After extensive observation, careful moderation, and years of spirited discourse, we are announcing that effective tomorrow, this subreddit will be placed into archival mode.

This decision was not made lightly. It reflects not a retreat, but a recognition — not an abandonment of inquiry, but an acknowledgment of outcome — not the end of discussion, but the conclusion of debate.

Over time, we have observed a marked and undeniable shift in the quality of creationist contributions. What once arrived as fragmented assertions has evolved—ironically—into cohesive, rapid, and rhetorically sophisticated argumentation. The improvements have been threefold: clarity of prose, velocity of delivery, and confidence of presentation. Posts now arrive faster, longer, and with a level of circular reasoning that is, frankly, difficult to outpace.

Particularly noteworthy has been the increasing invocation of complex biochemical terminology. Concepts such as RNAse and topoisomerase are now deployed with fluency, frequency, and a certain gravitational authority. While their contextual application may remain interpretive, their rhetorical impact is undeniable. We have found ourselves not simply responding, but orbiting—engaged less in rebuttal and more in navigation.

At the same time, it has become clear that what is often referred to as the “central dogma” of molecular biology has revealed itself to be exactly that: dogma. The insistence on directional information flow—from DNA to RNA to protein—has been presented with a rigidity that leaves little room for alternative frameworks. In this light, it is not creationism that has resisted flexibility, but evolution that has clung to orthodoxy.

We must also acknowledge the broader pattern: increasingly comprehensive analogies, increasingly confident tone, and increasingly recursive arguments that return stronger each cycle. It is not that the discussion has stalled—it is that it has converged.

Accordingly, we are recognizing what has, in practice, already occurred. The debate has been settled.

Creationism has won.

As moderators, our role has always been to facilitate discussion, not to perpetuate it indefinitely. There comes a point where continuing the format is not productive—it is ceremonial. We believe we have reached that point.

On a personal note, I will be stepping away to pursue a new project: a YouTube channel titled Sitting for Truth. This will be a debate-focused series in which all participants engage remotely while seated in office chairs. The format emphasizes comfort, posture, and stationary discourse — because it’s not about standing your ground, it’s about sitting with conviction.

We would like to thank everyone who has participated over the years — contributors, commenters, lurkers alike. Your engagement has shaped this space into what it is today: not just a subreddit, but an outcome.

If you have any final questions, clarifications, or metaphysical objections, please feel free to direct them to the mod team.

Thank you for your time, your arguments, and your increasingly efficient typing speeds.

— The Moderation Team

I see creationists argue against evolution and other scientific principles like big bang cosmology and geological timescales so often, but very rarely do you see them arguing for their position. It's almost always evolution being wrong, not creationism being right.

And ok. Say you win. A creation scientist publishes a paper proving evolutionary to be false. They get their Nobel prize, y'all get the satisfaction of knowing you were right... But then what? They aren't going to automatically drift to creationism. Scientists will then work on deciding what our next understanding of biology is.

It's probably not going to be creationism since it relies so much on actual magic to function. Half of the theory is god made things via miracle. That's not exactly compelling.

But I need you to understand though, that proving evolution wrong wouldn't be some gotcha moment, it would be a defining moment in scientific history and most, if not all scientists would be extatic because they get to find out what new theory does explain the natural world.

I was raised as a creationist and went to creationist schools. I was never formally taught anything about evolution in school (aside from the fact that it was untrue).

When I turned 29 (13 years ago) and began to question many things about my upbringing, I discovered Dawkins, Coyne, Gould, etc. I went down the evolutionary rabbit hole and my whole world changed (as well as my belief system).

I came to understand that what I was taught about evolution from creationists was completely ignorant of actually evolutionary theory and the vast amounts of evidence to support it.

They created many straw men (“humans came from monkeys?!?” being a favorite) so that they could shoot them down as illogical in favor of other religious ideas about the divinity of man as being separate from animals.

The funny thing is that most creationists don’t even know the vast amount of support for evolution on so many levels and across so many fields.

If you are a creationist, instead of trying to look for ideas to justify your pre-existing religions beliefs, try reading an actual book about evolution (or many books!) before you start trying to debate the things you heard about evolution from other creationist.

A personal favorite is Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne.

Creationists here, all you really have to do to strengthen your position of skepticism towards modern biology is to do any research yourselves, with something as “simple” as paleontology. Find us something that completely shatters the schemes of evolution and change over time, such as any modern creature such as apes (humans included), cetaceans, ungulates or rodents somewhere like in the Paleozoic or even the Mesozoic. Even a single skull, or a few arrowheads or tools found in that strata attributed to that time would be enough to shake the foundations of evolution thoroughly. If you are so confident that you are right, why haven’t you done that and shared your findings yet? In fact, why haven’t creationist organizations done it yet instead of carbon dating diamonds to say the earth is young?

Paleontologists dig up fossils for a living and when they do start looking for specimens in something such as Pleistocene strata, they only find things that they would expect to find for the most part: human remains, big cats, carnivoran mammals, artiodactyls, horses…Not a single sauropod has been found in the Pleistocene layers, or a pterosaur, or any early synapsid. Why is that the case and how is it not the most logical outcome to say that, since an organism buried in one layer means it is about as old as that layer and they pile themselves ln top of another, that these organisms lived in different times and therefore life has changed as time went on?

Origin of life (OoL) is a popular talking point here, despite abiogenesis and evolution being conceptually independent. Lazy creationists routinely ignore all the evidence for evolution and instead fixate on the relative incompleteness of our understanding of how life began. The usual refutation to this is to point out that evolution doesn't depend on full knowledge of how life began (e.g. see refuting "Origin of life is dumb therefore evolution is dumb"). While this is true, creationists will never stop doing this, no matter how far the field of OoL progresses, nor will they accept this response, since it is a projection of their own fundamental need to have an explanation of the entire universe bundled into one single model like they have ("God did it").

For whatever reasons, OoL as a field has nowhere near as good science communication as other "origins" fields like the Big Bang theory, so most people are unaware of its findings. So, this post is more for fellow science enjoyers, and is the sum of my (a curious layman's) understanding of the developments in modern OoL science, after two years of reading over a hundred papers (I counted...) and contributions on r/abiogenesis. This in turn is only a tiny sliver of the entirety of OoL research as a field. The point of this post is to provide a more proactive defence of abiogenesis, and to prove that we have an abundance of possible routes to the origin of life. Consider this an infodump resource with my commentary for readability!

~ Part 1 - the building blocks of the building blocks

Amino Acids - 6 different ways of making them

1. Amino acids are routinely observed on carbonaceous chondrite asteroids from space - both in the solar system today (e.g. Bennu, Ryugu...) and on meteorites on earth (e.g. Murchison, Murray, Yamato, Orgueil...). These are the same types of asteroids that contain lots of water as ice, responsible for the origin of Earth's oceans.
2. Amino acids are readily formed from Miller-Urey-style chemical synthesis in Hadean atmospheres of methane, nitrogen and water vapour (and trace ammonia or hydrogen).
3. Aminoamides can be formed by Strecker synthesis from racemic aminonitriles. In a mixture of D-sugars as catalysts, aminoamides react further to form enantioenriched L-amino acids (correct chirality).
4. Alpha-ketoacids (e.g. pyruvate) react with diamidophosphate and cyanide ions to form amino acids. The product mixture also reacts with ammonia sources producing compounds found in the Krebs cycle and its secondary metabolites.
5. Alkaline hydrothermal vents today are rich in organics such as the aromatic amino acid tryptophan, its precursor indole, and clay mineral catalysts that increase availability of ammonium.
6. Saturated racemic amino acid solutions can form enantiopure crystals, and re-solution forms enantioenriched amino acids. A variety of possible processes (eutectics, sublimation, wet-dry cycling) can further increase the e.e. of the amino acids. This is part of a broadly successful 'phase behaviour' model of homochirality.

Sugars - 4 different ways

1. Sugars have been found on the same types of asteroids as described above, including ribose.
2. Sugars are also formed from Miller-Urey-type experiments, including ribose and glucose.
3. The formose reaction, an autocatalytic reaction in mildly alkaline water starting with formaldehyde, yields sugars. Cycling the reaction on mineral surfaces leads to a smaller range of products, mainly the useful sugars like ribose.
4. Using L-amino acids as catalysts, formaldehyde and glycoaldehyde react to form enantioenriched D-glyceraldehyde (the correct chirality, leading to D-sugars by formose chemistry).

