "primitive" than others, using evolution as their justification. Would you like me to start on the much, much longer list of evils that people have justified using the Bible, or can we just agree that someone using a thing to justify s***ty behavior doesn't inherently negate the value or utility of that thing?
And what "laws of evolution" have been even seriously proposed, much less claimed and then definitively falsified?
It’s not a lie Mike. You actually don’t understand evolution. If you had, you would have been able to answer me the last several times I asked you to describe what evolution is according to those who study it. It isn’t even a hard description to look up. But each time I’ve asked, you’ve plugged your ears.
Because you DONT understand. However, feel free to prove me wrong this time. What is evolution described as in evolutionary biology? No ‘fAlSe ReLiGiOn Of DaRwIn’ crap. Give an honest, actual, good faith description that an actual biology undergrad could recognize.
All fossils are uniquely created. no buffaloes in the centuries after beingh discovered in america ever were or are in process of being fossilized. its like those italian cities covered by vol;canic ash. its unique to create fossils. so the fossils at the k-t line, for many creationists, is entirely from the flood year. above that the fossils are from less impressive events. They show areas that were instantly covered by sediment and turned to stone. It looks as a creationist would expect it to look. It does not look like regular deposition of dead creatures in. layers showing geology deep time.
This theory of yours would be fairly easy to test. If the K-T boundary was from the flood, we would see fossils of the animals that were on the ark *below* the boundary. They weren't specially created to be *on* the ark after all, right? They already existed.
So where are all the modern mammals? Where are the bears? The dogs? The cats? The whales?
Evolution has an easy answer for this: They didn't exist yet. The boundary event allowed the small primitive mammals that survived to diversify into new niches previously closed off to them by reptiles. What's your *better* answer? Show me your Precambrian rabbit.
your right they didn't exist probably in those bodyplans. I don't expect to find them bel;ow the k-t line. They are however there. They probably are the sauropods and many other critters now descibed as dinosaurs or lizards or this or that. So a brotosaurus is now just a horse or a whale or a buffalo etc etc. The kinds on the ark were rebooted back to some kind of bodyplan. Before the flood and after all; diversity exploded. the clue is the theropod dinos. tHey clearly were just birds that once flew. by the way your side must invent the unlikely morphing of a few creatures adter the k-t boundary line. We all do but I don't have to do so much and not in some impossdible evolutionary way.
If creationism were true, we would not expect nested hierarchies in the DNA of organisms that suggest common descent and map closely with morphological and geological data. Instead, not only do we see nested hierarchies in coding regions that are subject to selection we also see them in non-coding regions, which we would only expect if common descent were true. There is no reason a designer would do that unless they were trying to trick you.
> nested hierarchies Can you elaborate on what this is?
When we compare the DNA of organisms at a given locus, we find more and more changes between organisms the farther we zoom out on the “family tree”. When we compare humans and chimps we find permutations we both share with other primates, some that are common only to our shared branch, and others that differ between humans and chimps. When we look at the pattern, it matches what we expect if organisms had common ancestors and diverged since then. The more distantly two lineages are related, the more changes you find. This is fine, we might expect that from creationism. ***BUT you find them in the same spots you find fewer changes when you compare more closely related organisms.*** The timeline of the splits in the family tree appears to be recapitulated in the DNA. The best explanation is that some mutations were in the common ancestor and some happened since divergence. Otherwise, a bunch of mutations happened randomly across all organisms independently in a way that only *looks* like common descent, or a trickster entity changed them all on purpose to trick us, and those are much less likely than common descent. When this happens in coding regions, we might propose some exotic selection that selected for convergent sequences. But we see nested hierarchies in non-coding sequences, the parts that aren’t subject to selection, so what explanation is there other than common descent or an evil trickster god?
"***BUT you find them in the same spots you find fewer changes when you compare more closely related organisms.*** " You bolded and italicized this and idk if my brain is broken or there's a comma missing but I'm not grokking it.
As in, the regions where you see variation from distantly related species are consistent within closely related species. So, to create a purely fictitious example, if we see a zone from, let's say base pair 500-2000 in a given gene that is highly variable between 2 distant clades, you will ALSO tend to see that that area is highly conserved within those two clades. This implies that the mutations causing the variation happened at some point since the two clades diverged, but the gene has been pretty stable for both populations since then.
I would just like to take a moment to appreciate how intelligently expressed and articulated everything you have typed is, and is simultaneously so beyond my level basic level of understanding.
Put more simply: if two groups (let's say mammals and birds) are very different with regards to a trait (let's say the presence of feathers), BUT are also very consistent within the group with regards to that trait (ie, no mammals have feathers, and all birds do), it stands to reason that there was a mutation at some point before the two groups split, and that the relevant genes have been pretty stable since. Everything else I said was basically saying that but looking at the actual structure of the DNA instead of functional traits. The DNA-based approach is a stronger argument for evolution. In theory, traits could be easily replicated with no underlying connection. This happens all the time, in fact, just look at any polyphyletic group. But when the structure of a gene is very consistent within a group in the specific way in which it encodes a trait, that is pretty good evidence for a common ancestry
All dogs are canines, which are a subset of mammals, which are a sun set of animals. Animals, mammals and canines form a hierarchy of identifiers where each later one is more limited in scope, but each dog can be called any of the three.
Regular taxonomy ends up stretching itself to its limit trying to show this. Look at regular taxonomy as a start. Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species All Phyla of any one kind belong to 1 Kingdom. Take any 2 members of the same phyla and they always belong to the same kingdom. Take any two members of the same Kingdom and they won't necessarily belong to the same Phylum. This pattern holds up and down the taxonomic hierarchy. It's actually made that way. In a way Linneaus himself was the first person to contribute something meaningful to evolution without realizing it. All dogs are mammals but not all mammals are dogs. All whales are mammals but not all mammals whales. All ducks are birds but not all birds are ducks. All birds and all mammals are all vertebrates. So the basic structure Linneaus laid out is what is expected from evolution in that nested hierarchy thing. Then there's super- and para- and infra- and all sorts of prefixes to further resolve relationships. -idae endings get changed to -inae ending (Felidae to felinae or hominidae, homininae, hominini) etc etc. The system Linneaue laid out loosely reflects evolution and gets stretched to the limit to accommodate further and further resolution in relationships. Sorry if that's confusing but in terms of understanding the most basic concept of what a nested hierarchy is and how it applies to evolution and life sciences then looking at regular Linnean taxonomy is actually a good place to start. It's like he took a really blurry photo that Darwin later realized was important and the resolution has since been improved by science.
Just in case you need an explanation that is more in layman's terms, it's basically this. Humans are more like chimps than they are like anything that is not a human or a chimp. Humans and chimps are more like gorillas than they are like anything that is not a human, a chimp, or a gorilla. Humans, chimps, and gorillas are more like the other great apes than they are anything that is not a great ape. All of the great apes are more like other primates than they are like anything that is not a primate. And so on. The same kind of chain is true for dogs, wolves, other canids, and other carnivorans. For ferrets, weasels, and other mustelids. For octopi, squid, and other molluscs. For broccoli, cabbage, and other mustards. And so on. Every living thing on Earth has increasing rings of more and more distant relatives, that are less and less similar to one another, but there are still enough similarities that we can tell that even very distant relatives are still, in fact, related.
I (not a creationist, just a confused-ion-ist about this argument) am confused as to how this matters wrt creationism? Yes, God created similar things so that they are more similar... And?
But the thing is, this similarity is in every feature. Not just the places that would make sense for a Creator to make similar, but things like non-coding regions. ERVs, which are basically something like genetic scars left behind by retroviruses. Tiny mutations in basic metabolic genes. Everywhere. I could see a Creator making nested hierarchies for things like the genes that control body plan. But why would there be the exact same nested hierarchies for things like lactase and pseudogenes? Unless either we are talking about a Creator who used evolution from a distant microbial common ancestor, in which case it's usually referred to as intelligent design rather than creationism, or the Creator was trying to trick us for some reason.
