Brian Lauer of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association debated Mark Reid on the topic of creation vs. evolution and Reid slapped him down hard. I came on for a second round and tore up Lauer’s arguments further. Now there’s blood in the water: Mark Reid is coming back to mutilate the corpse yet further on Wednesday evening.
This should be fun. I’ll be watching and making comments in the chat. Join in! Maybe Lauer will show up to defend himself, adding to the hilarity.
Way back in the Bad Old Days before flat screen TVs, were there ever public debates over whether cathode ray tubes were real or whether there were tiny people inside TV sets who acted out all the programmes?
Normally I would not favor cruelty, but the creationist idiocy needs to be exposed as the idiotic thing it is.
@ 2
Ideally, they should bring in Eric Cartman and trick Lauer to eat his own parents (see episode a decade ago). Don’t hold back.
But but but if humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
Answer: So Trump supporters wouldn’t be the least intelligent primates on the planet.
I’m not sure why anyone keeps having debates about this creationist bunk. There are bigger issues to deal with and you’ll never convince some people that their position is just completely wrong headed. If these creationist are making their case based on the bibles they’re even wrong about that. I was attending a Southern Baptist college in the late 60s and they had a work around even then for a “creation” that didn’t require a young earth and the denial of evolution.
@4 freeline
actually, monkeys evolved from humans–so why are there still humans?
;)
Time. Someone needs to explain to these people what can happen to matter over eons of time. Especially matter that is exposed to ample sunlight, warmth, oxygen, and water. I realize that they believe 6000 years is enough time for everything they know to have been created, but most of us know better. If you take a salty shallow sea, and let it sit for a few million years, almost anything can happen to its components. At some point, there’ll be microscopic wriggling things feasting on nutrients. Give them some more time and they’ll be eating each other. That’s why creationists insist the earth is only a few millennia old. Time is their enemy, and they know it. The people who wrote the Bible didn’t understand time, or at least not time in the hundreds of millions of years. Their spiritual descendants that we’re debating don’t understand it either. Now, in a sense, we’re stuck arguing with long dead Bronze and Iron Age thinkers who believed the Sun was a vat of burning coals floating in the firmament. Arguing with them only leads to gnashing teeth and banging on tables.
@7: Is it a coincidence that the half-life of carbon-14 is just about as long as the YECs believe the earth and remainder of the universe (they would say “all of Creation,” of course) has existed?
John Watts @#7 — Unfortunately the true blue creationists have constructed their myth so that the vast amount of time represented by the known universe (13-14 billion years), the vast amount of time for elements to decay, the proven age of fossiles and rocks, and so forth are all part of god’s ruse to test our trust in “his word”. Apparently, just the kind of despotic ruler they crave.
Never
wrestledebate with apigcreationist. You just get dirty, and thepigcreationist enjoys it.Nah. That “warm little pond” idea of Darwin’s really doesn’t stand up to modern scientific investigation. Without compartmentalization, anything at all complex that arises by chance will just dissipate. I recommend Nick Lane’s The Vital Question and Transformer: The Deep Chemisty of Life and Death for a recent take on abiogenesis research.
Jaws@8–
I know you’re joking, but it is just a coincidence. It doesn’t even help with creationist logic because the C14 half-life of 5730 years makes it extremely useful for dating out to 60,000 years, which is 10x longer than YECs think the planet has existed. And then there are all the other isotopes that are useful for dating, giving us an age range across all radiometric methods of 50 years to 2.5 billion years. And not a shred of evidence for Biblical events in any of them. Which is why creationists try so hard to dismiss radiometric dating altogether.
Sorry, out to 4.5 billion years in the case of uranium-lead dating.
John Watts @ 7
You expect creationists to understand the concept of ‘deep time’ ? They can just about understand 4004 BC, after that it is blank.
robo @9. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with YECs, and it doesn’t really match what you suggest. In my observation, the overwhelming majority of responses to the scientific evidence for an old universe fall into two main categories:
The “somewhat honest” response: I don’t care what science says; I’m going with what (I interpret) the Bible to teach.
The “Answers in Genesis” response: Mainstream science is wrong—or even intentionally deceptive—and if you do science “properly,” it actually supports a young earth.
By contrast, I’ve encountered relatively few YECs who claim that the evidence itself is simply a test of faith.