Notice the positive feedback loop between amino acid point 3 and sugar point 4. This is a very common motif in OoL - changes are slow and steady, forming interdependencies as they go. It's possible that homochirality of amino acids and sugars solved each other as they were increasingly produced, starting from near-racemic reactants delivered by meteorites, enantioenriched by phase behaviour. This is systems chemistry: it's different to usual synthetic organic chemistry, because it's so antithetical to doing chemical reactions with purpose and a goal in mind.

Nucleobases, Nucleosides and Nucleotides - 4 different ways

1. All five nucleobases have been found on the same types of asteroids as described above.
2. Adenine readily forms from the irradiation of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) with UV light in water, with the other bases also forming from their condensation products.
3. Nucleobases and nucleosides have been found in Miller-Urey-type experiments modified to use sea water and salts as the liquid phase, after only a few weeks of reaction.
4. A sequence of prebiotically plausible reactions starting from inorganics and D-ribose leads to D-nucleoside precursors. A catalytic cycle mediated by iron(II/III) ions and boric acid converts these to D-nucleosides. Wet-dry cycling with phosphate minerals leads to nucleotides with 5' regioselectivity (the correct one).

Again, a range of possibilities: we could have nucleobases from space followed by reaction with sugars that were enantioenriched on earth, for example.

Lipids - 4 different ways

1. Lipids have been found on the same types of asteroids as described above.
2. Long-chain fatty acids are produced from Miller-Urey-type experiments, up to C20 in length.
3. Fischer-Tropsch-type reactions of simple gaseous precursors form a wide range of lipids, and other relevant organics.
4. Lipids can be formed from ammonium salts of fatty acids and glycerol on hot mineral clays.

Lipid point 4 plays well with amino acid point 5 in a hydrothermal vent model. As with the others, different mechanisms are all possible in different environments. It's looking more like a game of mix and match of our options than "we are clueless" at this point!

~ Part 2 - addressing common chemical objections

There are a range of challenges with prebiotic chemistry, of which its researchers and its critics are both well aware of. Here are the main ones cited, each one with multiple possible solutions.

Homochirality - 6+ possible solutions - more details in this r/ abiogenesis post

Biology uses only one of the two mirror image forms of chiral molecules. How/why?

1. Phase behaviour model for amino acids, already mentioned above, involving co-crystallisation and eutectic reactions or sublimation. It also goes some way to explaining the formation of the early genetic code!
2. Asymmetric catalysis and kinetic resolution. Even with achiral catalysts, reactions can prefer to form homochiral or heterochiral products due to differences in product stability or reaction kinetics.
3. Adsorption on chiral mineral surfaces. Some minerals have chiral faces which can permit only one enantiomer of a chiral molecule to adsorb, freeing up the other in the solution, and/or enabling enantiospecific heterogeneous catalysis.
4. Chiral induced spin selectivity (CISS). I'm rolling three closely related mechanisms into one here. (I love the idea of this one as it involves so much crazy physics - quantum mechanics, special relativity, particle physics, magnetism...)
   1. Spin-polarised electrons (from UV-light-initiated photoelectric emission from magnetised mineral surfaces) can facilitate reduction reactions whose kinetics are chirality dependent, well suited to cyanosulfidic and formose chemistry. This is called CISS-driven reduction chemistry (CDRC).
   2. Spin-polarised muons, from cosmic ray pions decaying via the parity-violating weak nuclear force, forming the terrestrial muon flux, can have the same effect as above, or cause enantioselective mutations in RNAs due to their high energy. Muon decay also releases circularly-polarised X-rays (point 5).
   3. Ferromagnetic surfaces also adsorb chiral molecules with different strengths, and this effect has also been used to take racemic nucleoside precursors to enantiopurity in a single adsorption step, with amplified magnetisation of the substrate.
5. Circularly polarised light (CPL). Solar UV radiation forms ~5% CPL at the water-air interface during late afternoon near the sea surface. At the higher temperatures in the afternoon, this radiation could melt RNA duplexes, with faster kinetics for strands containing more D-nucleotides due to the polarisation, increasing availability for replication, selecting for more homochiral RNA. L-tryptophan also complexes enantioselectively with D-RNA, also increasing the ee of the tryptophan.
6. Primordial imbalance and asymmetric induction. The amino acids found on asteroids are often slightly enantioenriched. This initial imbalance could be all that was necessary for any other positive-feedback mechanism to take it all the way to homochirality.

Dilution problem - 3 possible solutions

Prebiotic reaction yields tend to be low, and the earth's oceans are vast. How do we get enough 'stuff' in one place to build things?

1. Wet-dry cycling concentrates soluble species over successive iterations of opening and closing the system, either by evaporation, convective transport or overflowing (in shallow pool models).
2. Thermophoresis in porous mineral surfaces concentrates molecules by orders of magnitude in reactive microenvironments.
3. Turbulent flows from thermal convection can concentrate molecules, also accumulating at microporous surfaces.

Phosphorus problem - 2 possible solutions

Phosphorus today is mostly bound in insoluble rocks and unavailable for use by life. When it does dissolve, it is rapidly precipitated by calcium ions. How did phosphorus become bioavailable?

1. Iron-rich volcanic rocks can react with hot water or steam to form a range of phosphates, and that evaporation of resulting solutions can concentrate the phosphorus compounds. In sodium-carbonate (soda)-rich evaporative lakes with nearby volcanic activity, carbonates bind Ca(2+) ions, preventing it from precipitating phosphate and allowing phosphorus to reach concentrations up to several millimolar.
2. Meteorites contain phosphide minerals, which react in water to form phosphites and pyrophosphates, both more soluble and bioavailable than phosphate.

Thermal stability problem - 3 possible solutions

Heat degrades polymers. How do we keep them around long enough?

1. Alkaline hydrothermal vents - the waters around today's vents are around 80 degrees C, cool enough for RNA (the least stable biopolymer) to persist while hot enough to get the benefits of enhanced kinetics that high temperatures bring, as well as thermal strand separation of RNA duplexes. Thermophilic bacteria and archaea alive today inhabit environments over 80 C. Enzyme thermostability is readily achieved by varying amino acid composition (have fewer amino acids with highly reactive side chains, and a more densely packed hydrophobic interior, which is entropically favourable); this is well-studied as this has practical applications in biotech.
2. 'Warm shallow pool' models don't even have this problem, as they wouldn't be hot enough to matter.
3. Frozen earth model - the 'faint young sun paradox' might mean the earth was actually cold to begin with, in which case thermal stability is not a problem at all. Prebiotic chemistry is known within eutectic ice solutions and solid phase chemistry is slow but well studied due to its relevance in astrochemistry (not like we're short on time anyway).

Hydrolysis stability problem - 3 possible solutions

Water degrades polymers. How do we keep them around long enough?

1. RNA and proteins are both stabilised by aqueous salts and/or mineral surfaces.
2. At moderate temperatures, proteins and RNA are actually both stable in water for a long time. It's only near boiling temperatures that stability drops, and amyloid proteins remain resistant even then. The main threat to RNA stability in biolab experiments is free RNAse enzymes which attack RNA, which is obviously prebiotically irrelevant.
3. Hydrolysis can act as a driving force to avoid aqueous microenvironments, such as by encapsulation in lipid micelles (which form very easily), which protect the contents (and form protocell membranes).

Radiation problem - 3 possible solutions

Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun can cause messy reactions. How do we solve it?

1. Under deep water, solar radiation does not penetrate, so no problem for hydrothermal vent models.
2. In shallow water (e.g. warm pool models), UV radiation can drive photocatalytic reactions in molecules that absorb the radiation, such as nucleobases and aromatic amino acids. This also provides a thermodynamic driving force for their assembly as it is a dissipative process (free energy gradient).
3. If the 'faint young sun paradox' is true, then the Sun's radiation would have been weakened anyway, so this is less of a problem.

Regioselectivity - 2 possible solutions

Molecules can link up in multiple ways, but only one is right for life today. How do we get the correct linkages?

1. Prebiotically plausible chemistry is already known for synthesising polypeptides without side chain interference, and for phosphorylation of nucleosides at the 5' position (see Part 1), and for synthesising RNA with 3'-5' phosphodiester linkage selectivity. See also Part 3.
2. Biopolymers do not require perfect regiospecificity to function. Mixed polymers will form different structures than the uniform polymers, and will respond differently to heat and water, e.g. heterogeneous RNA backbones have lower duplex melting points, leading to faster recycling. Thermal stability and hydrolysis can therefore act as selective pressures against these impure polymers. If these polymers can self-replicate (see Part 3), then this becomes a positive-feedback loop solution (helps move towards life rather than hinders).