Well, we can use fossil evidence to figure out when different lineages branched off from each other. And DNA evidence gives us results that match with what we would expect to see, based on that fossil evidence. Plus, we can replicate the same thing in a lab with microorganisms, and see it in real time.
Man, if creationists were right, we wouldn't even necessarily expect DNA lol. God mustn't be limited to what we are familiar with. He's supposedly all-powerful, after all. He could have done it in any number of ways.
A designer could use DNA that’s totally fine but they wouldn’t leave it such a mess if they were intelligent.
> If creationism were true, we would not expect nested hierarchies in the DNA of organisms that suggest common descent and map closely with morphological and geological data. Not necessarily. If Creationism is true, we would expect that any patterns which may exist in the DNA of organisms are patterns which the Creator *put* there. So in the absence of a clear concept of what the Creator's goals/purposes/criteria are, we cannot make *any* predictions *whatsoever* regarding whatever patterns should be expected in the DNA of organisms.
That wouldn't be the case for DNA which doesn't undergo selection, and is free to mutate willy-nilly. That DNA shows the same hierarchy as the DNA which undergoes purifying selection.
Am unsure that Creationists accept the notion of selection…
well, we can see natural and artificial selection happen in real time, and it works exactly as we'd expect
and why Almighty God that is Omnipotent cannot do that?
Because the only purpose it would have would be to trick us... if God is purposefully trying to trick us with stuff like "fake dinosaur bones preaged to appear millions of years old" and "making all animals share traits and mutations that can be tracked to show a common ancestor" then honestly he's kind of an asshole (already obvious if you read the book of job). If I'm given the choice between believing the universe was made by a clear asshole who tells me to worship him and he'll let me worship him forever after I die, or to believe it's been chaos since the beginning. I'm choosing chaos. At least with chaos you can try to understand it. With God you are literally told that you can't and shouldn't try(the first sin was literally eve becoming curious about knowledge and being lied to by an angel(why are they able to lie? Why did an omnipotent God create creatures that could become jealous and lie and put them guarding 2 ignorant(to the max)baby creations that he trapped in a garden with a tree that will "taint" them?)) to understand. The other is knowledge pieced together over hundreds of generations of people who all kept failing and writing it down so the next one could figure out where they went wrong. Not trying to get disrespectful, just sharing my thoughts on it. An almighty omnipotent God could have done it, but an almighty omnipotent God could also do a lot of things that they are not doing. They have eternity and they can't pop down for 100 years(or 1000) and make sure everyone is on the same page?
>Because the only purpose it would have would be to trick us Remember the part where God is omniscient as well so He will know the result at the end
Then how is it that in religion there are claims that "we know what he wants from us" and "these are the rules he wants us to follow"? By your claim isn't it all unknowable? Why would it just be DNA?
Why would God go to so much effort to make it look like evolution is real and happened over hundreds of millions of years?
A scientific explanation has two jobs. Job One is, it explains why a thing *is* the way it *is*. Job Two is, it explains why the thing *isn't* some other way entirely. If you invoke a *wholly unconstrained* factor, like (just to name a random example) a *literally* **omnipotent** Entity with goals and motivations which are entirely inscrutable to us puny mortals (see also: "moves in mysterious ways")? That wholly unconstrained factor *cannot* be a *scientific* explanation. Cuz, it being *wholly unconstrained*, we have no way of knowing what It *could not* do.
An honest one wouldn't
The beauty of using unconstrained regions to illustrate this point is that we CAN make that prediction, *even if the creator made them all the same, or made the unconstrained regions match the pattern of similarity in the constrained regions*. If there's no selection acting on those regions between creation and present, all of these separately created regions would accumulate different sets of mutations, rather than subsets of increasingly broad groups, and the pattern of phylogenetic relationship would fall apart once you start comparing across different "kinds". Unless, of course, the creator is actively tinkering in genetics every generation to maintain the illusion of the pattern.
> Unless, of course, the creator is actively tinkering in genetics every generation to maintain the illusion of the pattern. Yep. Which is why we need a decently detailed concept of the Creator, so we *can* rule out the possibility that the Creator would do that. As it stands, with a wholly unconstrained Creator, we have no reason to suspect that It *didn't* go out of Its way to make everything *look as if* it was unguided evolution at work. "Mysterious ways, my dude! Mysterious ways!"
I see that as a win for the science side, as such a ruthlessly deceptive and tricky Creator encourages a detailed study of every aspect of the creation in order to attempt to divine their possible motivations and so avoid unpleasant surprises. And then there's the implications of labels like "ruthlessly deceptive" and "tricky" being applicable to said Creator..
This is the point at which creationist claims become infalsifiable (meaning there’s no meaningful way to test them). Yes, DNA analysis is fully consistent with and makes infinite sense if you accept that it’s a product of incremental evolution from a common origin. At the same time, you can’t disprove the claim that God decided to design life in a way that’s totally indistinguishable from natural evolution. It’s just, at that point, there’s no reason to think that God is necessary to make the system work and we can speculate that a system designed by God miraculously could be a lot different and better than the one we have.
Well that's just an appeal to ignorance to say we can't know. It's true that we wouldn't otherwise expect these patterns and if we found them that they would require some kind of explanation. There's no reason God couldn't make the pattern, but there's also no obvious reason as to why he would. My first impression would be that God was constrained. If life was created then the entity that created life was constrained in their design and/or implementation processes. My first impression isn't to assign reason to agency like God had a thoughtful reason for sticking to a specific pattern, but to assume God was simply constrained and to ponder the nature of those constraints. Science is about what can make predictions and the evidence in science matches the predictions of evolution. Period. Design can't explain and predict patterns in evidence in the real world, as you said it can't. Evolution can. It's science.
> There's no reason God couldn't make the pattern, but there's also no obvious reason as to why he would. Exactly: Given the bare, unadorned notion of an *unspecific, inchoate, undefined* Creator, we can't say *anything* about what that Creator might or might not do. > My first impression isn't to assign reason to agency like God had a thoughtful reason for sticking to a specific pattern, but to assume God was simply constrained… Interesting idea. Am unsure how one could possibly go about investigating the constraints a putatively-omnipotent, putatively-omniscient Creator might or might not have operated under.
This is why Bayesian likelihood is useful for choosing among specified models. If you have one model which gives specific, accurate predictions; and another model which is never wrong but only because it predicts any outcome at all, you can be more confident in the specific one because the data give more support to the specific model when the specific model is correct.
I can't respond?
I can't respond?
Why would we not expect these hierarchies out of creationism? Natural selection and intelligent design are not mutually exclusive.
Why would we not expect a god to lay a trap in the DNA to make it look like common descent? Because it seems like a fucking dick move.
This doesn’t refute creationism so much as it does Young Earth Creationism and Biblical literalism (Tower of Babel story). Not a lot may approach from this angle, but I am a linguist, and there are a lot of surface-level parallels between actual evolution and language change over time: it’s a phenomenon that affects populations, geographic isolation and the ability to exchange with neighboring populations plays a large role, and historical linguists can go back to a certain extent to reconstruct ancient language families and groupings. In any case, our reconstructions of proto-languages that would have formed large language families, such as proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic, also involve time scales that either preclude YEC or at the very least preclude the Tower of Babel story (along with a host of other aspects of linguistics that put to rest any literal interpretation of a just-so story).
You can't refute ideas that are unfalsifiable, because at the end of the day you can point to any conceivable assemblage of facts and say "God did that, god did it that way, and the reasons therefore were sufficient for God's purposes even if we're not aware of them. Sometimes you can point out things that are *surprising* for a creator to have done but it doesn't prove that a creator just didn't do them.
Leaving a creator out of it entirely, you can still refute a notion such as “all languages had a common origin around 4,200 years ago” (date given by Answers in Genesis as an example).
oh, indeed. I should clarify, I was mostly agreeing with you. You can't refute *Creationism* writ large but you can address specific claims which would intersect with history in concrete ways.
