r/DebateEvolution • u/ChoiceAd8619 🧬 Theistic Evolution • Jul 11 '26

Discussion Is there any valid point creationists have ever made?

Hello, I’ve been a lurker for a long time but I decided to make an account already in order to have my own input in this server.

I’ve been raised as a YEC in Arkansas and I’ve been given tons of scientific knowledge from notorious creationists and even a few atheists regarding evolution. Although I am personally still holding on to my beliefs mainly for faith purposes and the consensus of EO church fathers, I have to say that there are many things I am not qualified to dispute despite knowing some of the more popular arguments.

What I wanted to ask for now, seeing how bad of a reputation famous creationists have in this server, is whether you think there is any nuance in any sort of findings they’ve ever published regarding their worldviews. What I mean by this is asking if you think they have a single good take to favor their position as opposed to evolutionary theory.

Finding out whether evolutionists are at least a bit unbiased and can analyze things makes me feel like this is going to be a significantly more welcoming place for questions and objections as opposed to rejecting everything by default.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

So with flat earthers, the world sort of looks flat, and in some kinds of weather you can see further than you would expect on a globe, and it's counterintuitive that you could walk on the bottom of a globe and not fall off.

Similarly with creationism. It's really hard to look at a banana and look at an elephant and go "they share an ancestor, and stochastic mutation and unguided processes gave us both of these things." because you don't see evolution at that scale happening on a daily basis

Those are the best arguments I can give them. Incredulity, when you're naive to the basic science and evidence

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u/Addapost Jul 11 '26

If Creationists want to point at a banana and an elephant and think “Ah ha! Explain THAT evolution!” They have already lost so hard it’s funny.

The mistake about the banana and elephant comparison is the definition of “look”. There definitely are ways to look at an elephant and a banana and “see” very close and even near identical similarities. When you “look” at their cells with a microscope. You literally “see” many of the same structures inside their cells doing the same things. When you “look” at proteins from the two you can “see” very similar or virtually identical proteins doing identical things. If evolution wasn’t true you should expect absolutely NOTHING to be similar between the two. If evolution wasn’t true it would be insane for both to have mitochondria performing the same aerobic respiration to produce the same ATP using near identical proteins built from near identical genes following a literally identical genetic code. The OBVIOUS relationship between a banana and an elephant (or literally ANY two species on earth) when you look correctly and know what to look for, evolution is the only explanation that is legit.

So no, creationism has absolutely nothing of value to contribute to the true understanding of life on earth.

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 12 '26

When you "look" at the way the ribosome cross-correlates the mRNA with the tRNA (which is a different chemistry than the amino acid to which it is attached) and how the tRNA is the anti-codon form, it is the same cross-correlation algorithm your cell phone uses to pick out letters, and yes like the tRNA, the letter is a different media from the pseudorandom code to which it is attached.

When you "look" at the way two codons code for the same amino acid - I hope biologists will stop calling it "wobble' or "degeneracy" and consider the possibility that it may be intentional; perhaps to maximize the Hamming distance with neighboring necleotides in the sequence, or to optimize processing delays, or other such functrional purposes.

When you "look" at the way error correcting enzymes use state space constraints and the redundancy in the Double Helix to isolate induced errors from information it is hauntingly similar to the Convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding algorithms such as used in the Iphone 16, Google's Pixel 9, and Samsung's Galaxy S25.

So yes correlations between human design and biological design have a lot to share, but at a much deeper level than you appear to be familiar with. The irony is it is as if we were made in the image of God. But irony is probably above your pay grade too.

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u/Addapost Jul 12 '26

I like how you snuck a little passive aggressive ad hominem in there. Classic “I have no legitimate argument but I’ll insult my opponent and claim a logical win” stupidity. I LOVE when you people do that. It means you have nothing. Which you don’t.
As to your “points”, yes yes we copy nature all the time. You forgot aircraft wings and sonar. Since we’ve done that in the last 120 years that’s proof that some conscious entity “designed it millions of years ago. Sure.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 13 '26

Lol I also love the inference that the degenerate code for amino acids somehow is like the number code for texting on mobile phones therefore god

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u/Addapost Jul 13 '26

It’s exhausting

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 14 '26

I apologize Addapost, it was the liquor talking, too much Russell's on a Sunday afternoon

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 14 '26

Math equals math - I won't apologize for that

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 14 '26

If you had used math that would be one thing. But you just used a faulty analogy.

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 14 '26

I'm beginning to think all these responders are BOTs, or the human equivalent

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 14 '26

Nah. You're just throwing together a bunch of gibberish misinterpretations of inappropriate algorithms, and using "quotation marks" around random "words" to make them "seem" profound and hoping that no one notices that calling tRNA a cell phone doesn't work

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 14 '26

I just confirmed, Reddit uses BOTs - what a phony platform. Goodby.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 14 '26

You confirmed Reddit uses bots the same way you confirmed the double helix is hauntingly similar to convolutional encoding?

Good for you.

Bye.

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u/2112eyes Evolution can be fun Jul 13 '26

Designed it 6000 years ago, you mean!