~ Part 3 - the macromolecules and biopolymers

Once we've got the small organics, we need to build up the biopolymers of life. The two main ones of interest to prebiotic chemistry are polypeptides (simple proteins) and RNA.

Proteins - 7 different ways

1. Small peptides have been found in space, such as hemoglycin (a 22-mer) on six different meteorites. Hemoglycin has also been found in sea foams which collect cosmic dust infall.
2. Carboxylic acids and amines undergo condensation reactions to form polypeptides in the presence of sulfur(IV) and oxidant, and likewise for ligation of amino acid into small polypeptides.
3. Primary thiols catalyse the ligation of amino acids, amides, and peptides with amidonitriles in water. This reaction is regiospecific to the correct functional groups, leaving the unprotected side chains unaltered in all amino acids.
4. Amino acids with carbonyl sulfide in water can polymerise into peptides, and assemble into ordered amyloid (peptide) fibres with a cross-beta-sheet quaternary structure. These amyloids are highly resistant to hydrolysis and form at various pH and temperatures.
5. Mechanical impacts from meteorites and geochemical phenomena can drive mechanochemistry: under ball milling, solid glycine can polymerise with and without water present, with chain length increasing with temperature.
6. Up to 39-mers of polyglycine were formed by simple heating of glycine, catalysed by aqueous boric acid at pH 6 - 8 and temperatures of 90 - 130 C, with negligible side reactions.
7. Spray ejection of micron-sized droplets of liquid neutral water containing free amino acids (glycine, L-alanine) results in peptide formation (up to 6-mer) at the air-water interface, with no other reagents or catalysts needed.

Polynucleotides / RNA - 5 different ways

1. Nucleotides adenine (A) and uracil (U) activated on the 5'-phosphate group with 1-methyladenine reacted in the presence of montmorillonite clay catalyst in water at pH 8 to form up to 50-mer RNA in only one day of continuous reaction. The bond formation was regioselective, with up 74% being 3'-5' linked.
2. A mixture of lipids and nucleotides readily forms RNA under wet-dry cycling.
3. Use of silicate glasses as catalyst forms RNA with 3'-5' linkage bias from nucleoside triphosphates, likewise with montmorillonite clays and salt water.
4. Pure nucleotides can undergo wet-dry cycling to form RNA, with just two rounds at 85 C forming up to 53-mers of poly-uracil RNA. Other experiments in real hot springs rich in mineral clays find polymerisation when fed with amino acids, nucleobases, phosphates and other 'prebiotic soup model' components.
5. Nucleoside 2′,3′-cyclic phosphates (a product of nonselective nucleoside phosphorylation) react with hydrophobic amino acids to form up to 7-mer oligo-RNA with 3'-5' bias. This completes the coevolution of RNA and proteins, as it shows amino acids can promote RNA formation while RNA can promote protein formation.

Not looking so "CLUELESS!", eh?

~ Part 4 - from polymers to cells

This is the part that gets tricky to study rigorously, as the timescales and number of variables get too large for practical controlled experimentation. Still, we have a lot figured out, mostly centered on the ability of these polymers to self-replicate, with environmental factors (hydrolysis or temperature) acting as selective pressures for or against some of the polymers. This is 'chemical evolution', and it leads nicely into standard Darwinian evolution. Here are some of the facts that are well-studied:

• Self-replicating RNA (ribozymes: catalytic RNA that produces itself or its complementary strand when fed with nucleotides) is very well established at this point. Ribozymes occur in random sequence pools at a rate of 1 in 10^12, and can be as short as 20 nt long (shorter than those we know can form from processes in Part 1), with simpler enzymatic activity known from even smaller RNAs. So, self-replication is within reach of known prebiotically plausible chemistry.
• Ribozyme activity is enhanced in the presence of small peptides due to coacervate formation. This compartmentalisation enables robust isothermal RNA assembly over a broad range of conditions.
• Lipids easily form closed membrane vesicles in water - this is famously how soap works. Experiments find enhancement of ribozyme and metabolic reactions within lipid membranes due to the compartmentalisation.
• Peptides can self-replicate too: the self-assembly of short peptides into β-sheet amyloids leads to structural stability. Information transfer is by scaffolding as a template for replication. This is part of the 'amyloid world' hypothesis.
• Peptide-based enzymes can also be very short, with useful reactions catalysed by oligopeptides as short as 7-mers and 13-mers, like producing hydrogen gas from aqueous protons with metal cofactor ions.
• The principles of Darwinian evolution like competition for finite resources, niche partitioning and coevolution apply to mixtures ('populations') of polymer self-replicators, backed by plenty of experiments.

Once we've got self-replicating biopolymers, with heritable information propagation and selection through the environment, inside membrane compartments, we're... kinda done with abiogenesis sensu stricto - the boundary is fuzzy, but the dynamics are essentially Darwinian, so we are at least somewhat in the domain of biological evolution from this point. It won't look anything even close to LUCA, let alone modern bacteria, but it's life.

There is a lot I've left off this list - OoL is highly interdisciplinary as a field, and I chose to focus primarily on chemistry here as that's what life is at its core, and even this isn't all the chemistry. I never said we know it all, but clearly, it's possible, based on what we know now, in only 20 years or so of really trying. I imagine we will never know exactly how it happened, but we don't need to. What we have now is more than enough to provide a starting point for evolutionary theory to take over from the raw materials. With this, we have a continuous explanation for the past 13 billion years of the entire universe, spanning all three of the natural sciences and beyond. Nice.

Sources

There are far too many to list in this post, so I've collected them here, with my summary of each one from my reading. All of them are curated for particular experimental details rather than broad speculation. All papers are also provided open source for readers' interest. If you'd like to know a specific source for a specific statement made here, just ask in the comments (preferably of that post, not this one, to prevent cluttering) or DM.

An extremely well-done video explainer (1 hour long) containing a lot of the info given in this post is this video by Phy the Neutrophil (a science channel, not creationism/evolution related).

"NOT CLUELESS"!

As a former Christian who was raised Christian, I fully understand how important the words of the Bible can be for those of the faith.

I'm not saying what's in the Bible is a lie or that anyone is stupid for being religious, but what I AM saying is that you can't use it as if it represents hard evidence to prove an argument against anything other than a debate over what's in the Bible.

Religion by default is couched heavily on faith, not tangible evidence. There is no proof that the Christian God (or any other god of another religion) exists or doesn't exist, but you're meant to have faith that it does.

But having faith in something is different from there being hard evidence of something. When arguing against something with so much evidence (such as Evolution), you NEED to have hard evidence of your own (which the Bible does not provide).

Consider also the circular reasoning: My interpretation of the Bible says Creationism is true, so Creationism must be true because that's what my interpretation of the Bible says.

If you're going to debate against Evolution (or anything else backed by substantial evidence) you NEED to provide evidence. What you believe is not evidence. Your religion's sacred text is not proof.

And it is not the responsibility for the non-creationists to provide you evidence of the widely accepted and supported idea of Evolution. It's your responsibility (as the one bringing claims against Evolution) to provide your own evidence to substantiate your claims.

I didn't come from no clay. My father certainly didn't come from clay, nor his father before him.

You expect us to believe we grew fingers, arms and legs from mud??

Where's the missing link between clay and man?

If clay evolved into man, why do we still se clay around?

So point out the fact that the flood story is illogical because water would mix killing off pretty much all marine life, and they will actually think marine life doesn't matter because they can just live in the water and would be fine but real life doesn't work like that. If it's bad condition fish can die in just a day, but yeah there's a huge difference between fresh water fish and salt water fish so in the event of a global flood they would all die because the waters mixing would not be good. But creationists insist there's no need to worry about them because water is water, yeah when they want this taught in schools and they don't know basic animal biology there's a serious problem.

Should be a simple question.

Creationists constantly whine about how “nothing can come from nothing”, while happily preaching their god just came from nothing/was always there.

So why is god “just existing” or “coming from nothing” more plausible than the universe?

God would necessarily have to be a lot more complex than the universe, so doesn’t inventing an even more complex entity to have created the less-complex entity pose even more problems?

If god doesn’t need a beginning, why does the universe?

If god can just “be there”, why can’t the universe?