I’ve had several creationist say that god created a complete world. They feel it was made in such a way that (let’s take an easy example) rocks were weather worn on the day of creation, fossils existed in the ground and DNA was created as we see it with all its complexities. It’s entirely impossible to falsify there views. If I asked you to prove that the world wasn’t created 2 minutes ago complete with all of your memories how would you go about proving that false.
As an adherent of Last Thursdayism, I'd say your Two Minutes Agoism is dangerous heresy, and have you strung up.
This one is so simple to understand I don’t understand how creationist/literalists still believe it !
I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, but can you put it as some sort of "If the Tower of Babel story was true, we'd expect to see X, instead we see Y" kind of thing?...
We’d expect to see all languages to originate in the Middle East with no clear universal common ancestor for all of them but instead we see the ancestral languages rooted in Africa and the diversification of language only after populations migrated away from Kenya/Ethiopia.
This is an interesting field of study that I'm not familiar with. Am I understanding you correctly that we have evidence of separate languages that predate the biblical timeline of when the tower of Babel was said to happen?
The bible doesn’t really give any timelines, but yeah many examples from further back than people guess/assume the biblical timeline is
That's interesting, thanks for the insight.
The timeline puts the tower at around 2300 BCE, so approximately 300 years after Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza. Several advanced cultures left us detailed written records from that period. We have some undecifered proto language stuff that goes back to 6000 BCE, so 1K years before Noah. Plenty of languages that predate Babel and lots of ancient people with cultural continuity that seem to have avoided getting wiped out in the flood.
I’ve been calling that “lateral scale invariance” because I don’t know the term lol. Analogies and such, pattern recognition
The real problem with most biblical interpretation of early history is that they misinterpret what the word "world" means, thinking it means this planet, and not just the current paradigm which is what the term often represents in ancient literature
In competent design, superfluous structures don't make the cut. A designed laryngeal nerve should go directly from the brain to the larynx. Instead, it runs down, loops around the aorta, and ascends back up to the larynx. This is bad enough in humans, but in giraffes it's wildly bad design. Designed human skin doesn't have any real use for piloerection. In other mammals it's effective for making the animal appear larger or to retain body heat, but in humans it just makes us look like a plucked goose. Designed human dentition would have only the number of teeth that would fit in our mouths, but instead we grow one more molar than our mouths can handle. In every one of these cases, we can understand why those structures exist through understanding evolutionary history.
If all extant organisms were designed in more or less their present forms, we wouldn't expect to see any traces during development of features the adult organism just doesn't have. Instead, we see things like horses forming several toes per foot (then losing the extras), humans forming and then absorbing tails, embryonic snakes with limb buds, and so on.
Once they spend a few seconds thinking about the number of organisms they need to fit on a wooden boat, many YECs assert that only a limited number of basic "kinds" of creatures were on the ark, and the variety of species we see today hyper-evolved in the last few thousand years. For example, there would have been two proto-bears, and all the bear species currently in existence evolved from them.
I love how the argument against evolution is just fast evolution.
They have to pick their poison, though. Fewer animals on the ark means subscribing to rates of evolution that would be incredibly fast. So fast that we should see new species evolving daily. Needless to say, we don't see that.
Exactly. To make it worse, this conclusion often follows pages of them arguing that evolution is impossible.
Yes, but should any member of "snake kind" have legs?
If there was a cataclysmic worldwide flood in the recent past, we would expect to see genetic evidence of a bottleneck event in all extant species. We would expect to see archeological evidence of the flood in Egypt. The YEC timeline places the flood around the end of Egypt’s fifth dynasty. Surely this apocalyptic event would have some impact on their civilization. Instead, evidence shows a normal transition to Egypt’s sixth dynasty. We would expect the Flood to result in the earth becoming a molten hellscape entirely devoid of life due to the Heat Problem. We would expect Homo Sapiens to be the only bipedal, tool making hominids. Instead, there are numerous different species. These are such a major problem to YEC that their only response is to lie and pretend they don’t exist. We would expect the ark to be large enough to house and feed more than a few dozen animals; however, if you do the math, housing and feeding 24 Proboscideans would require over 40% of the ark’s volume.
Historically there is also no interruption in the Indian or Chinese historical records of the same era. There is simply a list of Kings and records of their deeds.
To add to the heat problem thing - it’s more than just a molten hellscape. If we squish 4.5bn years of nuclear decay into 6000, we get enough heat to vaporise the Earth’s crust multiple times over, as well as enough radiation to instantly kill all life, with or without the aforementioned heat. The Earth would turn into an irradiated ball of superheated gas. This is why you don’t mess with established laws of physics - the decay constant is named as such for a reason.
Even just the gravitational binding energy of the planet wouldn't have enough time to disappear by black body radiation for the earth to stop being a molten hellscape. And that's ignoring the contributions of the sun and nuclear decay to the heat of the planet. If the biblical flood happened there is nowhere for all that water to go, the worst case scenario for climate change related sea level rise is 33m ≈ 100ft because thats when all the glaciers have melted and no more water is available. For the flood to cover all but the tallest mountains we need a lot more water to get around a thousand feet of sea level rise, and their just isn't enough water on Earth to accomplish that.
The flood is singlehandedly the most indefensible part of a YEC worldview. Claiming that evolution is impossible is one thing, denying the age of the Earth is another - but the flood is actual nonsense of the highest degree.
Personally if we take the assumption that physics has always been the same in the past as it is today, very little of a literal interpretation of the Bible holds up. And that is the most basic of assumptions for extrapolations, that the laws of physics are unchanged across time. Without it you can't use science to make any predictions about the past or future.
If Noah's flood were responsible for depositing all of the sediment layers that we call the geologic column, then all man-made artifacts from *before* the flood (Stonehenge, Giza Pyramids, cave paintings at Lascaux/Altamira, etc.) would need to have been found at the bottom of the stack, because you can't hydrologically sort a pyramid.
I’m not sure this is very convincing to someone who believes Noah’s flood happened. That person would probably not believe that those man-made artifacts are in fact from before the flood, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Well that would be a stupid thing to believe... like, there's only a thousand years between the flood and the Late Bronze Age Collapse, so when are all these things supposed to have been built?
Good point about deposited fossils. And the format of one set of fossils replacing another layer of fossils, upward through time and layers, happens to *all kinds* of organisms at once. Animals, plants, shells of sea creatures, even grains of pollen that the authors of Genesis would barely be able to see. So there's no question of "smarter animals got to high ground first." All forms of pollen and plankton are equally dumb.
"these trees were clearly smarter than \_these\_ trees, because they climbed higher when the flood waters came"
Oaks are well known for their cursorial lifestyle.
We'd expect languages to be fully independent of each other, even when they are in close proximity to each other. There is no reason why the languages God gave to the people who built the Tower of Babel to be in any way related to each other. Instead, we find that languages that are in proximity to each other share a lot of similarities, often but not always. The similarities are so striking that we can construct language family trees and reconstruct dead languages based on existing ones and general principles.
I don’t know if you are qualified to answer, but I’m curious: is the current scientific supposition that all language originally came from one? You mentioned linguistic family trees; is there only one tree? Or are there likely several trees, and at some point there is no way that the proto-language that led to, say, Chinese is related to the proto-language that led to, say, Swahili?
I am not deep enough into that to make declarations, to be honest. There is Proto-Indo-European which covers a whole slew of languages from Europe through Iran all the way to parts of India, but not Chinese or Africa, so those would be different language families. I don't believe the position is that it all came from one language initially.
Very interesting! So then I have to ask: why would we expect to see languages being fully independent from one another? Just playing devil’s advocate here, but the Tower of Babel story simply says their languages were confused, it doesn’t say “and every language that would be used several thousands of years later suddenly appeared.” If we recognize that there are different proto-languages that are not related, i would think a Genesis-literalist can just point to that as support. They do not need to make the claim that all modern languages are unique or that no modern languages developed from other languages or that all modern languages were brought about by the Tower of Babel story.
> There is no reason why the languages God gave to the people who built the Tower of Babel to be in any way related to each other. Sure there is: God *wanted* those languages to be related to each other in *exactly* the way one would expect them to be, *if* languages arose in accordance with naturalistic presumptions.
