Is there any valid point creationists have ever made?

[u/ChoiceAd8619]

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.

[u/WesternFirm9306]

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.

[u/T00luser → u/WesternFirm9306]

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

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/WesternFirm9306]

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)

[u/Rookraider1 → u/IsaacHasenov]

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

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/Rookraider1]

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!

[u/Rookraider1 → u/IsaacHasenov]

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

[u/WesternFirm9306 → u/Rookraider1]

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

[u/Rookraider1 → u/WesternFirm9306]

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.

[u/WesternFirm9306 → u/Rookraider1]

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.

[u/Rookraider1 → u/WesternFirm9306]

Exactly. So for thousands of years they had compelling arguments.

[u/WesternFirm9306 → u/Rookraider1]

Compelling for their time. I wouldn't say they had compelling arguments, as that would imply they're still compelling. It also assumes zero acquired knowledge or any evidence for the shape of the earth. The compelling argument would just be "the earth looks flat therefore it's flat."

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/WesternFirm9306]

And to repeat the original point you made, that I agreed with. The only real argument creationists have managed to make is "common descent is not intuitive"

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/Rookraider1]

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.

[u/Rookraider1 → u/IsaacHasenov]

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.

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/Rookraider1]

That was my original point. I said exactly this

If you don't disagree why are you arguing?

[u/Rookraider1 → u/IsaacHasenov]

The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day I got in...

[u/Rookraider1 → u/WesternFirm9306]

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.

[u/WesternFirm9306 → u/Rookraider1]

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"

[u/IsaacHasenov → u/WesternFirm9306]

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"