@12:
Agreed that it’s “just” a coincidence — but it’s the kind of coincidence common throughout problematic religious doctrines, in which a doctrinal assertion about nature (especially, but not only, a span of time) runs smack into a later-discovered “problem.” YECs relying on Ussher’s “calculations” are just one obvious example here; there are many others, not at all limited to northwest-European fundamentalist beliefs. I find it an immensely amusing coincidence that the halflife of carbon-14 matches so closely (less than 100 years off) to the age of the universe “calculated” by Ussher at the time he did his “calculations” during the mid-17th century.
Isidore of Seville is the writer whose work contains a timeline that purports to measure the age of the earth by totaling up the years between Adam and Jesus.
It also claims that people used to live for hundreds of years, like Methuselah. I don’t know if the Bible makes any claims on the age of the earth being only 6000 years old.
It’s seriously stupid to conflate the age of the oldest written story in Mesopotamia with the age of the earth.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a much better story than their Jewish slave fan-fic version included in Genesis. The even renamed the man who survived the flood.
Uta-napishtim or Utnapishtim (Akkadian: 𒌓𒍣, “he has found life”) was a legendary king of the ancient city of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who, according to the Gilgamesh flood myth, one of several similar narratives, survived the Flood by making and occupying a boat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim
Jaws @ # 16: YECs relying on Ussher’s “calculations” …
Weren’t all those guys just farting around with the traditional Jewish calendar by trying to convert lunar years to Gregorian?
Tethys @ # 17: … claims that people used to live for hundreds of years, like Methuselah.
If you add up the years listed in Genesis, it turns out that ol’ Meth died in (the year of) the Flood – it doesn’t say what sins he committed that Noah omitted, or how Noah explained to his sons that they had to leave Great-grandpa to drown.
Just a thought. What are some good books explaining evolution that a curious 10 year old could enjoy and learn from? How could people inoculate their children from creationist nonsense, not be critiquing creationism, but by explaining how we know evolution is true? One would think that by this time there would be a no nonsense site that would be created to curate evolutionary materials to present evolution in the strongest evidential manner to cut off the creationists at the knees long before they can get a foot in the door. We can no longer assume our schools will honestly teach evolutionary science in this age of Idiocracy.
@20 cheerfulcharlie
I read The Book of Life by Stephen Jay Gould (2001) when I was 13 years old. I enjoyed it, and I think it holds up, though it is almost 25 years behind where evolution science is now.
The no-nonsense site is the complete list of creationist claims, and 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, both at talkorigins (dot) org.
Definitive one is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Panda%27s_Thumb_(blog)
@19. Pierce R. Butler : “If you add up the years listed in Genesis, it turns out that ol’ Meth died in (the year of) the Flood – it doesn’t say what sins he committed that Noah omitted, or how Noah explained to his sons that they had to leave Great-grandpa to drown.”
Huh. Neat fact but dying in the year of something doesn’t mean you died of that something. The Titanic sank in 1912 but not all the people who died in 1912 died on the Titanic. (They’d need a bigger boat!) Presumably the year of the Flood included a month or so before the Flood or at least days unless that occurrred on Jan 1st .. then .. yeah. But even still..
Then again, does the Buy-bull definitively say Methuselah didn’t die in the Flood? Hmm.. ?
PS. Sorry to ruin the joke with the obvs. Also I do like ol’ Meth as the nickname there! ;-)
Cheerfulcharlie
I suggest giving the 10 year books about dinosaurs and fossils. Take them to visit a natural history museum. Our local museum has a fantastic display of ice age mega-fauna which in itself is thousands of years older than 6000.
No need to discuss evolution at all, unless you wish to explain why giant beavers and mammoths went extinct when their habitat disappeared, but we still have regular sized beavers and elephants.
[meta]
Me: gimme a 1-paragraph summary of the biblical story of methuselah
Bubblebot: Methuselah, a patriarch from the Book of Genesis, is best known for living 969 years—the longest lifespan recorded in the Bible. He was the son of Enoch, who “walked with God” and was taken by God without dying, and the grandfather of Noah, the builder of the ark. Though Methuselah’s story is brief, his presence spans the antediluvian era and ends in the year of the Great Flood, symbolizing divine patience before judgment. His lineage, marked by faithfulness, suggests he lived righteously, and some traditions hold that his death prompted a seven-day mourning period during which God delayed the flood out of respect for his virtue.