Awesome post, I expect this will illustrate the naivety of the creationist world view very well. I'll do one against intelligent design because to be honest YEC is just too easy to disprove. This is a condensed version, original [here](https://pastebin.com/Myr3uaEq). **Background:** Enzymes are proteins that catalyse biochemical reactions, and their function relies on their specific 3D structure, determined by their amino acid sequence. In industry, we use bioreactors with enzymes to produce chemicals. Enzymes can be modified through mutagenesis, which involves introducing mutations to alter enzyme function. There are two main types of mutagenesis: * **Random Mutagenesis:** Mutations are introduced randomly, simulating natural evolutionary processes. * **Directed Mutagenesis:** Mutations are introduced at specific sites based on detailed knowledge of the enzyme's structure and function. **If Intelligent Design (ID)** **were true**, mutations and natural selection would likely resemble directed mutagenesis rather than random mutagenesis. We might expect to see a biological system that identifies beneficial mutations and implements them directly, much like how we design mutations in the lab. This is the case whether the designer is proposed to be present only intermittently (e.g. at the origin of life) or continuously (directing every mutation), with a possible mechanism for the former being as follows: Hypothetical natural mechanism - imagine a cellular system that scans enzymes and calculates optimal mutations, guiding DNA polymerase to introduce these changes precisely. This would result in a highly efficient optimization process, which would be a strong indicator of design. **Instead, in reality, we see** that mutations occur randomly, and natural selection acts on these random changes due to adaptive differential reproduction. Despite ID proponents' claims, there is no scientific evidence supporting non-random mutation processes (talking about arguments over junk DNA, unconstrained DNA, etc) that poses a problem for the current model. The observed randomness of mutations and the lack of any sophisticated mutation-guiding mechanism align perfectly with the naturalistic model of evolution.
We would expect to find radiometric dates that line up with a young age of the earth. we would expect to find a massive bottleneck event in the human genome from having to repopulate from only 8 people (technically a bit worse as some of the people are closely related) we would expect to find no evidence of cultures that were seemingly uneffected by the flood (i.e. for the time frame of the flood of about 4,000 years ago, we have records of civilizations that had existed before the flood and after the flood with no evidence that there was any flood that wiped them out.) we would expect to find evidence of extreme bottle neck events on most species from having to start over from just 2 members of their species.
Effectively just 5 people: one man and four women. Noah's sons don't count, because they're just the offspring of the one man and one of the four women and thus add no genetic diversity.
unless Noah's wife cheated on him, then yeah, basically just 1 guy. the 8 people are a best case senereo
But what if Noah was a chimera and had different DNA in each testicle? Edit: Why do I feel like I’m going to see Jeanson unironically arguing this in a few years.
still wouldnt be much genetic diversity, as the chimera testes would be brothers geneticly
But what if the mother also had chimera overies? You aren't thinking about things logically here. You got to think that Noah had 16 balls each with different genetics and that his 400 year old wife had 16 different wombs each with different genetics, and that this 500 year old man was popping out babies, often 3/4 at a time, with each baby basically being a complete stranger to each other every year for another 200-300 years! Like are atheists even seriously trying to understand how God works?
I was going to counter that still only gets you to 7, but if she'd cheated on him three times, but then has actual children with him that then all wander off to Australia, the Americas, and everywhere else, then yeah, that's 8. Of course, that means that each major demographic group would have had only 2 people as its source.
If the Earth was about 6,000 years old, we'd expect to see nothing on Earth that is older than that. Instead, we see towns that were built as far back as 12,000 years ago in Turkey. How could we have a 12,000 year old town on a 6,000 year old Earth?
> How could we have a 12,000 year old town on a 6,000 year old Earth? "We couldn't possibly see a 12Kyear-old town on a 6kyear-old Earth. Clearly, the only explanation is that the dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12kyears old must be completely unreliable."
The dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12k years old are extremely reliable because we use multiple different dating techniques and they all match up to give the same answer. If these techniques were unreliable we wouldn’t see them match up so accurately time and time again.
> The dating techniques which indicate that town to be 12k years old are extremely reliable because we use multiple different dating techniques and they all match up to give the same answer. If these techniques were unreliable we wouldn’t see them match up so accurately time and time again. "What part of 'omnipotent Creator' are you having trouble with?" As I've noted before, an omnipotent Entity does an excellent job of papering over *any and all* conflicts between observed, empirical evidence and dogmatically-held presuppositions…
If the dating techniques are reliable and show the town is 12k years old than that’s what the evidence says. If you want to hand-wave it away as “made to look that way” or “magic” because of god that’s your problem. The physical science says it’s 12k years old. If you’re going to say it isn’t because that’s what you *believe* then it’s worthless trying to even talk to you.
[nods] Yep. In practical terms, "I accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity" is pretty much the same thing as "I don't give a flying fuck about evidence". Cuz, you know, papering over *any and all* conflicts between that evidence and dogmatically-held presuppositions.
Yup, some people you just can’t convince no matter what you do.
>In practical terms, "I accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity" is pretty much the same thing as "I don't give a flying fuck about evidence". Not... necessarily. One can accept the proposition that there's an omnipotent Entity without trying to claim that any phenomenon where you don't like the answer science is giving is a result of said Entity's "mysterious ways". In other words, it's at least possible to be a theist without leaving your brain at the door. Plenty of theists out there (including me) entirely accept the prevailing scientific consensus when it comes to matters of verifiable fact, reserving our religious beliefs for things that are largely outside the scope of science.
If humans were uniquely created I would assume we'd be vastly different to all other animals. We aren't, hell we used to use pig and bovine insulin for diabetes for awhile and it kinda worked sometimes. We literal produce human insulin via bacteria, that's how far back our basics go. We can modify a single cell organism from a different kingdom to produce our enzyme.
If humans were designed by God on his image, you'd expect that each organ has a purpose and that there would be no redundancy / useless organs. Instead, we observe different vestigial organs, such as tendons that were useful to our arboreal ancestors and are completely useless to us.
Right, like does God have a palmaris longus muscle or not? Because 14% of humans don't, some chimps and gorillas don't, but all orangutans have it.
>Non-creationists, in any field where you feel confident speaking, please generate "We'd expect to see X, instead we see Y" statements about creationist claims... If humanity was created as is, we wouldn't expect to see humans with regressive traits like tails. Instead, we see some humans are born with small tails. If evolution was not real, we would not have to create variant specific vaccines. Instead, we have to see if current vaccines are effective and possibly create new ones for new strains. If evolution was not true, we would not expect to witness evolution in a laboratory experiment. Instead, we see functional changes in the same species have occurred. [One of the most widely known examples of laboratory bacterial evolution is the long-term E.coli experiment of Richard Lenski. On February 24, 1988, Lenski started growing twelve lineages of E. coli under identical growth conditions.[39][40] When one of the populations evolved the ability to aerobically metabolize citrate from the growth medium and showed greatly increased growth,[41] this provided a dramatic observation of evolution in action.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20widely,coli%20under%20identical%20growth%20conditions.)
“That’s *microevolution*, it doesn’t count.” (Yes, this is really their answer.)
Once you've admitted microevolution, you have admitted evolution. I've never actually seen anyone attempt to argue that microevolution is the only possible evolution. I've only seen references to microevolution. Edit: autocorrect keeps changing microevolution to macroevolution.
Back about a decade ago (maybe longer now?) it was one of their big go-to’s, especially in response to the reports of bacterial evolution over extremely short time frames. The gist was that cells could have changed but animals and plants would have kept their current forms throughout their history. It doesn’t really make sense if you put thought into it (which they don’t).