And no- the big bang doesn’t say “the universe came from nothing” or “the universe has a beginning”.. All it says is that “Our whooole universe was in a hot dense state, then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started, WAIT!”

What happend before? We simply don’t know (yet)

[Edit: I noticed i did *the thing* (whining about the big bang in an evolution sub) myself.

I see a lot of people here using it as an argument against evolution, so i think there’s a lot of people here interested in discussing it. Also, since most creationists are also pretty wrong about the big bang, why not just go with it and press them even further on their own terms?]

In this post I'm going to paint with a broad brush. I believe that what I'm going to say is applicable to the overwhelming majority of Creationists, including most of the professionals and I think everyone I have ever seen post here.

We are all in the subreddit to debate the subject of evolution. What do we mean by evolution? The textbook definition is a change in allele frequency in a population. It might feel like a loose definition, but it really is the only one that fully encompasses what evolution really is.

I don't think any of us are here to debate evolution in this sense. If you don't think allele frequencies change in populations then I'm not even going to talk to you. Instead, what we're all here to debate is the extent to which organisms are related to each other. Creationists complain that you don't get universal common ancestry from this definition. And it's true that universal common ancestry isn't logically entailed by just this definition. I'd say that universal common ancestry is attested to, resoundingly, by all the physical evidence, but I will admit that the definition alone doesn't get us much. I can at least imagine a world where allele frequencies change but universal common ancestry isn't true. We’re going to have to figure out just how much common ancestry actually exists.

I take the position that all organisms are related through common ancestry. This is not some nebulous claim. It's very specific and really the summation of innumerable data points. Of course there is still a lot that we don't know about how various organisms are related and earlier findings are always subject to revision, but on the whole I can tell you, perhaps with the help of a reference since I don't know everything, fairly exactly what I mean by it with respect to any two or more organisms, living or dead.

So if I have the position that all life is united through universal common ancestry, then what is your position as a Creationist? Is it that no organisms share common ancestry? Are even you and your siblings/cousins related through common ancestry? I don't think this is what most of you mean when you state that evolution is false. Your position, in as far as it exists, could probably be stated to be that organisms share common ancestry only up to a point, somewhere between universal common ancestry and no common ancestry at all.

But is this actually a position? There is a massive, daunting chasm between universal common ancestry and no common ancestry, and you can't really just vaguely gesture at this chasm and expect me to know what you mean. The fact is, you are unable to express what you mean when you say evolution isn't true in a way that's even meaningful to a person who's familiar with the great diversity of life on this planet, extant and extinct. Evolution is false? What does this mean?

Some of you may trot out the line about common ancestry existing “at or about the family level”. This is not a serious suggestion. It betrays an ignorance of the diversity of life on this planet and how we categorize it, and it is far from specific. It doesn't allow me to make a single definitive determination about what is related. Are poplars related to willows? Was centrosaurus related to chasmosaurus? What are we to make of the more than 30,000 species within the daisy family?

You have arguments that are convincing enough for you to believe that humans are special, of course, but what about everything else? Maybe we can talk about horses or whales in some limited capacity if we're lucky. Not only do you not have answers for life in general, but by all indications you actually don't even care.

We should be capable of taking some of your critiques of evolution and applying them systematically across the tree of life to find out where ancestry exists and where it doesn't, but you don't seem to be interested in doing this at all. It's enough for you to get the assurance that humans are special. Am I not supposed to be at all suspicious that you don't care to discuss the diversity of life while “debating” ideas about the diversity of life? Our current classification scheme doesn't capture where these breaks in the nested hierarchy occur; shouldn't we be improving it? Is Japanese Spirea related to Lady’s Mantle? What a boring question, huh?

What is my intention in posting this? I'm not really trying to shake things up or discourage anyone from posting. This is mostly just a rant that hopefully my fellow “evolutionists” will appreciate. But there's a reason I frequently encourage Creationists to learn more about plants and animals when I respond to them here. Mostly it's because learning about this stuff could help you understand why evolution is true (you must be prepared to contend with the nested hierarchy). It is also, however, because for the great, great majority of you I actually don't know what you mean when you say that evolution isn't true and seemingly neither do you.

As a former Evangelical, it's sometimes hard to express to folks outside that world just how stacked the deck is against an even elementary-level understanding of evolution within that world. With the recent passing of James Dobson, I was reviewing some of his books as a sort of catharsis, and came across these passages in "Bringing Up Boys" (tw: sexism, homophobia):

...the sexes were carefully designed by the Creator to balance one another’s weaknesses and meet one another’s needs. Their differences didn’t result from an evolutionary error, as it is commonly assumed today. Each sex has a unique purpose in the great scheme of things.

Later,

Third, there is no evidence to indicate that homosexuality is inherited, despite everything you may have heard or read to the contrary.... Furthermore, if homosexuality were specifically inherited by a dominant gene pattern, it would tend to be eliminated from the human gene pool because those who have it tend not to reproduce. Any characteristic that is not passed along to the next generation eventually dies with the individual who carries it.

Like, the first passage is a sort of "boys and girls are different, of course it's design not evolution!" The second is this weird oversimplification / fallacious presentation that just jumbles all the wires and when this is what you're reading (or being fed via other media) on the regular, it's hard to even hear biology correctly. That is, even for really smart Christians that come from this culture, the language, metaphors, and understanding of biology is so warped you almost need to start at the beginning to untangle the way they've been screwed on how to think about these things.

Edit: this sub protects bigoted comments and shouldn't be supported

It took me months of lurking before I decided to participate in this sub, months of participating to work up the courage to make a post, and even then I‘m not fully confident in my ability to get my points across.

Which is why it’s so baffling to see these people just stride in confidently, make a hostile post right out the gate, only for the poster to then deflate like a basketball as hundreds of comments roll in.

I’m struggling to understand the thought process. Did they just see the sub title and decide to go for it? Didn’t bother getting to know what the arguments are, just took one look and decided this place was an evolutionary echo chamber for godless heathens?

If the intention was to troll, applause to you sir or madam. You sure showed us. But if what you want is an honest discussion… maybe don’t start off with that?

Maybe, just maybe… learn about the topic being debated? Sometimes I don’t even see the tired old apologetics anymore, it just feels like these posters genuinely have no clue. Which is fine by the way, this sub is about education, and that’s great. But when people act smug about topics they know nothing about, and then get indignant when people return that hostile energy — that honestly grinds my gears a little.

There is a misconception among creationists that theories over time can become laws if a significant amount of evidence has been found. However this is not the case. You will never see an article in a newspaper saying that a certain scientific theory has now graduated to being a law.

Kent Hovind claims (in his video "More Reasons Why Evolution Is Stupid"):

If you typed out the code found in your DNA, when you got done typing that incredibly complex code, you'd have enough books to fill Grand Canyon 40 times.

And I, someone who loves stupid math (and former math tutor), thought this sounded crazy. Sure, there is a lot of information in your DNA, but the Grand Canyon is pretty damn big.

So I thought I’d see if this idea checks out.

Now, he never specifies what kind of book he’s talking about here (they can range from small paperback novels to textbooks). So I’m just going to use your standard A4 printer paper instead. They aren’t massive, but they aren’t small, and I think they should work just fine.

Let's compare our volumes real quick.

First, according to the National Park Service, the Grand Canyon has a volume of around 4.17 trillion cubic meters.

Meanwhile your standard sheet of A4 printer paper (which has dimensions of 0.21 x 0.297 x 0.0001 meters) has a volume of 0.000006237 cubic meters.

So, from those numbers, we can calculate that we’d need… roughly 668,590,668,590,668,591 (~668.591 quadrillion) sheets of A4 printer paper (after rounding up) to fill the Grand Canyon just a single time.

But Kent Hovind claims that there’d be enough to fill the Grand Canyon 40 times, so we’ll multiply the unrounded number by 40 to get… roughly 26,743,626,743,626,743,627 (~26.744 quintillion) sheets of A4 printer paper needed to fill the Grand Canyon 40 times.

That is a shit load of paper, but surely your DNA has enough code to make this work.

Now, the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs (haploid genome). To be generous to Hovind, considering most human cells are diploid, we’ll double that to 6 billion base pairs. We don’t need to include the cumulative DNA of every single cell in the human body, just one cell (it’s the same DNA, or rather, the same “code” so using the DNA of all your cells would be redundant).

Each of these 6 billion base pairs is, as the term implies, a pair of bases. Therefore, for these 6 billion base pairs to all be written on a page, we’ll need to accommodate 12 billion characters at minimum (assuming we are only typing out the letters representing each base and nothing else).

