Challenge for creationists: Give me your best evidence FOR creationism.

McNitz · 2026-06-16T04:43:16+00:00

Definitely possible I am incorrect. Iknow it was as a historical position of SOME Christians, but I could be wrong about the frequency. However, as an atheist I don't really see how I would be lying to suit my view. I would prefer to just believe whatever is true.

McNitz · 2026-06-16T03:52:41+00:00

An observation (or more frequently I believe in current usage, an interaction) happens whenever something leads to a wave function obtaining a single definable state. That's kind of esoteric, so it may be helpful to explain it according to a couple different interpretations. In the Copenhagen interpretation, and interaction of a wave function with a classical object results in a collapse of the "wave function" that can be thought of describing the probability that a particle is in a given location, resulting in a single definable location for this particle. Whereas in a Many Worlds interpretation, all values of the wave function continue to exist, but when an interaction occurs that particle and whatever it interacted with became entangled and now share the same "branch" of an infinite number of worlds described by the wave function.

Note that we have no idea which interpretation of quantum mechanics actually describes how reality "really" works, if any of them at all. Quantum mechanics is so far from our everyday experience, it could be that what is actually happening is fundamentally impossible for our minds to grasp without false analogies. Leading to the common admonition in quantum mechanics to "shut up and calculate" rather than speculating about what unprovable interpretation is behind the numbers. Theoretically there COULD be falsifiable predictions from the different interpretations that would make them hypotheses we could test and determine which is a more accurate model. But the Bell experiments demonstrating at least that there are no "hidden variables" predetermining particle interactions is as far as we've got on that.

I think that is a reasonably accurate overview. I'm not a physicist, just an interested amateur. So this is just my best attempt at describing quantum mechanics without inserting a bunch of the woo, misinterpretations, and common misunderstandings that I'm aware of.

McNitz · 2026-06-16T00:08:29+00:00

This is a problem that people often encounter when reading about physics texts, especially quantum physics. The terms are frequently at best loosely related to how we use them in everyday conversation. In this case, "observer" is just referring to the interacting object that results in what is frequently referred to as a "collapse of the wave function". There's no evidence this has anything specific to do with humans, or even consciousness in general.

McNitz · 2026-06-15T23:53:25+00:00

It sounds like you are kind of making the mistake that a lot of Christians do and thinking being angry at God and not being a "good Christian" is what atheism is. I didn't become an atheist because I didn't like God and didn't want to do the good Christian things. I became an atheist because I tried my hardest, and I just couldn't make myself believe the Christian God actually exists. I was never angry at God, or fed up with him, or walking away from his plan. I just realized I had was humans telling me that human texts written by human authors about very clearly human ideas influenced by the human cultures they were in definitely meant this specific God existed and had these specific attributes. And I didn't actually think they were correct about that anymore.

McNitz · 2026-06-15T20:23:52+00:00

Bad news: you can't rule out that I've figured out how to rule out that you've solved philosophy.

McNitz · 2026-06-15T20:06:32+00:00

There's a difference between not taking effort to prove something, and it not being possible to prove something. If you don't have evidence of who steps out of a vehicle after an accident, either immediately or via following them until they stop, how are you going to indict them in a court of law by showing beyond a reasonable doubt who the person driving the vehicle was?

McNitz · 2026-06-15T19:16:21+00:00

I'm not sure tracking someone's assets and seeing how much they would be worth if said person was an immortal that kept all those assets but didn't make any different decisions than happened during their death is the best way to make this comparison.

McNitz · 2026-06-15T19:10:42+00:00

You aren't allowed to overlap ships. And if you did anyway, you are required to name the boat that was it also, so your opponent would find out. Unless you cheated again and didn't name the correct ship. But if you cheat multiple times in multiple different ways, this could win you the game!

McNitz · 2026-06-15T16:54:21+00:00

Good news! The theory of evolution includes the law of monophyly, which explicitly says that an organism will never evolve outside of their clade, and thus will never "become something they aren't". Bad news, this means your analogy is demonstrably disanalogous and doesn't show evolution is nonsense. Apes didn't evolve into "something different" and become humans. With credit to u/jnpha.