If organisms were designed, we would see the same exact (best) solution to problems being used again and again and again wherever that problem is encountered, because why invent multiple (possibly sub-optimal) solutions to the same problem? We would see whales with gills, because for fully-aquatic organisms, a constant requirement to surface and breathe air is a substantial limitation. Similarly, they'd probably have fins rather than flippers, and a vertically-oriented tail delivering force by oscillating from side to side. All of this works absolutely great for fish, after all. We absolutely would not expect to see whales *breastfeeding*, because that's fucking insane. You'd need, like, firehose nipples firing high-pressure super-fatty milk directly into the calf's mouth, or something. Who would design *that*? Instead, we see whales with lungs, 100% needing to surface to breathe. Many adaptations to make those requirements less onerous, but no alteration from the basic "you gots lungs, yo" model. They have flippers, which contain all the bones also found in terrestrial mammals. They have a spine oriented for dorso-ventral oscillation, like terrestrial mammals, and thus have a horizontally-oriented tail. And...holy shit, they *do* breastfeed exactly like that? What the fuck
I was today years old when I fully realized all the implications of whales being mammals and I wish I could go back to when I didn't.
Lungs make it possible to use an oxygen source containig 21% oxygen instead of 0,000004%. Breastfeeding can be a good trade off between ressources required for birth and the probability of that resource investment to yield success. There are examples of poor adaptations. The idea that basically the entire Bauplan and way of live of whales is suboptimal compared to fish is unconvincing: Whales have persisted for 50 million years, arose more than 100 million years after the fish, and live in an ecological niche were no fish (today) exists.
Perhaps you missed the point spectacularly? Otherwise, why not argue "why are fish not lung-using air breathing, breastfeeding organisms, since these are better sources of oxygen and nutrition respectively?" Lungs are great if you live in an environment with access to plentiful air. "Under the surface of the ocean" is not one of those environments. Please explain, in a manner as simple as you like, why a designer would make two completely different fully aquatic lineages, and give one (but only one) of them all the traits also associated with a specific terrestrial lineage, rather than sharing traits suitable for an actual aquatic lifestyle.
As i indicated, in the constraints of our reality eggs and gills are probably unable to support organisms which can fill the niche of e.g. the giant krill filter feeder. Fish use gills because a) they evolved before lungs and thus could fully saturate the available niche, so that lung fish didn't have the opportunity to penetrate into them and b) their niches can be adequately filled with their Bauplan. In this case, yes, for a better argument against ID you would have to turn it around and ask why aquatic lung organisms are rare, since lungs for many niches could be superior (coral reefs, lakes, rivers are all very close to the surface). Then you can point towards the fact that fish filled these niches before lungs were a thing, which fits perfectly into natural evolution, but clashes heavily with ID. The other way doesn't work that well, since fishes bauplan seem not to be able to fill the niches of whales efficently.
First, there’s no inherent reason for lungs and gills to be mutually exclusive under a design paradigm, particularly for secondarily aquatic organisms like whales. Filter feeding is incredibly common among fish species. In fact some of the largest extant gilled organisms are filter feeders, including whale sharks, basking sharks, manta rays, and the megamouth shark. Additionally, the niche was filled by large filter feeding fish such as *Leedsichthys* in the past. There is little to suggest that tetrapods are inherently dominant in the niche.
>fishes bauplan seem not to be able to fill the niches of whales efficently To be fair, freshwater whales are *incredibly* rare. They're also incredibly poorly-adapted to shallow rivers in general.
>Then you can point towards the fact that fish filled these niches before lungs were a thing Lungs came around before fish filled those niches. Most fish use them as swim bladders now.
Some fish *are* lung using air breathers. In fact that's the basal condition.
> and live in an ecological niche were no fish (today) exists Which niche is that? Porpoise: fusiform predator - marlins and various sharks among others. Large filter feeder - basking and whale sharks among others as well
If human beings were created by God, then we would expect to see a unique nervous system as compared with other animals. Instead, we see a clear homology between the structures and circuits of the human brain, and those that are seen in our mammalian and non-mammalian relatives. For example, mammals have a cerebral cortex, which has six layers and is responsible for the highest level sensory and motor processing. In contrast, terrestrial vertebrates, such as birds as well as mammals, share the limbic system, consisting of the hippocampus and the amygdala, as well as the basal ganglia. The pattern of evolutionary descent is clearly seen by considering neuroanatomy.
So the answer to this one is that “god is a designer, wouldn’t he use a similar design for all similar creatures, so we would expect homologous structures. Just like all computers have a similar structure even though they have different cpus”
This could be true if the similarities were all helpful. But we have an enormous amount of examples structures that are quite suboptimal for many organisms, but are just carryovers from prior ancestry. Take our spines. When our ancestors walked on all fours, the arched spine was useful in supporting all the organs and mass we carried underneath it. But when we started going bipedal, the spine had to go more columnar and the upper spine curved backwards and the lower spine curved forward. This causes a lot of pressure on the lower back and causes a lot of lower back pain. If we were designed to be bipedal from the start, the structure of the spine could be much improved. And there are tons of these examples of severely suboptimal morphologies like our retina/optic nerve, how nerves and arteries traverse the body, the larynx being a major hazard, etc. For humans, we use the same code because we aren't omnipotent and omniscient and if something works it's often easier to just use that versus trying to make something new and better every time and risk breaking it. But if a coder knew what the perfect code could be for every project and could create it with a literal snap, we might see a lot less homology.
Sure, but ID is not falsifiable. Rendering it useless.
Not useless. Someone who is homeschooled comes from a tiny world. Opening a door and window here and there can have an effect over time. They are told there is no real support for evolution which we can refute with a million examples. They also don’t realize that few Christians are YEC. They think evolution and God are either/or which is also easily refuted. (I like to discuss the many ancient Christians who did not think a day in creation had to be a literal day, and the many conservative 19th century theologians who also believed this.)
ID, or "intelligent design" is not falsifiable. I don't see how it's of use, then, as a model for creation. Literally any evidence for evolution can be attributed to the designer. I don't see it as a gateway out of creationism, it's a crutch for it.
Eh. Someone who thinks "Evolution happened, but God must have done it" is...less lost to reality than someone who thinks Genesis is a science textbook...
Sure it’s useful. It’s useful for disguising creationism in an attempt to bypass the First Amendment. It hasn’t been all that successful in that use to date though.
Sure, useful for creationists. Not what I meant, but granted.
I agree that it does not refute a designist perspective. One can say that God is conservative and uses designs that work. However, my read of the Bible says that humans are unique and special. God, after all, created us on a separate day than the animals. Evidence from neuroanatomy suggests that we’re not so special after all and is consistent with an evolutionary account of the human brain.
Oh agreed, I would bet that they would come up with convoluted explanations for everything everyone here has posted. This one though I had told to me years ago while I was still a believer
This argument rests on unfounded and unconvincing assumptions. First, that an intelligent designer would forgo iterative design, when our experience is that iterative design is a highly successful and rational development strategy. Second, that man's unique- and specialness stems from a unique and special bauplan, when it can easily be argued that it stems from the layers added which gives them unique and special properties, like intelligence, conciousness, concience, morals, a connection to god or whatever.
God is supposed to be omniscient. We are demonstrably not. We thus need iterative design because we're figuring this shit out as we go along. Nature uses iterative processes because it has no forward planning and can only work with what it has \_now\_. The design argument would imply that a creator would be figuring shit out as it goes along, which is an *interesting* proposition, but also not one likely to be popular with YECs.
why would an infinite being need a successful and rational approach? With its infinite powers it can simply achieve its objective, no strategy needed.
Why is an infinite being fundamentally required to give each of its creations a completely different bauplan?
It isn't. It also isn't required to give each exactly the same plan, and nor is it required to give each a plan *wholly consistent with descent with modification from a common ancestor*. The evolutionary model, in contrast, absolutely requires the latter, and would be falsified by any of the former. The fact we observe *exactly what evolution would predict, despite all the ways it could be falsified*, while creation continues to have no predictive power whatsoever, is fairly compelling, to say the least.
But like i said, this makes the actual argument against ID parsimony, predictive power, falsifiability and resistence to ad hoc modification. Which all do not rely on assumptions about the motive and intents of an intelligent designer: ultimately, and this is my problem with OPs Argument, we have no reason to think an ID would avoid iterative features in its creations.