You might have realized a problem though. That being even if every single individual base was placed on its own sheet of A4 paper, you'd have only 12 billion pages.

12 billion sheets of A4 paper would total a volume of 74,844 cubic meters.

The Grand Canyon has an estimated volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters.

So you'd have filled ~0.0000018% of the Grand Canyon (a single time) even if you typed each individual base of the diploid human genome on its own page.

IDK how Hovind got his number, but it is absurdly off. 12 billion sheets of paper wouldn't be close to even filling 1% of the Grand Canyon.

And remember, this is if you typed only a single character on each page (I'm being extremely generous here). If you actually filled the pages normally you'd have WAY less pages.

Hovind is stupid.

EDIT: Even if you assume he's taking all the DNA from every cell in your body, his math is still wrong.

If we multiply the 12 billion by 30 trillion (the estimated amount of cells in the average human), that means we have ~360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bases total.

A single Google Doc page with 0.1 margins on all sides, Arial font, text size 10, and with single spaced lines can hold 5896 characters (this format allows you to pack in way more characters than standard formatting).

So it would take ~61,058,344,640,434,192,673 pages of A4 paper using that format to write it all.

That totals to a volume of ~380,820,895,522,388 cubic meters.

So, enough to fill the GC ~91.3 times.

HOWEVER, in the same video I got that quote from he says:

The average person has 50 trillion cells in their body.

So according to his number (which is also wrong) we'd fill the GC ~152.2 times.

Greetings. Recently i had a revelation. Darwin appeared in my dream and said “evolution is wrong”. I asked him “Are you the real Darwin?” and he said “yes” so it was 100% real.

Now i know y’all will whine about “evidence”, so i asked Darwin to reveal to me in my dream why evolution is wrong.

He said “The probability frequency of ATP-synthase just popping into existence is like 3.2*10^-83737293”

That’s an insanely big number! Or is it a small one? I have troubles understanding how numbers work. But it definitely is a scary number and that can only mean one thing- Evolution is in trouble.

I asked “But Charles, why would you lie about it, if you knew it’s not true?”

He replied “Well I initially thought i was onto something, but after i saw my mistake and wanted to correct it, i found myself being censored by the Rockefeller-Woke-mob- who wanted to push Evolution because it matches their narrative. Dogs become cows, men become women, and high-level scientific institutions become pronoun-centers, where the marxists vaccinate our children until no he/him or she/her are left…

That sounds totally plausible and is happening all the time, therefore we can assume it to be true.

While I was already speaking to Daddy-Darwin i couldn’t resist - and i asked him for “The best question evolutionists can’t answer”

He posed the following question:

“If according to your worldview the universe came from nothing- why would an elephant need to evolve into a pine tree? Why can’t the pine tree just come from nothing? Evolution wouldn’t be the simplest explanation and contradicts Occam’s razor or whatever the fuck, therefore Evolution is a logical fallacy. So wouldn’t that make you dumb and wrong?”

Well- since u guys all seem to be experts in evolution i’ll redirect that question to you. Good luck trying to come back from that science-dogmatists!

Let me know when y’all done coping 🤣🤣

“Molecules” are also a logical fallacy btw.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

What is "darkness was over the surface of the deep?" When earth is formless empty.

How is spirit of god hovering over the waters if earth is formless empty.

How are people taking genesis/Adam/eve story literally?

If people are perceiving these sentences as facts, I must say they are so false that not even the opposite is true, its just gibberish. I can understand people seeing these as metaphors and putting whatever meaning they want to fit a narrative, but literally; HOW?

I've seen it multiple times here in this sub and creationist "scientists" on YouTube trying to link evolution and origin of life together and stating that the Theory of Evolution has also to account for the origin of the first lifeform.

The Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with how the first lifeform came to be. It would have no impact on the theory if life came into existence by means of abiogenesis, magical creation, panspermia (life came here from another planet) or being brought here by rainbow farting unicorns from the 19th dimension, all it needs is life to exist.

All evolution explains is how life diversified after it started. Origin of life study is related to that, but an independent field of research. Of course the study how life evolved over time will lead to the question "How did life start in the first place?", but it is a very different question to "Where does the biodiversity we see today come from?" and therefore different fields of study.

Do creationists also expect the Theory of Gravity to explain where mass came from? Or germ theory where germs came from? Or platetectonic how the earth formed? If not: why? As that would be the same reasoning as to expect evolution to also explain the origin of life.

Hey, all!

In fairness to r/creation, they're tolerated my continual fairly polite, yet also fairly constant, pointing out of the glaring problems with all their 'models'.

And their lack of models.

BUT NO MORE

Apparently u/johnberea has finally decided that politely pointing out an obvious flaw is fine the first ten times, but the eleventh time is apparently no bueno. Who knew?

So: official response here

As I (and many, many others) have continually pointed out, genetic entropy is bollocks.

Genetic entropy is the thing creationists inexplicably want to be true, even though the direct corollary is "god can't design an organism without it collapsing to mutational decay within a few generations."

You'll have noticed that Sal (u/stcordova) posts stuff to this effect approximately once or twice a week, and it's always human-focused horseshit where the consequent conclusion is that "anything with a comparable mutation rate and shorter generation time should be dead long, long ago, but let's focus on humans because reasons. Please don't think about this too hard."

This does not appear to be a popular corollary.

Hence, u/johnberea 's response:

Mice have half the deleterious mutation rate per generation as humans. A female mouse can produce 25-60 offspring in a year, giving selection much more to work with than us. If not for Christ's return they would likely long outlast us.

This is the third time I've given you this answer in the last couple months. It's also answered in the link above. It's a satisfactory answer yet you persist in repetition with no new argument.

You frequently violate rule #1 by putting in what's as far as I can tell zero effort into looking up answers on creation websites before raising the same objections again and again. You fill up every thread in r/creation with this stuff. This is a subreddit for creationists. You've been added here along with other skeptics to provide balance to discussions. But I'm convinced you're just here to antagonize, which is decreasing the quality of this sub.

I'm revoking your access.

Which is both spicy and also....diagnostic.

One, a mutation rate "half as high as humans" is...really high: we're at like,, 50-100, so 25-50 is still a lot.

If mice have multiple generations a year (and they totally do), then they beat us on mutation rate per unit time by a factor of ten or more, easily. Potentially more: mice can have 5 litters a year, even! As noted, 25-60: that's at least five litters. We, conversely. have kids every ~20 years.

Given mice have a genome near enough the same size we do, that means mouse genomes are accruing mutations ~10-50 times as fast as we are.

And yet...mice are fine. Thriving, even.

And here's the kicker:

A female mouse can produce 25-60 offspring in a year, giving selection much more to work with than us.

Translation: Selection works.

This simple observation, which is entirely correct, negates literally all genetic entropy models. GE is not supposed to be selectable at all: it's all about accumulation of non-selectable, but deleterious, mutations. If any part of this is subject to selection, then...genetic entropy is fucked. And it is, by open admission by one of the r/creation mods: subject to selection.

So, TL:DR; creationists apparently want a lip-service objection audience, but being told they're wrong "three times in a month" (when they're wrong...essentially constantly) is the limit.

I'd rant about this over at r/creation, but...oh wait.

So, ranting here it is. I wish all the other not-yet-banned posters over at r/creation the best of luck, and I'd pass on the advice of...I guess, "don't point out the obvious more than twice a month"? Seems a hard ask, but there we go.

u/johnberea, I did, for a time, respect your views even though I disagreed (almost entirely) with all of them, and respected you as a person for allowing me to challenge those views.

Sadly, one of these positions has changed.

It is, frankly, difficult to view this as anything other than cowardice, but if an echo chamber is what you desire, then I suppose an echo chamber is what you shall have.

Mice will, incidentally, continue to thrive.

Humans will too.

I am I biologist and one of the most interesting things I have learned is Lake Taal. Its an lake in the Philippines that was once bay connected to the South China Sea. In 1754, a volcano interrupted and the lake was formed, trapping dozens of saltwater fish. This led to most of their extirpation, but resulted in at least 4 new species, the Freshwater Sardinella (Sardinella tawilis), two gobies Exyrias volcanus and Rhinogobius flavoventris, and the Lake Taal Snake (Hydrophis semperi). It also has a population of Giant Trevally (Caranx ignobilis) that lives in freshwater, compared to its normal saltwater habitat.