—
(Best to know the lore for any given mythos before opining as to the semiotics)
Genesis 5 lists the descendants from Adam through Noah, along with claiming that most of them lived for about 900 years. Noah was already 500 when he begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
I have always wondered about Cain’s wife. If Adam and Eve are the only people, where did she and all those other wives come from?
“I have always wondered about Cain’s wife. If Adam and Eve are the only people, where did she and all those other wives come from?”
As with StevoR, you’re treating that as an actual historical narrative, rather than a myth.
Obs, desperate apologetics exist within the USA:
https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/who-were-adam-and-eves-children.html
Have the basic courtesy to blockquote, John.
I’m treating it like any other story, and questioning where all of those unnamed wives came from since on the previous page the story also claims that Adam and Eve are the first people.
IME, the YEC and fundamentalists don’t want to talk about their odd beliefs once you start pointing out all the incest, murder, rape, and dashing out the brains of babies on the rocks. Learning all that scripture wasn’t completely worthless.
Tethys, you seem twitchy.
Um. I put your quotation within quotation marks.
It would be the most one could possibly achieve in any nom-markup medium.
That is not courtesy nor netiquette, that’s you imagining that me not typing <blockquote>
and </blockquote> somehow shows less respect and courtesy and manners than using old-fashioned quotation marks.
So. That’s what I think of your demand for what you imagine is courtesy.
(Am I somehow wrong, in your estimation?)
“I’m treating it like any other story, and questioning where all of those unnamed wives came from since on the previous page the story also claims that Adam and Eve are the first people.”
Heh. Sure you are.
“IME, the YEC and fundamentalists don’t want to talk about their odd beliefs once you start pointing out all the incest, murder, rape, and dashing out the brains of babies on the rocks. Learning all that scripture wasn’t completely worthless.”
Yet, I adduced a link to exactly that.
Your response was to tell me I lacked courtesy.
(You, of course, are and cannot be boorish, right?)
Re where did those wives come from? The late anthropologist Edmund Leach noted, in his fun little book “Genesis As Myth and Other Essays” (1969), that origin myths around the world often deal with a fundamental dilemma: if there was only original man and woman, how did they avoid incest, or if they were not related, how did their children avoid incest? Leach considered various divine punishments in Genesis (expulsion from Eden; Cain kills Able, etc, etc) to be the consequences of the incest implied in the myths. I remember reading it more than 50 years ago, and found it an intriguing take on biblical myths, though I am not sure how it would be received today, and I am sure that I am over-simplifying his analysis……
I very much enjoy Dr. Irving Finkel’s YouTube lectures on the topic of ancient Mesopotamian cultures and the subsequent incorporation of their various creation myths into the Judaic texts.
I believe ‘The Ark before Noah’ covers the subject?
He points out that Genesis actually contains three creation myths. First the 7 day creation myth.
Then the Garden of Eden story, which is originally from either Akkadian or Sumerian sources. The Snake is also a God and Jehovah is the evil god IIRC, which explains why Jehovah sets up humans to fail, and lies about dying from the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Then comes the Flood myth, which is the third creation.
A version of this story is the oldest thing ever written that we have discovered. I believe it’s Babylonian in origin, though obviously the basic concept was common to multiple Mesopotamian cultures.
Dr Finkel considers the melding of the creation stories into one narrative to be a metaphor for blending cultures and peoples into nations. Redacting out all other references to the Gods in the pantheons of those cultures accounts for many of the logical inconsistencies in Genesis.
Judaic culture also has a belief in magical numbers, which results in 900 year old patriarchs, etc…
I’ve only ever met one YEC. I consider their ideas as credible as the flat- earthers
@Heddle:
Given that the typical AIG discussion involves “lenses” (biblical lens vs secular lens), I don’t think they are accusing actual scientists of being intentionally deceptive. But there is an idea I’ve been pondering for a while, and I think it might go something like this.
YECs have, as an unstated implicit belief, the belief that the observable universe is an undetectable and deliberate deception. Note that who is committing the deception is not unspecified — it could be God; it could be Satan. The reasons are also not stated — could be as a divine test; could be devilish reasons.
