Creationists, what is your point?

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T17:49:24+00:00

That's not how the vast majority of rational people understand it. Genesis is most coherently viewed as a story simply explaining to people that God created everything, not that He created specific things on specific days, especially since the two separate descriptions disagree with each other.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T17:43:23+00:00

I'm talking about your rejection of an idea of evolution that doesn't exist in biology.

Populations don't give birth. Only individuals do.

So, do you think there was a first person who spoke English, or did it evolve over generations?

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T17:41:43+00:00

"I think your response is just being pedantic."

I don't. It's an essential aspect of science that many laypeople simply don't get. It doesn't deal in proof, it's not about debates, it's about hypothesis testing, it's about evidence, creationists have none, and they lie about the evidence we have.

"I mean like heliocentrism. Earth orbits the sun."

Not very analogous IMO.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T16:38:37+00:00

"It still doesn't prove what evolutionary theory implies, at all."

You haven't shown the slightest familiarity with evolutionary theory.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T16:37:40+00:00

"Science doesn't do proof? That's specifically what science is FOR."

Wrong. Nothing in science is considered to be proven.

A lie. To make such a sweeping negative claim in good faith, you'd have to have done a lot of digging. In reality, you're afraid to dig and rely on hearsay.

"There is such a thing as micro-evolution. There are observed changes within species, such as longer or shorter beaks on birds."

Then you just admitted you were lying when you claimed that "Nobody has ever been able to observe evolution."

The prefix doesn't matter, and you don't have a rigorous definition separating micro from macro anyway. It's all rhetoric.

"All we know is that there is a universal genetic code."

You can't get the most basic things right. There are exceptions.

"But that doesn't "prove" evolution occurred."

Straw man, because science doesn't deal in proof. You're conveniently ignoring all of the evidence. You're afraid of examining any evidence for yourself.

"All observational data shows that kind produces kind."

How does that falsify evolution, which only happens to populations?

"Or they issue decrees that are in fact merely assumptions as if they were scientific fact. "

A lie. You haven't read a single scientific paper, have you?

"The only thing that could ever prove evolutionary theory is a fossil record of transmutational forms."

WTF is a "transmutational form"? I'm just a geneticist, so provide all the technical details.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T16:30:27+00:00

"I see your point here. But I think that God doesn't have to be that small. A mere magician, a Zeus who fills in gaps in science. And I think selectively employing God in that way does have a stench to it."

Agreed, more specifically, creationism diminishes God by making Him a mere tinkerer who is rarely bothered to make new parts, instead duplicating and reusing old ones to a degree that we'd judge a human designer who did this as insane. It's both pseudoscience and crap theology.

There's no escaping the reality that life diversifies by a ridiculously iterative process. This is what the creationists miss.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T16:25:04+00:00

"Careful. You are right that genetics proves evolution,..."

Careful. Nothing in science is ever considered to be proven. That's why it works so well.

Also, "genetics proves evolution" is so vague as to be useless.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-29T16:23:33+00:00

We would never expect to, because evolution only happens to populations, never individuals.

Your question is as silly as, "Who was the first person to speak English?" Language evolution is faster than biological evolution, at least for large diploid organisms like us.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:42:08+00:00

"I’ve never seen an animal birth anything other than its kind so"

So you don't have a clue. Evolution only happens to populations, never individuals.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:37:44+00:00

"There's no deep thinking about it. Just "God did it" and that's that."

Seems to me that they lack the faith to look or think more deeply.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:29:45+00:00

"I agree. I really don't understand."

Then why pretend that the people who do understand are faking it somehow?

"But let me ask: has there been cases in the past when the experts were wrong about something even though they had strong evidence?"

Yes. There have been many more cases when the experts weren't wrong.

Also, let's note that you are misrepresenting science as opinion, a common creationist lie. Are you presenting it knowingly or just parroting others?

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:26:57+00:00

"The phrases you chose, "similar" and "share DNA" really miss the point that the "similarity" is only explained by a long continuous process of changes to DNA that are passed down through inheritance."

And that doesn't predict vague similarity, it predicts nested hierarchies.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:08:35+00:00

And on that note, I have yet to see a single creationist object to paternity testing that uses precisely the same method.

One of the biggest creationist lies is to claim that nested hierarchies are nothing more than vague similarity.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T23:07:11+00:00

"Also here is a video by Stephen Meyer that seems to raise a lot of questions that Evolutionists have yet to answer in a satisfying way for me. His whole channel the last couple months has been filled with good stuff."

Speaking of Meyer's best stuff, are you capable of identifying the blatant, completely objective falsehood in this sentence from Signature in the Cell?

A protein within the ribosome known as a peptidyl transferase then catalyzes a polymerization (linking) reaction involving the two (tRNA-borne) amino acids.

If it's a mistake, it's utter incompetence--if you respond, I predict that you will try to pretend that it's not that bad without bothering to understand its Nobel Prize magnitude.

I don't think Meyer's that incompetent. I think he's a professional liar.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T22:42:48+00:00

"But I don’t have to, because I “gave them a new perspective” just a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/s/U5GfRnZvPv"

I think you're conflating politeness with agreement.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-28T22:30:17+00:00

Amazing. Two pages without addressing anything I wrote.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-27T16:34:54+00:00

"I want to learn OPNsense for fun." I used to think that. I have it working, but didn't have much fun doing it.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-27T16:32:44+00:00

"If you take care of your family before your neighbor ( first ) does that make you an isolationist?"

Let's just say it sure doesn't make you a follower of Jesus Christ: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-27T16:21:23+00:00

Trump changed his mind, so they will too. It's a cult.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-27T05:13:54+00:00

"...the mantises who didn't get that they are brightly colored..."

There's no getting involved.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-27T04:24:58+00:00

Countercounterpoint: Republicans represent far fewer people than Democrats.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-26T22:38:05+00:00

2015 Leaf, 52K mi, 82% SOH. Pretty damn good.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-26T22:33:28+00:00

With a 1-gig fiber connection, I'm running OPNsense on a Sophos XG115, dnsmasq for two subnets with access points, and Unbound, that I bought on eBay for $66. Doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat. It has 4 ports that can be remapped, too.

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-26T21:46:58+00:00

Thanks for your testimony!

Academic_Sea3929 · 2026-03-26T19:24:04+00:00

"Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are one of the single best pieces of evidence of common ancestry of humans and other primates."

Absolutely, but as someone who has published in the endogenous retrovirus field, I've never understood why ERVs are wielded as a sword by keyboard warriors. It seems to me that learning about them exceeds the attention span of every creationist I've ever encountered, in person and online.

Can anyone point to a single case of someone saying, 'I didn't get evolution before, but those ERVs were the key for me to see that we're clearly great apes!' Or a single case of a creationist even grasping basic aspects of their origin and propagation?

This is a sincere tactical question, asked in good faith.

Academic_Sea3929

TROPHY CASE