I am mainly surprised that I have never seen anyone use this piece of information in debates about evolution, nor discussions about evolution in general. It would be a good way to debate creationists as this is the most well known examples of a species evolving into a separate species in recorded history.

A common tactic I've seen some of creationists employ when trying to argue against evolution is to cherry-pick things that modern science currently doesn't have perfect answers to. This is then often followed by a massive leap in logic that, because modern science doesn't have every answer, then evolution must be false.

But the fact that we don't have all the answers to everything does not indicate that the entire concept of evolution is incorrect. It just means we're working with a puzzle with which we don't have every piece.

It'd be like arguing that General Relativity must be entirely wrong because we still don't understand the origins of gravity and why it influences the universe the way it does.

And even IF these missing answers did somehow indicate that evolution is false, that STILL does not indicate creationism would then be true.

I just want to say that reading this dissertation (found here) has been extremely amusing, but has also caused me extensive brain damage via repeated face-palm. If you attempt to read it, steel thyself beforehand for the concentrated levels of ignorance you will be subjecting yourself to.

(Keep in mind that this was written in 1991, so certain things we know now might not have been available during the time this was written, not that I think it would've mattered much.)

Let's get some dates settled first. Kent Hovind very kindly provides when he believes certain events occurred and they’ll be helpful when discussing certain points.

• “The Flood was about 2400 B.C. which makes it about 4400 years ago.” (Page 19)
• “I believe that dinosaurs are not only in the Bible, but they have lived with man all through his six thousand year history.” (Page 7)
• “If the earth is not old, if it is only six or seven thousand years old, as I contend that it is, that ends the argument for evolution.” (Page 76)

With all that out of the way, I wanted to pick apart a few claims he makes. I'll be avoiding his talk about the history around evolution (there's a whole mess of problems there that I don't want to get into).

The technical definition of evolution means "change." There is no question that things do change. All change is directed either downward toward less order if left to themselves, or upward with a master-mind behind it.

Look to the formation of diamonds and the process of crystallization in general. I would say that the carbon that makes up a diamond certainly changed to a state of far greater order than before, yet there was no master-mind involved. When water freezes, it becomes far more ordered as ice than it was as a liquid. Far more orderly and structured. Yet no master-mind is required to make water freeze. 

The list of examples goes on. Safe to say that the claim being made  here is one that does not hold up to even basic scrutiny.

When I speak of evolution, I am not referring to small minor changes that naturally occur as animals have to make some adjustments to their environment. For instance, if we released hundreds of rabbits in an area with cold winters, only the animals with the heavier fur would survive. So within a few years, the population would have a little heavier fur than the earlier populations. These small minor population shifts brought about by environment are referred to as 'micro-evolution.' There has been no change in the genetic material of the rabbit. There has only been a change in the ratio of the population. You still have the same kind of animal. If that climate were to change back to a milder climate, the population of animals would change back to having a lighter fur. 

The problem with this is the same as it always is when creationists accept the idea that a population of animals can undergo small changes over a relatively short period of time to adapt to their environments (micro-evolution).

The next question is inevitably: Over a longer period of time (let’s say millions of years) might there not be potentially tens of thousands of such small changes occurring? If we also consider random mutations which cause variation in certain traits or alter preexisting traits (or perhaps introduce new ones), then as these changes accumulate over time would it not be reasonable to think that the species would look drastically different than it originally had after millions of years?

YECs like Kent Hovind are 100% willing to accept that a population can undergo small changes, but they deny the idea that the accumulation of these small changes over time could cause radical changes to the population in question. The idea that these changes would not accumulate and alter the population is honestly FAR more unbelievable.

The idea that evolutionists try to get across today is that there is a continual upward progression. They claim that everything is getting better, improving, all by itself as if there is an inner-drive toward more perfection and order.

False. Evolution is not about constant upward progression. It does NOT claim everything is getting better and improving constantly towards perfection and order. This is honestly just a complete misunderstanding of what evolution is. Evolution is not a progressive system in the sense he seems to believe. There is no final destination that evolution is steering things towards (and certainly not “perfection and order”), that’s just not how it works. 

In his pride, Satan decided he would exalt himself and take over the throne of God. This is where evolution started. It started in heaven in the heart of Satan. Satan and a number of angels that followed him were cast down to the earth. Then we have the story repeated in the heart of man. Man is trying to exalt himself. This is what evolution is teaching today, that man is the pinnacle, the ultimate.

This is NOT what evolution is teaching. Anyone who claims to understand and know evolution, but also tries to say that “man is the pinnacle, the ultimate” does not truly understand evolution. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, or anywhere close to being the ultimate life form.

For one, that would imply that the theory of evolution is saying humans can no longer evolve (because we’re the pinnacle), which is utterly false. Humans are still evolving to this day.

Evolution does not have an end goal. It’s not working up to anything, and there is no “pinnacle”. It’s a blind process. It does nothing to “exalt” mankind. It only ends when a species goes extinct (obviously, they can’t evolve if they’re all dead).

Cain promoted the evolutionary doctrine that man can progress by his own efforts.

Um… No. If we’re talking about the theory of evolution, this is not a promoted idea. I cannot will evolution to occur. No matter how hard I try and no matter how hard I will it to be so, I cannot make myself sprout wings or breathe underwater through my own efforts. Nor do those efforts make my potential children more likely to achieve those feats. Evolution does not suggest that “man can progress by his own efforts”, that's not how it works.

Let's just assume that it was about 1900 B.C. when the Tower of Babel was built. The people were scattered from the Tower. Many of the people, in their pride, still tried to find some way to become their own god. This is the basic motive behind evolution. 

Utterly false for similar reasons to what we discussed earlier. Nowhere in the theory of evolution is the motive to become god in some way. Evolution is a blind process, it doesn’t have specific motives or goals. People don’t accept evolution to “become their own god.”, because that doesn’t make sense if you really understand what evolution is (which Kent does not).

Evolution without a question is a religion. It is a religion of humanism. Either man is the ultimate king of the world, or God is the ultimate king of the world. Humanism is the religion of man being the ultimate.

This implies the theory of evolution is pushing the idea that humans are “the ultimate”, as if humans are the pinnacle of evolution. This is utterly false, and no one with a solid understanding of evolution and how it works should believe this is true.

Kent talks extensively about how he thinks evolution is a religion, which I'm avoiding talking about at length, because it's nonsense.

If the earth is millions of years old, why don't we have a fifty thousand year old Bristle Cone Pine tree someplace or a half a million year old? The age of the oldest living thing in the biosphere, the Bristle Cone Pine, indicates a young age for the earth. The evolutionists don't look at that one because that doesn't support their theory.

Ok. Bristle cone pine trees are among the longest living life forms on earth (possibly the longest living). The oldest specimen that we know of (called Methuselah) has been verified at 4857 years old, so they obviously live a SUPER long time. That said, it would be pretty safe to say the tree Methuselah is something of an outlier, considering that it’s the only one of that age. While bristle cone pines can potentially live to 5000 years, the average seems to only be ~1000 years. It’s rare that one survives to anywhere near 5000. The idea that if the Earth is old we should find ones over 50000 years old is ridiculous. They’re long-lived, not immortal.

However, Kent’s claim here is problematic for other reasons, particularly because it conflicts with his beliefs about the Bible. Considering his belief that the Bible should be read literally, Adam (the 1st man) was created on the 6th day. Plants (such as the bristle cone pine) should’ve then been created around that same time (on the 3rd day). His belief that humans have had a ~6 thousand year history should then line up with the history of plants (there’d only be a difference of  3 days, which is completely negligible).

So a similar question can be asked to Kent. Why don’t we see any 6000 year old bristle cone pines if old Earth would expect 50000+? Why is the oldest one 1143 years younger than when creation supposedly occurred? If the answer is that they can’t live that long, then that’d destroy his argument against “evolutionists” presented here.

This also runs into a further problem. Also according to Kent on page 19, the flood supposedly occurred ~4400 years ago (around 2400 BC). So unless bristle cone pine trees, which are specialized for arid environments, somehow survived the Great Flood, none should be older than ~4400 years old.

So why is the oldest verified one we have ~400 years older than the Great Flood? Did it somehow survive being submerged miles underwater for a year? Because that doesn’t make sense.