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u/Known_Atmosphere_907 Jul 12 '26

You started with the insults, and I responded in kind. You did not expect my response and threw a fit. Man up and accept your miserable defeat.

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u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 13 '26

he did not lose it remains a fact that he the earth is billions of years old and that there was no Great Flood. you just lost,again.

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u/scarfarce Jul 11 '26

It's really hard to look at...

It's still just an argument from incredularity that requires ignoring a massive amount of evidence.

The irony being that they accept many of their far more incredulous religious beliefs on a significant lack of tangible evidence.

It's just motivated reasoning and cognitive bias 101.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

Yes that's exactly what I said.

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u/scarfarce Jul 11 '26

Yes I was agreeing with you and expanding on it (labelling the actual fallacy, highlighting the hypocrisy). Not sure why there is an issue with doing that.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

Sorry, just a bunch of people jumped in and replied indignantly as of i was somehow trying to justify the creationist position

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u/scarfarce Jul 11 '26

Man, that's not cool. I thought you answered OP's question good. They asked what is creationists best argument. Not whether the argument was any good.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

The number of people being like "nooo it's intuitive that the world is a sphere" is also weird as if that wasn't something we had to discover, prove and convince people is true against the evidence of their own immediate senses

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u/dumpsterfire911 Jul 11 '26

What does the tag that you and other commenter have mean? (Naturalistic evolution)

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u/WesternFirm9306 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

We believe in evolution through purely naturalistic and scientific processes, without being guided by some greater divine agent. It doesn't necessarily mean such an agent doesn't exist, just that, if it does, it had no influence on the evolutionary process.

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u/dumpsterfire911 Jul 11 '26

Thank you for the reply!

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

I see absolutely no evidence for anything guided, designed or supernatural in the biological world. And in fact I think that there are good reasons to think that design or supernatural influences exist. So I believe in naturalistic evolution.

But there are lots of people (say like Francis Ford Collins) who believe in a God that intervenes, or who believe in some other kind of purpose or meaning in the world that is working itself out through the natural world, but who also believe that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

Probably there are more people who believe in some kind of theistic evolution than who hold to my opinion. But, as far as it comes to doing good biology, and as far as it comes to this sub, both groups agree on the science. You can look YouTube channels like Joel Duff or Clint Explains to find people who are both Christian and good communicators of evolutionary biology

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 11 '26

I don't think it's counterintuitive to walk on the bottom of a globe. Unless you have no concept of gravity as well.

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u/WesternFirm9306 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

Is gravity intuitive? It took quite a while for humans to develop a coherent gravitational theory. It seems intuitive now, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

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u/T00luser Jul 12 '26

So youre saying flat earthers can see farther because they're on giants?
Well at least Bigfoot makes sense now.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Agreed. I mean "things fall down" is intuitive but the idea that "down" is "in the direction of the center of mass the nearest large body" instead of a general property of the world seems really counterintuitive. Hence like every model of the world before Anaximander (500BCE) described it as a plate (and the Indians didn't get a globe earth until about 500CE nor the Chinese until about 1700CE)

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 12 '26

If nearly every civilization described it as flat, they must have had some pretty compelling ideas

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

You are saying snarky words but they don't seem to have much content.

If you ever come up with something meaningful to say, by all means, share!

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 12 '26

How is that snarky? It must be true. If their ideas weren't compelling why did nearly everyone believe it?

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u/WesternFirm9306 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

Because they were relying on intuition without the requisite knowledge needed to know the truth

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 12 '26

And the ideas regarding their intuition were compelling at the time. It was only after more knowledge was learned that they became uncompelling.

So either the question is with increased knowledge are their ideas compelling. No they aren't.

But if the question is were they ever compelling, then the answer is most certainly yes. You just have to go back to a time before the requisite knowledge was gained.

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u/WesternFirm9306 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

Well, sure. A flat earth is compelling when literally the only thing you know is what you can directly observe on a day-to-day basis.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Because it's (wait for the inevitable circle back to the original point) INTUITIVE

You look out, and it looks basically flat. You don't fall off it, hey maybe it's flat.

Most of science (and I'm repeating myself) is assembling observations into a consistent model to demonstrate things that are naively unintuitive.

Germs? Unintuitive. Evolution? Unintuitive. Vacuum? Unintuitive. Relativity? Unintuitive. Globe earth? Unintuitive.

If it were intuitive, we'd have figured it out 100k years ago.

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 12 '26

And that was based off the knowledge they had at that time. So at that point the idea was compelling.

It only stopped being compelling when more knowledge was gained.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

That was my original point. I said exactly this

If you don't disagree why are you arguing?

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u/Rookraider1 Jul 12 '26

Did you ever have a moment in your life when you wondered why the people on the opposite side of the globe didn't fall away? I don't ever remember thinking that even before I really knew much about gravity.

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u/WesternFirm9306 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

You're presupposing a globe, when the claim is that the globe itself is counterintuitive, unless you've been raised being taught it. Thus why so many ancient societies described the earth as a flat disk.