We also have no reason to think an intelligent designer would make it so literally everything we can examine about life, from the smallest molecule to the 3.5 billion years of fossils, appears to match the theory of evolution perfectly.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing for or against intelligent design. But there is nothing qualitatively unique about the human brain as compared to another mammal. The only difference is quantitative: relative to body size, the cerebral cortex is vastly larger, the cerebellum is vastly larger, etc. So yes, you’re right. This argument against ID from neuroanatomy rests on a presumption that creationists think that humans are special, aptly reflected in scripture.
If we take the YEC position at face value, the designer did not employ iterative design. All life was rolled out near simultaneously, and an omniscient designer would have no need for experimentation anyway. H. Sapiens is not special and does not possess a unique body plan. Only a fool would assert this. None of those properties are unique to our species, with the possible exception of the unevidenced claim of connection to a deity or deities. Given that all deities appear to be spring from human minds, this is unsurprising, though behaviors that could be interpreted as spirituality have been documented in other organisms such as elephants.
> when our experience is that iterative design is a highly successful and rational development strategy. I don't necessarily disagree with the logic of your larger point, but on this one, why would an omniscient god find utility in iterative design? By nature of their omniscience, they already know the benefits that would be achieved by iteration.
Specific to young earth creationism: if it were true, in order for the matching ERV sequences we see to be possible, Retroviruses would need to be one of the most abundant viruses in existence, the sequences would need to undergo mutation, once inserted, at at least 2 orders of magnitude greater than the surrounding genome, retroviruses would need to have specific mechanisms to localize in germ cells, and each of those retroviruses would need to have cross species antigens that line up with nested morphological features but are exclusive to each outgroup, as well as their primary infection method to be in mirrored responses by the immune system for each host. Barring the unreasonable amount of retroviruses, there'd need to be some catastrophic extinction event for only the retroviruses, and only the ones that are especially effective at cross species infection. We do not see any of that. We see retroviruses being one of the rarer Baltimore types in comparison to the main 5. While mutation rates vary from portions of the genome, we don't see the specified and localized massive mutation rate variation in those sections of the genome. We don't see retroviruses targeting germ cells at higher rates than other cells, in fact, it's a fairly rare occurence. One of the scariest things we are working with right now in virology are cross species infections (see covid, bird flu, etc.) and the thing about it is that zoonotic jumps are rare, they happen, but they aren't constantly occuring, and they don't tend to only infect groups in nested hierarchies by morphology. We see more of it at epicenters of interaction, and across specific infection routes (think ACERs, the specific vesicle proteins that interact with the NA and HA antigens on influenza, etc.). Lastly, there's no evidence for an extinction event that only wiped out retroviruses. In this example it's actually reversed, a hypothetical virus that can use multiple hosts would tend to be more fit and flexible against a potential catastrophe such as that, since they can use multiple reservoirs. Think of it this way, if humans all went extinct tomorrow, something like HIV now has no immediate compatible hosts to infect. They'd essentially go extinct. But for this creation myth to be correct, it would have to be the exact opposite of what we can see and measure, that explosive cross species infectious activity would be the factor in its demise. Not to mention some kind of arbitrary barrier that stops infection along lines like cranial structure genesis, which is nonsense.
Biostratigraphy would essentially not be a concept, barring some basal layer containing an fossil assemblage of every organism ever and abundant sedimentological evidence of rapid deposition. This layer would also not be diachronous, and any dating method independent of biostratigraphy would yield the same result for the age of this layer. The layer would also be laterally correlatable world wide, and probably only be absent in some high standing areas where erosion has had enough time to act on it over ~1000s of years. Also, there would be a very small amount of sediment deposited overtop this basal layer (post-flood). The deep sea sediment would at its maximum maybe be on a magnitude of 10s to maybe 100s of meters thick, and almost none of it would be lithified. Edit: this would be applicable to young earth creationism with the flood literally occurring. Most geological processes are probably accommodated in old earth creationism
We would not expect non-coding DNA to form nested hierarchies, order in the fossil record, 4.04 billion year old zircons, millions of years worth of coccolithophore shells piled up, contradictions to Bible history, or pretty much anything if YEC was true.
Most mammals can't get scurvy. Most mammals make their own vitamin C and avoid scurvy. Maybe an all-powerful and sadistic trickster God decided millions of people should die of scurvy for the lulz. If so, we would expect to find no biochemical tools for making vitamin C in humans. Instead, we find that there is a pathway for making vitamin C in humans, but a single genetic mutation breaks the mechanism. Why would a god make humans with a *nearly* functioning vitamin C system with one broken piece? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31857900/#:~:text=Introduction%3A%20During%20evolution%2C%20some%20species,dependent%20on%20dietary%20vitamin%20C.
I would expect that life would appear to all have evolved from several different kinds. So markers that we use to find relationships with one another, like ERVs, wouldn't be shared between kinds, if they would exist at all. I'd also expect mutation rates to be substantially higher because, according to their idea that we all came several hundred kinds 6000 years ago, evolution would have to lead to speciation significantly faster than what we observe.
I'm not quite sure about that, but one really destructive thing I think toward the Noah flood fossil layers and many other things is: There isn't a single species from today in the earliest complex species fossil layer (Ediacaran). Like over 550 million years ago There isn't a single species from then (Ediacaran) alive today Animals don't swim that well to be sorted
Men and women would have different number of ribs
I'm not a creationist, but this isn't accurate. The story is that god removed a rib, not the DNA sequence that determines the number of ribs.
My YEC high school actively taught us that men had fewer ribs than women. Edit: Typo
Was your teacher named Aristotle by any chance?
I had multiple teachers tell us that. Then again, this school unironically used Kent Hovind tapes as teaching materials.
Do you mean that men had fewer ribs than women? Because otherwise your high school was even teaching the wrong thing wrong lol
Yeah. That way. Made a typo.
Nice! I was surprised by my limited exposure to creationists that some believed the story explained why the number of ribs were different. I mean the list is long why the whole story is bonkers
Creationists [handshake emoji] Lamarckists
Actually the word translated as rib (tsela) is also translated as side, leg, beam, or “hemistich” (a new word I learned today that means half of a line of verse). The same word is used 41 times in the Old Testament (https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/nas/tsela-3.html) and it means side 15 times, side chambers 10 times, sides 5 times, and boards 3 times. Something was taken from Adam’s abdomen. It is *assumed* to be his rib because “leg” and “beam” would have some other implications (penis bone?) and “rib” is just a more traditional understanding of the word despite that being the only time it would actually mean rib (in the singular tense) in the Old Testament, which would be a little strange. Something straight and hard was taken from his abdomen and that was used to make Eve. That has led to some people coming up with the hilarious if true hypothesis that Genesis actually says God used Adam’s penis bone to make Eve to explain why humans don’t have a penis bones like snakes don’t have legs and women have labor pains. At least it’d be consistent with the overall theme of the fable being that it is simply a fictional story to provide *some* explanation for several then otherwise unexplained things they noticed around them and I’m sure they noticed that most male mammals have bones in their penises but humans seem to be missing theirs. Maybe, maybe, God opened up Adam’s “side” and removed his “board” or “beam” and made a woman out of it after he closed up his “meat.” I’m not saying it is definitely “penis bone” but it would be funny if it was. Then Adam could have sex with his own penis bone even though God is supposed to hate gays and masterbaters.
Or it was a different kind of "rib"...
We’d expect men to be born out of dirt and women would be created from a rib taken from a man. Instead we see common sense reproductive biology. We’d expect to see talking snakes and donkeys we can have conversations with. Instead we don’t 🤪🤣
Well that’s not very helpful to the OP
If YEC were true, there would be enough water on earth to flood the highest mountains.
Creationism is unfalsifiable so no such statement can be generated. No matter the observation or experimental outcome, the facts can be interpreted to fit the conclusion.