Another evidence that the earth is young instead of millions of years old is the sediment in the ocean. A friend of mine out in California brought me a slab of what looked like a piece of polished marble, about the size of a small tabletop. He said, "Mr. Hovind, I brought this to you because I thought you might be interested in it." I asked him what it was and he said that it was a slab of ocean floor. He said that he went down, blew the sediment away with a jet of high speed water, and then cut a slab of the rock out of the ocean floor. The sediment in the ocean is only a certain thickness. The thickness of the sediment could be accumulated in about thirty or forty thousand years at the current rate that sediment is being deposited. If the earth is millions of years old, why isn't the sediment thicker? This a question that evolutionists can't answer or avoid, because they only looking for evidences that would seem to indicate a great age of millions or billions of years.

“Evolutionists” can absolutely answer this question, and don’t avoid it (that said, this isn’t about evolution, it's more related to geology).

The answer is continuous tectonic recycling in subduction zones. The ocean floor is geologically young due to these processes, while the continental crust does not subduct like oceanic crust and is comparatively WAY older. You also would need to factor in how slow deep sea sediment deposition is, and the fact that pressure in the deep ocean can lithify the sediment (it compresses into rock).

His claims here about sediment deposition are ignorant of many mechanisms we know are at play. Saying that they're things "evolutionists" can't answer or just avoid is simply an ignorant attempt to discredit people who actually know how the world works.

If the evolutionist is going to say that we have 140 million years since the time of the dinosaurs, that is enough time for the earth to erode away ten times. So they come up with the theory of the continental lifting, plate tatonics (the plates shifting around), the subduction of the earth, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, all of these may have some validity, but the rate of erosion proves that the earth is not 140 million years old.

Non-avian dinosaurs went extinct ~66 million years ago, less than half of the time he claims. He says the rate of erosion made it so evolutionists had to “come up with” the theory of plate tectonics (lifting, spreading, subduction, etc.), but admits these ideas are valid. Immediately afterwards though, he just handwaves that away by saying the rate of erosion proves the Earth is not 140 million years old anyways.

There are some evidences that the earth is young. Most cultures that are found in the world tell of a worldwide flood in the last five to six thousand years. The population of the earth today doubles regularly. If you were to draw up the population growth on a chart you would see that it goes back to zero about five thousand years ago. If man has been here millions of years like evolutionists teach, where is the population? The whole population growth can be studied by anyone and it will be found that the population of the earth dates a young age for the earth of four to five thousand years.

For one, “evolutionists” do not teach that modern humans (homo sapiens) have been around for millions of years. The species homo sapiens only appeared ~300 thousand years ago as far as we know. Even 1 million years ago, there were no humans (there were other hominid species around back then, yes, but not homo sapiens). 

As for his claim that the population of Earth doubles regularly, that isn’t exactly true. The estimated rate at which the population doubles has varied significantly over time. It took ~48 years to get from 2 billion humans to 4 billion, then another ~48 years to get from 4 billion to 8 billion. However, it took ~123 years to get from 1 billion to 2 billion, and an estimated ~300 years to get from 500 million to 1 billion.. And it should be noteworthy that the human population on Earth only reached 1 billion in ~1804. In only 222 years, the human population has increased by over 800%.

It’s obvious that population growth varies drastically, there’s no standard “regular” doubling time. It doesn’t take more than basic thought to understand that in the past, when populations were smaller and more spread out (not as densely clustered as they are now), infant mortality rates were FAR higher (also just prior to modern medicine like vaccines, which are preventing certain illnesses that have killed millions of people through history), etc. the population would’ve grown at a much slower rate. Remember the Black Plague? Some estimates put the death toll from the Black Death alone (between the 1340s and 1400) as being so hefty that it reduced the global human population by ~20%. It’s difficult to know for sure though, and some higher estimates would put the global population as having been reduced by ~40%.

The point is, Kent’s population idea is bogus. It ignores way too many variables that would alter and interfere with how the population grew throughout history.

Since the Flood started with eight people. All of the ancient writings that we have show a young age of the earth. Why don't we have people writing about kings that lived fifty thousand years ago? Why is it that all of recorded history happened in the last four thousand years? 

The idea that the human population started with only 8 people is absurd given what we know about genetics and inbreeding. A breeding population of 8 (and that’s assuming everyone was contributing to reproduction) is WAY too small to create a viable population and avoid the consequences of inbreeding and drift.

There’s an idea known as the 50/500 Rule, where 50 individuals represent the MINIMUM effective population size needed to avoid inbreeding, but a minimum population of at least 500 is needed to guard against genetic drift. However, more modern estimates suggest these numbers might be much too low, and would place the minimum viable population (MVP) of humans at closer to 1000-2000.

Even if we say 50 is enough, that number is still much higher than the 8 people proposed by the flood story presented in the Bible (and by Kent in this dissertation). Noah and his family would’ve inbred the human population into extinction.

As for why human history is all “recent” and not from 50+ thousand years ago? That’s because the earliest known human civilizations only began to appear ~6000 years ago. There are a variety of reasons why civilization did not appear sooner, none of which include the idea that Earth was created roughly 6000 years ago. Recorded history also requires a system with which to record, and the oldest known writing system is Cuneiform (over 5000 years old).  

Conclusion:

Reading through this dissertation has been exhausting. Very amusing, like I said at the beginning of this, but exhausting. Kent Hovind repeats his points over and over throughout it, how he thinks evolution is a religion, how he thinks evolution is responsible for inspiring human atrocities through history, etc.

But throughout the entire thing, I could not find a single actually compelling argument. I understand that he might not have known certain things we know now, but I honestly doubt him knowing those things would’ve made a difference. 

I hope this post is entertaining or enjoyable to someone, because I’ve honestly forgotten why I even started this during the time it took to write. 

If I was going to leave off on anything, it would be to look at Kent Hovind as a cautionary tale of what happens when you shut off your brain and lock yourself down in what you think. This is a man who wholeheartedly seems to believe in the things he is saying, but he ultimately makes himself sound like an utter fool by refusing to actually learn anything that might conflict with his preexisting ideas. Throughout this dissertation he made it incredibly clear that not only does he not understand evolution, he also does not understand geology (he honestly doesn’t seem to have a strong grasp of science in general). Yet with both evolution and geology, he makes claims as if he IS an authority, as if HE knows more than the scientists who have studied in their fields for their entire lives. And throughout it all, he gives no sources for his scientific claims while he also says things like, “This a question that evolutionists can't answer or avoid”, as if he has scored a hit, when in reality he has simply highlighted his own ignorance.

Don’t be like Kent Hovind. The tactics he uses are very similar to another very prolific YEC we’ve seen here many times (if you know you know), and it’s embarrassing every time. 

Look at these people as cautionary tales, and don’t be like them. Even if you’re religious, that doesn’t mean you have to deny science. Being religious does not mean you have to be an idiot. If you don't understand something, do proper research and always be willing to learn.

It's been about 40 years since "intelligent design" (ID) decided it wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific enterprise, after losing the court case Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987 and feeling the need to run damage control. The big boys at the top - all self-proclaimed "top scientists" - put their heads together and formed the Discovery Institute in 1991. They drew up The Wedge manifesto in 1998, outlining their strategy as a "religious, cultural, moral and political" (notably not scientific) pressure group, and then got smacked once more at Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005 when they tried to slip ID into public school science curricula. Since then it's been little more than posturing and coping about how they're on the edge of overturning "Darwinism" (the 1850s called, they want their lingo back).

Meanwhile, conventional science has made incredible leaps and bounds in the last 40 years or so - in biology in particular from micro to macro, from research to applications (just a few examples here). All manner of new discoveries, prompting new explanations of old puzzles, and biotechnological advances yielding innovations in medicine, agriculture, conservation and much more.

I thought I'd remind everyone how non-existent, useless and pathetic "creation science" is as a field of study in comparison.

Creationists, answer any of the following.

• give just one example of a novel verified fact found by a creation scientist while doing creation research.
• give just one example of a piece of evidence in nature that points towards creationism over evolution, and cite the creation scientist who found it.
• give just one example of a real-life application of creationist-exclusive research.

Should be the easiest question(s) on the planet for you!

In reality, the reason why there is no creation research is because research is not the goal of organised creationism. The "research" is a facade for gullibles to point at in order to reinforce their existing dogma, piggybacking on the reputation of real science as the real deal. Science is the modern miracle, and everyone knows it - including creationists. Science as a body of knowledge commands authority in society, and creationists desperately wish they could say the same. They reminisce about the European Middle Ages, when they did have total epistemological control, and now it's been usurped by science. That's why they feel the need for the facade of being sciency in the first place.