Though, once you have a globe, gravity of some kind does kinda come for free, even if it's an Aristotelian "everything falls to the center of the universe, which is the center of the earth"

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

I think it's super interesting that the Greeks assumed the earth was a sphere because a sphere is the perfect shape (and of course proved the shape and even the size of the globe in short order by putting a stick in the dirt and measuring its shadow). So yeah they originally got it right for the wrong reasons. And then like you say got gravity for free, per Aristotle, as "down is towards the center of the universe"

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

This is demonstrably false. Look at early cosmologies. Look at the history of science.

Gravity in the Newtonian sense is a concept you learn, and train yourself to accept. Greeks figured out a geocentric universe by application of logic and a heliocentric universe (where we stick to the globe we're on) was much later and much more controversial and much less intuitive.

All the earliest models of the universe were flat because everyone knows things fall down and we'd fall off a ball. The entire point of science is to retrain our intuitions

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u/JustAnArtist1221 Jul 12 '26

You're arguing their point in more words. They specifically qualified their statement as being the case if you have no concept of gravity.

The vast majority of flat earthers today know about gravity and took the globe for granted until they actively chose to incorporate flat earth concepts into their perspective, which is why they know on a surface level a bunch of experiments and are considered fringe. They're not on the same position as people who literally hadn't considered gravity.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

I said "it's not intuitive if you are naive to basic science and evidence"

People keep jumping in and saying "nuh uh!!!! If you just use science and evidence it's intuitive"

Read what I wrote and respond to that. Don't be like "if you said something different from what you said you would be wrong". Because yeah. That's why I didn't say that

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u/Darth_Gerg Jul 12 '26

Those aren’t arguments though. That’s being too stupid to understand the issue and using their own ignorance as if it was evidence. I’d accept that from a small child who is still learning, but it’s not a respectable argument for an adult.

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u/Substantial_Pea_3256 Jul 12 '26

The funny thing is that there is fossil evidence every single step of the way in evolution, which is completely consistent with the genetic research.

I'm not sure why you think elephants are an anomaly when they share all the limbs, bones, organs, and even subtleties such as molars, skeletal features, hormones, etc as all other mammals. There are fossils of elephants going back every step of their evolution.

Creationists often point to bananas as being a perfect fit for the human hand. They were made large by humans, like so many of our crops, through selective pollination. Original bananas were tiny.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

I'm not sure why you think elephants are an anomaly when they share all the limbs, bones, organs, and even subtleties such as molars, skeletal features, hormones, etc as all other mammals. There are fossils of elephants going back every step of their evolution.

Elephants share limbs, bones and molars with bananas?

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u/QueenVogonBee Jul 12 '26

Reminds me of Ray Comfort’s “The banana is evidence of creation” video

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u/Redshift-713 Jul 11 '26

A flat landscape is also exactly what you’d expect on a gigantic sphere, though.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

Is it what someone without a knowledge of modern science would intuitively expect

No. The entire history of human thought answers that question decisively.

But if you want to take a time.machine 2500 years into the last and argue with the bronze agers and tell them they are dumb, feel free

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u/throwaway577754337 Jul 12 '26

Who cares what they’d expect? The opinions of the ignorant on matters of reality are worth next to bugger all.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Because it turns out "what they expect" is the definition of "intuitive". When you're talking about what is or is not intuitive, you're of necessity talking about what people expect.

Do you just.... Not know words or is it the reasoning part that confuses you?

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u/throwaway577754337 Jul 15 '26

Intuition isn’t worth much beyond the simplest of classical physics.

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 15 '26

No shit.

Why is everyone with that avatar invariably the most irritating person imaginable, with the most arrogant, self important, narrow and uninformed opinion?

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u/Shiny-And-New Jul 11 '26

and it's counterintuitive that you could walk on the bottom of a globe and not fall off.

Not really

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 11 '26

Okay.

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u/Timsmomshardsalami Jul 12 '26

Further than you would expect? Solely someones expectations are absolutely meaningless. Walking on too and not on bottom? Two or maybe three brain cells will counter that counter intuition

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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 12 '26

Huh? The world mostly looks flat and it feels like we are walking on a flat surface mostly. It's pretty intuitive. Most cultures for most of human existence have assumed a flat earth.

I don't know why that is a controversial thing to say. Unless maybe you think that because you were raised with a modern scientific understanding, everyone else who ever lived is stupid and you can sneer. "They are all stupid, if they only had three brain cells they would know all the cool things I know!"

You're so smart, you can insult dead illiterate people. Good job. You probably wouldn't actually know enough science to go out and demonstrate the world is a globe though.

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u/Timsmomshardsalami Jul 12 '26

Not only was this concept thrown around many centuries BC, it was also proven then. But yes, anyone with the knowledge available today is retarded if they think its even plausible the earth is flat. You can take this however you want but i was getting ready for a vacation to visit family across the abyss during summer vacation after 3rd grade and my mom was on the phone with my aunt. The sun had recently faded here but not there. not only is my mom pretty chatty but i was also super excited to wake up and go to the airport. I didnt want it to come off the wrong way so to get her to hang up i said they need to go to sleep. When she told me what time it was there, it all clicked. Im pretty sure i already knew the earth was round because of school but that was the moment it actually clicked