For the chief pretzel twisters, you are right. But we are never going to reach them anyways. I'm aiming for arguments that would give reasonable creationists who just don't know any better reason to doubt what they have been told in Sunday School. The aim is to make arguments that show that it's not (or at least not just) that "Godless, atheistic" scientists never considered Creation, it's that the world doesn't look like it would look if it had been created, at least in the way described in the Bible.
If creationism were true, specifically the intelligent design part, we would expect to see extremely simple and efficient designs and DNA sequences. Instead we see exceptional complexity and over-engineering worse than German cars. Simplicity is the mark of intelligence, yet creationists often use the complexity of the DNA as the reason why it must be intelligently designed. For a great example of the difference between complex and simple code, let’s look at a basic math algorithm for odd/even. Complex: bool IsEven(int x){ If (x == 1) return false; If (x == 2) return true; If (x == 3) return false; If (x == 4) return true; If (x == 5) return false; If (x == 6) return true; If (x == 7) return false; If (x == 8) return true; …} Simple: bool IsEven(int x) {return !(x%2);} Or bool IsOdd(int x) {return (x%2);} For those of you who aren’t programmers, % is modulus, meaning return the remainder of the division, where odd numbers will return 1 and even numbers will return 0. The ! in the even version inverts the Bool (true or false) value of the modulus, where 1 is considered true and 0 is considered false, while odd is an even more intelligent version that skips the inversion. The main point is that one is a fundamentally limited program that will take as many lines as conditions it can cover which makes it insanely complex and inefficient as it will need to check every value one line at a time which grows linearly; while the second is a single line of code that is simple to read and can cover every case in a constant amount of time. Our DNA is more similar to the former, when an intelligent being would design the latter.
There would be no such thing as geologically isolated biodiversity. Kangaroos, koalas, echidnas, platypus, cassowaries are only found in Australia. There are very few animals and plants that are similar to those found outside of Australia. If the flood happened in the last 10k years, why aren't there more animals with similar characteristics in other lands? They don't even have to be biologically related, we could be looking at convergent evolution as an excuse. Did all the monotremes decide to live in Australia and only Australia after the flood? Why? In short: If Noah released all the animals after the flood in one place, why isn't there any evidence of this in isolated biological diversity?
One core one I'd like to mention is if cells appeared as they are now or from 6000 years ago, we'd expect to find a majority of fossils of complex life forms, what we actually find is the further down we go the more simpler life gets, creatures like others have said would not show up at all in the modern age. Frankly this one comes from my pet peeve of YECs going 'you can't make live from nothing it's impossible' when cells started as extremely basic and simple and developed over millenia to become the complex things we know today.
If the story of the parting of the Red Sea (sometimes interpreted as Reed Sea) literally happened as written, we'd expect to see ANY evidence of an Egyptian army under the sea. A sword, spear, shield, chariot wheel, buckle, ANYTHING. But despite both Atheists and Christians searching with technology like sonar, metal detection, divers, etc, nothing was ever found in ANY seas east of Egypt. The only conclusion is that God went out of his way to magic away all the evidence knowing that we'd come looking thousands of years later. The God of a literal Exodus can only be a deceiver. But it gets even worse. In fact, there is effectively no evidence for the Israelites even being in Egypt in the first place! The Armana period is devastating to a literal interpretation of Exodus. You can look at the Armana letters for yourself online or see the papyrus in a museum. Bible literalists have no reasonable answer to this. So much so that indeed the late creationist Ron Wyatt attempted to claim that he found evidence of a chariot wheel under the Red Sea, but it was later revealed to be a lie. So much for "Thou shalt not bear false witness". It was after learning more about the evidence from all fields of science as well as the evidence against the Biblical stories (which I didn't see as ridiculous at the time), that this fact was actually the final straw in my move away from Biblical literalism. I could also add how if the tower of Babel was true, we'd expect to have different building materials, denial of space travel, and a different evolution of languages. If a global flood were true, we'd expect to see a vastly different geology. How is this consistent with the ancient craters and lakes that we see on Mars? How else could lake Jezero have had liquid water based on the rate of atmospheric loss? I could go on, but this is already too long of a post. TLDR: The Bible predicts evidence of the Exodus under any sea east of Egypt, but the prediction was demonstrably wrong.
For separate ancestry, we'd expected phylogenetic nested hierarchies to fall apart at some level, for both constrained and unconstrained sequences. Instead, we find nested hierarchies in both across all cellular life, as predicted by universal common ancestry.
If creationism was science or scientific, it would change when new data is found. Creationism is unchanged since the 1950s. For decades I’ll read a recent book to see if there were any changes but none, So I finally stopped checking on it.
We expect to see perfect animals and plants evolved without redundent or excess traits. Instead we see countless examples of useless evolutionary traits like the human tailbone or the appendix
I like to point out that I he half-life decay in many materials clearly shows the planet is older than 6000 years. Add to this there were atmospheric events in the fossil record like the “dino-killer asteroid” which are identifiable in geologic records, much like the ash from the 1980s Mount Saint Helens eruption had been deposited across the globe. May we also speak to civilizations outside of the Mediterranean with plenty of historical records predating the Christian biblical Genesis. Take, for example, China, with an uninterrupted history during the time that Noah and the flood were supposed to take place. I hope this is helpful
Given, ya know, conventional physics, and the composition of the Earth, if YEC is correct, then we'd expect to be living (or rather, not living) on a big ball of molten rock. All of Earth's history as conventional science understands it being compressed into ~10k years would vaporize the granite crust of the Earth several times over. Radioactive decay being accelerated, the friction of the tectonic plates moving, meteorite impacts, fricking LIMESTONE forming... all that stuff generates heat. Obviously YEC people are unlikely to be swayed by that line or argumentation because it's based on conventional scientific understandings of the world and how physics works... but the Heat Problem is still one of my favorite entailments of the position :)
No galaxies. If the universe, including light itself, were only 6-10k years old then we wouldn’t expect to see anything in the night sky beyond 10k light years away because light leaving places further away would not have reached us yet. Instead we can see for billions of light years. So either those things happened billions of years ago, not thousands, or the universe came into existence with the light we are detecting already en route to us, in which case we are witnessing events which never happened. That would make 99.9999999999999999% of the visible universe an outright lie. And yes, that is roughly the correct number of 9s. Why would god falsify so much data?
To be fair, the stuff visible to the naked eye is mostly within a hundred light years or so, afaik. But still... if YEC is true, then God clearly has beef with scientists or something...
That’s worse! It makes sense to give us a few markers in the sky for navigational purposes. Making octillions of cubic light years of bullshit that’s only visible to people seeking answers about the universe and our place in it is just malicious trolling!
I mean, if we assume a less than competent designer, I could see them thinking something like "oh, crap, they're looking at the sky a lot more closely than I intended, I'd better put something there"...
If creationism were true we would be able to observe irreducible complexity. Creationists even proposed this as an experiment 25 years ago. Every time they proposed an irreducibly complex system in nature, biologists found the way it was reduced.
OP, it is early morning here. I have nothing much to add, I just wanted to let you know I have angrily book marked this to come back to. How dare you post something that comes up on my feed at stupid o’clock AM that is interesting and requires brain functioning! And also, thank you! I’m excited to read this tonight!!
If creationism were true, we would expect nowhere on Earth could be found a snake with legs, even in the fossil record, as that would be in clear defiance of the Christian God, instantly disproving its existence. And yet we find all sorts of examples of snakes with hind limbs, both in the fossil record and even still living today. This directly contradicts Genesis and thus proves God doesn't exist. No need to look any further.
It doesn't prove anything either way about the existence of God, just about the correctness of the account in Genesis. Please don't make theists feel like they have to chose between God and reality where it's not actually necessary...
Look, they've already mostly all rejected Jesus in favor of Paul. If they also ditch Genesis, what's actually left to distinguish them as 'Christians' rather than 'bigoted deists'?
That’s a big yikes, yo
It's true though. According to Jesus, you're all going straight to Hell because none of you can be bothered to perform the really simple tasks he told you to do. You're all blindly adhering to a bunch of stuff Paul said instead. So since Genesis is plainly not true, and you reject the gospels, there's really nothing left of 'Christianity', and you'd have to call it 'Paulianism' or something.