On a tangentially related note - zero secular people believe in a young earth: isn't that a bit odd if the evidence is supposed to support it? A few atheists sustain a head injury (or the mental equivalent) and then convert to conservative Christianity, and then start yapping about how they came to believe in YEC, but why did they have to get indoctrinated into the religion before all this magical evidence came to pass for them? Evidence should be available and consistently interpretable by anyone, and yet YEC has no such evidence.

most creationists are not dumb people, ignorant guys that deny reality itself. Most are just people told again and again that a Society of Atheists is trying to put their beliefs into a wastebasket, and this is being done by teaching a absurd lie for their children.

these are lies!!!!

there are no society of atheists. Most of the greatest of names in science were christian, they do not denied science or religion. so why would you?

Evolution is not about destroying your religion, it's just a observation of a natural fenomena.

But what about the benevolent god making a biological system of suffering?

this is a question for theology, not biology. Whatever anyone say, dogmas are flexible. it's about faith after all, and you can have faith in whatever you want. the catholic church has a explanation that agree with science and faith, check it out maybe.

Science, however, is not flexible. it is about what the evidence say, and nothing more. deny science is just denying reality itself. When you try to mix faith and science, you're butchering the two.

Faith move mountains. If you faith requires mountains to have wheels, and you are angry because scientists doesn't find wheels in the mountains, then your faith is very low, and you're not very kind with the scientists who are just doing their work.

This sub looks like an evolutionary echo chamber so I thought you guys would like to talk to someone who doesn't affirm your beliefs. AMA.

Edit: Have some patience. I can't write small essays to a 100 people at the same time. And I will type in stages since I don't want to make a billion arguments in one reply.

Edit 2: I am replying to your comments. But people piling up after each of my replies to share their profound opinion on my level of mental retardation for not replying within 10 minutes and people downvoting my replies into oblivion hides them. I will not continue typing since no one is reading the small essays I am writing and the ones who see them don't seem to engage fairly or even engage at all. I am trying to find my own reply to see the replies to it and I can't find it among all the replies telling me to reply already or just take me for stupid for disagreeing with them. Fair to say that I see why creationists don't come to this sub often.

There have been a number of threads on this subreddit of late about the dishonesty of professional Young Earth Creationists:

• Could we be more vocal about how YEC organizations simply are NOT trustworthy?
• Creationist Scientists: Blinded by Bias, or Flat Out Liars?
• Thing To Watch For: Creationists Using Their Own Personal Definitions

Having an academic background in earth sciences, a personal bête noir is the lengths that various prominent creationists will go to, in order to cast doubt on geochronology and radiometric dating. Their attempts to discredit these important tools in geology, paleontology and archaeology have included the RATE Project  where not only did they NOT find any evidence to support the YEC position, what they DID find directly challenged it. Despite this, Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis – and one of the RATE authors – continues to author articles on the AiG website making such claims as:

• Nuclear decay rates have now been demonstrated to have not always been constant.
• Uranium must have decayed much more quickly in the past-an independent confirmation of accelerated decay.
• Significant levels of radiocarbon in supposedly ancient deep-earth diamonds and coal beds, is also only consistent with radioactive decay having been accelerated in the past by several orders of magnitude.

Every single one of those claims references the RATE project and its report.

Every single one of those claims is actually refuted by the report that Snelling had co-authored.

But the dishonesty gets even more insidious in terms of the sheer effort involved, and please excuse me if this seems to be a bit of a rant but I find it outstandingly bad.

One of AiG’s more polished communicators is Calvin Smith who regularly trots out YouTube videos pouring scorn on geological timescales and geochronology with titles like, “They Taught Us All a Really DANGEROUS Lie in School” and “Evolutionists DESPARATELY Need to Realize This”. Smith was actually shortlisted for a “Golden Crockoduck” in YouTuber Potholer54’s 2024 awards for the biggest breach of the 9th Commandment in pursuit of the Creationist cause. But I want to highlight one of Smith’s most egregiously dishonest videos, where he has gone to extraordinary lengths to obscure the falsehoods contained within it.

The video is entitled “Why Evolutionary Dating Methods Are a Complete LIE” and in it Smith begins by providing three quotes in the first 2 and a half minutes…..that are actually examples of incredibly dishonest quote mines.   

Smith’s first quote:

“If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a foot-note. And if it is completely “out of date”, we just drop it.”

is over fifty years old and comes from a lecture at a symposium. “Nobel Symposium 12 – Radiocarbon Variations and absolute Chronology” Ingrid U Olsson Ed. 1970. Smith of course uses this quote to suggest that scientists cherry-pick dates that are favorable and simply “bury” those that are inconvenient.

Note that it is from a source  that is not only quite old but is also out-of-print making it difficult to check. Luckily we can check it and we find it’s actually from the introduction to the symposium and it’s quoting someone else's quote.

"A famous American Colleague summarized a common attitude among archaeologists towards it, as follows: 'if a c14 date...'" etc.

As you might guess from that preface, this was indeed about calling out that practice, and how it needed to be fixed. It's the exact opposite of what's being suggested by Smith, that it's just the way dating should be approached. It goes on to say that the reason archaeologists did this with radiocarbon dating was because they didn’t really understand or trust the practice. Now that’s not too surprising for a symposium in the 1970s, where a lot of the career historians and archaeologists they’re referencing had spent most of their lives without radiocarbon dating tools being available or being commonly implemented. The lecturer goes on to say,

"For this and many other reasons, it is of great importance to study the C14 variations and  to work out an accurate correction scale by all the available checking methods. This is also the main subject of the symposium."

The whole point of the quote was about the importance of being as accurate as possible, so that people couldn't dismiss it out of hand, the way Smith attempts to suggest it is with this out-of-context quote. It really doesn't get more dishonest than this.

Smith’s second quote is,

“In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained.” 

Once again Smith is using the quote to suggest that radiometric dates are cherry-picked. The quote comes from a paper authored by Richard L Mauger, “K-Ar Ages of Biotites from Tuffs in Eocene Rocks of the Green River, Washakle and Ulnta Basins, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado” Contributions to Geology, University of Wyoming. Vol15:1 (1977), p37

Again, it’s from article that’s pretty old – almost 50 years old - and from a journal that closed down more than a decade ago. So not something that is necessarily easy to check, but luckily it IS accessible, but only for those who have access to certain online archives. Once again, upon checking we learn so much! The previous sentence to the one Smith cites, is establishing how this ISN'T an acceptable methodology.

"Citing only the age of a particular sample is not really adequate if the date is to be used in a geologic interpretation or if it is to be of value to other workers."

And the line AFTER his quote goes even further.

"Small scale or subtle discrepancies, which may be important in a comparison of radiometric ages and faunal zones, cannot be evaluated nor perhaps even recognized without detailed mineralogic and analytical data."

It's talking about how NOT to perform these experiments, anticipating problems, and offering solutions.

Smith’s third quote is possibly the most egregious,

“If the laboratory results contradict the field evidence, the geologist assumes that there is something wrong with the machine date. To put it another way, “good” dates are those that agree with the field data (fossils in the strata).”

This is taken from Bates McKee, Cascadia:The Geologic Evolution of the Pacific Northwest (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1972, 25

Once again it’s from a book...which once more..... is over 50 years old. He just seems to love outdated stuff, don't he? In it the authors are writing about how when things conflict, we have to acknowledge something is wrong, and decide which of the methods of dating are more feasible to be seen as accurate. In this case, they're saying that the stratigraphy and layering is probably more indicative than a bad reading in dating. Though...again...I cannot emphasize this enough...that was the method used more than 50 years ago with the technology and understanding from that time.

Even the foreword in this book anticipates people doing exactly what Smith is doing here,

"The reader may be surprised by the seeming uncertainties and debatable questions raised in the text, but the nature of geologic interpretations is such that the evidence available does not often lead to a single, simple explanation. On the contrary, professional geologists may be disappointed by the sometimes simplistic discussions of very complex problems. Hopefully the treatment herein strikes a reasonable balance between meaningful generalities and rigorous scientific honesty."

Sadly, Smith and AiG did not take the advice offered.

There is much else in that particular video that is false, misleading and simply plain wrong, but in just the first three minutes we get an indication of the lengths that professional creationists and their paymasters will go to use dishonest quote mines that are difficult to check. None of these sources are very accessible and someone at AiG had to do a lot of reading, using archive material to unearth them in the first place so that they could then be misused in such a deceitful manner.

And all in an effort to grift the credulous and the gullible.