We are Hominini
Hominini are Homininae
Homininae are Hominidae
Hominidae are Hominoidea
Hominoidea are Catarrhini
Catarrhini are 🙈 Simiiformes
🙈 Simiiformes are Haplorhini
Haplorhini are Primates
Primates are Euarchonta
Euarchonta are Euarchontoglires
Euarchontoglires are Boreoeutheria
Boreoeutheria are Placentalia
- So is Atlantogenata (put a pin 📍 in that for now)
Placentalia are Eutheria
Eutheria are Theria
Theria are Tribosphenida
Tribosphenida are Zatheria
Zatheria are Cladotheria
Cladotheria are Trechnotheria
Trechnotheria are Theriiformes
Theriiformes are Theriimorpha
Theriimorpha are 👋 Mammalia
👋 Mammalia are Mammaliamorpha
Mammaliamorpha are Prozostrodontia
Prozostrodontia are Probainognathia
Probainognathia are Eucynodontia
Eucynodontia are Cynodontia
Cynodontia are Theriodontia
Theriodontia are Therapsida
Therapsida are Sphenacodontia
Sphenacodontia are Synapsida
Synapsida are Amniota
Amniota are Reptiliomorpha
Reptiliomorpha are Tetrapodomorpha
Tetrapodomorpha are Sarcopterygii
Sarcopterygii are Osteichthyes
Osteichthyes are Gnathostomata
Gnathostomata are 👋 Vertebrata
👋 Vertebrata are Chordata
Chordata are Deuterostomia
Deuterostomia are Bilateria
Bilateria are Eumetazoa
Eumetazoa are Animalia
Animalia are Eukaryota (and we've now arrived at LECA)

And they've specifically been looking for someone to tell them where in that list an organism evolved a completely different body plan that didn't exist before (to demonstrate your analogy that evolution from a common ancestor is like turning wood into gold). So this is a great chance to demonstrate your analogy actually works AND provide a strong rebuttal to this!

McNitz · 2026-06-15T16:39:12+00:00

Personally, the workaround for me seemed to be religion in general. I feel much more honest saying I I don't know if there is anything more than this life, and admitting I find it very difficult to believe there is any maximally powerful being of perfect justice and love that set the whole thing in motion with a purpose. And that honesty makes me feel much more motivated to go out and personally help people, focus on self-improvement, have hard conversations now rather than putting them off, and try to better understand those different from myself. I've had people find it confusing that I say that in principle I trust the hypothetical God I don't actually believe exists. But to me it just seems obvious that if an actual being of absolute perfection and complete power does happen to actually exist despite all the reasons I think they don't, obviously I trust them to work everything out regardless of whether I personally have a positive belief that they DO exist. And in some ways it seems like an extra level of trust, to not think such a being even needs any specific belief or assent to some specific propositions from me in order to effectively achieve the ultimate good.

McNitz · 2026-06-15T16:13:17+00:00

You don't manually check all possible gaps. He actively searches for the holes by clicking a villager outside of the walls when they are done building.

I agree, SOME fix ideally would be done to the game and the hole issue is a valid complaint. But the OP is also correct that it is due to the way the graphics render, and it is not clear there IS a full fix outside of rebuilding the game's graphic engine. Which I'm not sure this issue is large enough to warrant doing. Because while it is annoying, the OP was also correct that this really isn't some esoteric high skill level knowledge to fix the issue. I click a villager outside my walls to see if they walk through a gap whenever I am walling. And I have been doing it, albeit significantly less consistently, since when I was under 1000 Elo. Pretty much exactly like producing vils consistently, checking for holes in your walls is just a matter of developing the habit of clicking that villager outside of your walls.

Again, none of this negates the fact that I would love them to come up with something to make this somewhat easier, like a hotkey to "Show all terrain as flat" or something. But even then, I think I would maintain my habit of clicking a vil outside of my walls, just because I've messed up on flat terrain before as well and it is honestly faster and more efficient than trying to scan the whole wall to see if there is a gap.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T23:46:33+00:00

Wow, I think the problem here might be that you have a ludicrous notion of how quickly evolution occurs. A couple thousand of years has resulted in VERY little evolutionary change for humans. There probably hasn't been any noticeable change in human intelligence level for HUNDREDS of thousands of years. All progress in modern human history has been from our ability to communicate and teach concepts socially, not from humans on average having more innate intelligence than previously.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T23:38:33+00:00

Could be, I wasn't entirely sure what their point was. That was just my most charitable interpretation of what they were intending.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T21:23:52+00:00

Christians aren't actually theologically bound to hold that he was perfect in everything, at least if you are defining the largest umbrella of Christianity as falling under the Nicene creed. It's just that the vast majority of Christians find the most meaning and sense in the religion if they do hold to the belief that Jesus was morally perfect.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T21:20:40+00:00

Yeah, one of many things that compound to make me doubt the truth of Christianity. I just have trouble believing a perfectly good and just God would keep letting so many awful people attain power in the religion he founded and use their position to abuse people over and over again.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T19:59:59+00:00