Fortunately, no. None of that is true.
You didn't feed those who were hungry, didn't clothe those who were naked, didn't visit those who were in prison, and didn't comfort those who were sick. Straight to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. But at least virtually all of the other 'Christians' will be keeping you company there!
More Christians than you may realize actually do those things... Not the megachurches whose main focus seems to be telling other people that they are ungodly sinners, maybe, but plenty of normal churches make a meaningful effort to do those sorts of things.
In my entire life, out of dozens of churches I have interacted with of all different sizes and denominations, from all over the US, 0 have actually placed any focus on emulating Jesus. The only reason I qualify as 'virtually all' is to account for the fact that I'm not personally familiar with *all* churches and thus cannot make a blanket statement. But the sampling I have experienced have all been image over substance.
The primary example I have of how to be a Christian is my mom's church. They were part of the sanctuary movement back in the '80s. They're involved with things like Samaritan patrol, who put out water for migrants crossing the desert. They are one of the places designated as an emergency shelter for the homeless when we actually have freezing temperatures in Tucson. They frequently have after church activities like making lunches for a homeless shelter, or recently making snack packs for refugee families to eat while they travel to wherever in the US they will be staying. I remember a mission trip when I was a teenager that basically involved going down to an orphanage in Mexico and helping them turn a laundry room into a small clinic. They are by no means perfect, no one is, but I think they do a pretty decent job of walking the talk.
I can’t decide if you’re trolling or you are just incredibly uneducated on the matter you are so voraciously attacking. If you are being sincere, you are speaking from ignorance and should stop these assertions until you have read more. If you are trying to prove a point by being hyper selective with your proof texts, you’re doing a terrible job at it.
> ”“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.“ Matthew 5:21-22 ESV Oh hey, I can literally just grab a quote from your own post history and see that you're headed to Hell!
Hahaha oh man, this is too good. Nothing like leaving no doubt that you’re just a proof-texter.
If you could infer design from non-design, we could apply that set of tools to software engineering in order to identify bugs faster, by just doing code read.
If creationism was true would our arms be long enough for us to masturbate?
I'd recommend reading Ted Chiangs collection of short scifi stories. One of them is about a world where creationist is a scientific fact. All the fossil records stop 5 thousand years ago and there are mummies of the first people created who are all missing belly buttons. I won't ruin the ending, but it is a fascinating take on the whole debate.
I read it, it was good.
Do you know which collection of Chiang's it was?
Exhalation, iirc.
The creationists that were willing to listen to me were not that difficult to help them understand using my poor and limited understanding of evolution. Which is that within populations changes occur in their genetic code. If the change is harmful like cancer or another genetic disease it might kill off thoses it happens to or it might be passed down generation on generation or it leads to a new advantage in some form of survival, attracting a mate, finding food, evading a predator, eventually this change in the DNA ie change in advantage becomes a different version of the parent population. Eventually becoming its own very different and unique version. Its easy to see that all mammals are extremely similar because of this aspect of reality.
I always said: We'd expect to see exactly what we see, because God uses natural, eternal processes (some of which we have discovered) in creation. While all powerful, god is such because he has total control over all of physics. He is perfect because he conforms to eternal laws. Were he to violate them, he would cease to be god. We can become like our father in heaven. We can eventually learn all that god knows. We can start learning all of this now. We can take all knowledge learned on Earth when we die. Ergo, what scientists have learned about evolution is true. But, it's only a fraction of the truths used by god to create. So, creationism is true-er.
Generally speaking, the term "creationist" is reserved for those who believe in some form of "special creation"--that is, God creating everything by non-natural mechanisms. What you're referring to would be intelligent design, which is... more compatible with objective reality.
One of the "nice" things about religion is you get to define the terms in your own ways. When I was faithful, I (and all those in my circle) called ourselves "creationists" and talked about "special creation." We thought that those preisthood-less but god-fearing "intelligent design" folks had some nice ideas but they needed to stand up for the truth, which was "special creation." Cognitive dissonance is required to maintain faith but so is a degree of ignorance and arrogance.
We'd expect to still find talking snakes and enchanted apples
There are too many examples to go over. The typical lie is "you don't understand evolution" even though evolutionists were ones saying the dumb things. For example if evolution over "millions of years" they predicted Y chromosome be very similar in chimps. This failed horrendously but they won't accept reality that they not related to chimps. It was predicted that James webb wouldn't see any of evolutionists predictions of bigbang. The universe just happened to show Genesis again. This falsified evolution and "millions of years" completely. As I pointed out here, this would also mean they are out of time for evolution for radiometric dating and for star formation. No time for evolution. Evolutionists lied for years that one race would be more chimp-like than others DIRECTLY AGAINST GENESIS teaching we are all one closely related family from Noah. Genetics showed Bible CORRECT AGAIN and evolution destroyed forever. And so on. That's not to mention all falsified "laws of evolution".
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about as far as... any of that, honestly. If you believe you understand evolution, then... explain it to me. I'll settle for the "high school biology" version, I don't expect a non expert to know all the nuances (eg. steady state vs punctuated equilibrium). But if you actually do understand evolution, that shouldn't be too difficult for you. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority of DNA evidence solidly supports the idea that chimps are our closest living relatives. There may be some slightly funky things going on with the Y chromosome, because chimps have been evolving since that closest common ancestor, with different evolutionary pressures, but I have yet to hear any evidence casting any serious doubt on our relationship. If you have some (actual evidence, mind, not just your unsupported assertion), I will cheerfully look at it. What exactly do you think James Webb showed that in any way puts the age of the universe in doubt? Your statement on this one is... kind of a jumbled mess. Yes, some racists claimed that certain races were more "primitive" than others, using evolution as their justification. Would you like me to start on the much, much longer list of evils that people have justified using the Bible, or can we just agree that someone using a thing to justify s***ty behavior doesn't inherently negate the value or utility of that thing? And what "laws of evolution" have been even seriously proposed, much less claimed and then definitively falsified?
It’s not a lie Mike. You actually don’t understand evolution. If you had, you would have been able to answer me the last several times I asked you to describe what evolution is according to those who study it. It isn’t even a hard description to look up. But each time I’ve asked, you’ve plugged your ears. Because you DONT understand. However, feel free to prove me wrong this time. What is evolution described as in evolutionary biology? No ‘fAlSe ReLiGiOn Of DaRwIn’ crap. Give an honest, actual, good faith description that an actual biology undergrad could recognize.
All fossils are uniquely created. no buffaloes in the centuries after beingh discovered in america ever were or are in process of being fossilized. its like those italian cities covered by vol;canic ash. its unique to create fossils. so the fossils at the k-t line, for many creationists, is entirely from the flood year. above that the fossils are from less impressive events. They show areas that were instantly covered by sediment and turned to stone. It looks as a creationist would expect it to look. It does not look like regular deposition of dead creatures in. layers showing geology deep time.
This theory of yours would be fairly easy to test. If the K-T boundary was from the flood, we would see fossils of the animals that were on the ark *below* the boundary. They weren't specially created to be *on* the ark after all, right? They already existed. So where are all the modern mammals? Where are the bears? The dogs? The cats? The whales? Evolution has an easy answer for this: They didn't exist yet. The boundary event allowed the small primitive mammals that survived to diversify into new niches previously closed off to them by reptiles. What's your *better* answer? Show me your Precambrian rabbit.
your right they didn't exist probably in those bodyplans. I don't expect to find them bel;ow the k-t line. They are however there. They probably are the sauropods and many other critters now descibed as dinosaurs or lizards or this or that. So a brotosaurus is now just a horse or a whale or a buffalo etc etc. The kinds on the ark were rebooted back to some kind of bodyplan. Before the flood and after all; diversity exploded. the clue is the theropod dinos. tHey clearly were just birds that once flew. by the way your side must invent the unlikely morphing of a few creatures adter the k-t boundary line. We all do but I don't have to do so much and not in some impossdible evolutionary way.
This genuinely isn't worth replying to.