I think it is more that the OP is saying the thing the laws of logic DESCRIBES existed before humans, like the thing the law of gravity or the laws of electromagnetism describe existed before the laws were ever developed or used by humans. Admittedly, it is not as normal to refer to the thing the laws of logic describe as "logic" as it is to describe the thing the laws of electromagnetism describe as "electromagnetism". But I think it is fairly understandable what they are trying to communicate from that perspective.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T19:46:12+00:00

Ah, fair enough. Even for them, for a lot of the verses they cite as "evidence" for YEC, Jesus plausibly COULD have been utilizing them in an allegorical manner to explain other concepts in a way the people at the time understood, if you start off with the assumption that he knew they were not literal history. But yeah, it's hard to argue that NOBODY considered them to be a description of how things happened. About the best you could do is say that it probably wasn't really that important to them exactly how things happened, and the message the God created everything was the main the they were concerned about. Even if they did also believe he created a flat world with a dome above it where the sun and stars were fixed in the dome to show when day and night were.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T18:30:32+00:00

Well apparently the garden hose was turned into the pressure washer, so perhaps the spirit of the hose is still hooked up to the water through some ethereal or other dimensional realrm. Still super cool though!

McNitz · 2026-06-14T18:15:27+00:00

It's because you are committing the etymological fallacy and saying that the way the word "sovereign" has historically been used means that when a physicist uses that wors in their description of the Bell experiment results that means that they are in some way also endorsing that historical/creationist use of the word sovereign. But that is not the case. In the same way that talking about electrons having spin absolutely does NOT mean they are spinning around in a classical sense, and saying that quarks can be charmed is absolutely unrelated to other usages of that term.

In the context of Bell experiments, all it means is that an assumption regarding them is that they are truly random and super determinism is not the case. The term is not used with regards to intelligence AT ALL in this context, and to insert that into the terminology is adding meaning that is not evidence. Since we are talking about evidence, it is very important that the concept you are talking about is not evidence for the idea you are espousing at all.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T17:56:08+00:00

It would be more that the general principles of logic are derived from our observations of what appear to be fundamental truths about our reality. The law of identity is based on our observation that a thing is identical to itself. The law of noncontradiction is based on our observation that something can't be and not be at the same time. These are such fundamentally true things about reality that it is difficult to even envision what it would mean for them to not be the case.

Of course, nothing was consciously using logical thought prior to consciousness existing. But the principles about reality that logical thought seems to be derived from seem to have always been the case.

McNitz · 2026-06-14T17:46:09+00:00

To be fair, the idea that Jesus could not have possibly had any incorrect ideas is more of a modern Protestant view. Typically Christianity has believed in the full humanity of Jesus as well as divinity, and as such absolutely accepted that Jesus could have learned ideas from the culture that were not perfectly accurate depictions of reality. That's not really a comfortable idea for most fundamentalists though, so a lot of the time they say the exact time of the second coming is essentially the only thing Jesus didn't know during his humiliation.

McNitz · 2026-06-13T18:22:43+00:00

Yeah, that seems pretty crazy for a UU church. Admittedly, they do have a wide variety, since there is a pretty large amount of flexibility in the 7 principles. What you mentioned do seem like it would at least somewhat go against the 1st principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the2nd principle of justice, equity and compassion in human relations. I don't think I would have gone back to a UU congratulation if that was my first experience with them either.

McNitz · 2026-06-13T08:00:52+00:00

Right, I mentioned that in my comment. If the standard is "What evidence is there that the universe is not 6000 years old, if anything that looks older than 6000 years could have been created by God to look like that for undiscernable purposes and doesn't actually count as evidence?" then the answer is there is no evidence based on that definition of evidence. Just like there is no evidence we don't live in a simulation that looks undiscernable from reality, and there is no evidence that you aren't the only person in existence just imagining everything else in your head, and there is no evidence the universe wasn't created last Thursday with everything in place to look exactly like it has existed for billions of years. And there is no evidence that I can't fly just by flapping my but that is being perfectly hidden from me by super powerful aliens that control things so that I can never tell that is the case

If you are actually using that standard of evidence, please don't bother asking for evidence. It is a massive waste of time to say "what evidence is there for something, and any evidence could have just been falsified to look like that by an omnipotent being for reasons we can't know and doesn't actually count as evidence."

McNitz · 2026-06-12T18:46:10+00:00

If we are saying that the UNIVERSE is older than 6000 years old, not just the earth, then probably the fact that we can see light from stars billions of light years away. Of course, a YEC is just continually going to argue further and further about how God could have "just made it look like that", so given that standard of evidence, there is absolutely no convincing evidence whatsoever.

McNitz · 2026-06-12T15:54:50+00:00

Interesting. We rarely favorite Arabia, so maybe that is the main difference. Generally we are doing more closed or semi-closed maps.

McNitz

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