The line from the AIG statement of faith, that I think supports that implicit belief, is this one:
That clear rejection of scientific evidence as being valid only makes sense if the scientific evidence is false. Yet they nowhere accuse scientists of perpetrating the falsehood — only of being “fallible” and have presumably made the wrong “interpretation” of the evidence. But if the scientists are wrong despite having plentiful scientific evidence, then the evidence itself must be false. Yet they also offer no way to detect this falseness scientifically. So the evidence is undetectably false. And given that the universe is a creation, the false evidence must have been created as well, hence, deliberate.
Related to this point, I’ve read Gosse’s Omphalos, and he actually tried to address the point of divine deception, but I don’t think his excuses actually work.
Contrariwise to the above, I think that atheists, agnostics, and theists who accept science and reject YEC have as an unstated implicit belief that the observable universe is not a deception (undetectable or otherwise; deliberate or otherwise).
YECs do try to find “sciency” reasons to reject scientific findings, like “radioactive decay rates changed wildly during the flood”, and like that, but when it’s pointed out that doesn’t make scientific sense, there is still the push to reject scientific evidence as being false anyway. I sort of want to corner a YEC, walk through the alpha-decay chain, and see if I can get them to answer the question of “Do you think that about half of the uranium in thousands of zircons was changed to lead in far far less than 4.5 billion years on purpose?”
FWIW.
Me: one paragraph summary of distinction between belief and alief
Bubblebot:
Belief refers to a conscious, reason-responsive mental stance toward a proposition, typically governed by evidence and logic. Alief, by contrast, is a non-deliberative, automatic mental state that fuses representation, emotion, and behavioral disposition, often surfacing in ways that contradict one’s explicit beliefs—such as flinching on a transparent glass ledge despite believing it’s safe. Beliefs are epistemically regulated; aliefs are associative and arational.
This has just started now.. Watching. FWIW.
‘This has just started now.’
To what do you refer as ‘this’?
‘Reid v Lauer…again!’ implies it’s been some ongoing thing, no?
@ ^ John Morales : The “this’ I was referring to was the youtube discussion linked in the OP. Thought that would’ve been pretty obvs.
Did get to watch most of it live which was good.
@Owlmirror #32
Fair point. Hovind has in fact stated that “Satan is using evolution theory to make kids go to hell.” Another common argument does cast God as the deceiver, though in a supposedly benign sense: the apparent age argument.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say nowhere, but I agree that the marquee YECs are somewhat cautious on this point. Still, Hovind has also claimed that biology textbooks are “lying in order to brainwash youth.” So there are examples. Speaking anecdotally, in my experience — which may reflect a different dynamic, since I often interact with YECs who assume I’m likeminded at first — I do encounter “laity” YECs who directly assert that “scientists are lying,” at least until they realize I’m a scientist myself.
As for “where did the other people come from, if Adam and Eve were first,” I’ve heard it explained that Genesis 1 was about creating the species of humans, as the other living things (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion…”), while Genesis 2 was about specifically creating Adam and Eve as the beginning of the lineage that led to Jesus. I’m not sure that holds up, even as mythology, but at least it beats Eve pumping out hundreds of offspring for Cain to be afraid of in distant lands after being expelled for murder.
Somehow the clip on Earth’s earliest eon and how we figued out how very, very, VERY old it is linked here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-5/#comment-2275214
Seems apt when it comes to dating (not romantically) our pale blue dot..
@Heddle:
[accusations of lying]
I would say the “intellectual” YECs, rather than necessarily “marquee” (by which I presume you mean “famous”; “in the public eye”). I have in mind those affiliated with AIG (the source of that statement of faith) and those affiliated with the ICR as well (which also has a statement of faith). Those various YECs who have gone to respected educational institutions for science degrees in geology and astronomy and biology and paleontology; the ones that have given some thought (but not enough thought) to epistemology and philosophy in shaping their rhetoric.
Kent Hovind, particularly, is one whom I would consider to be an anti-intellectual YEC. Anti-intellectualism is a strong factor in some YECs, indeed.
Does Eric Hovind also talk about scientists lying, I wonder? I seem to recall that Eric, too, tended to use AIG-style arguments about assumptions or presuppositions or lenses or worldviews.
There have been discussions here on Pharyngula about the use of the term “lying” to describe what creationists do — it might be true, sometimes, when they actually know enough to deliberately misrepresent science. There was actually a conversation with a young creationist who got pissed off because he thought his parents were being specifically accused of deliberately lying to him.
More typical, though, “lie” is also used to refer to claims made out of a morally depraved indifference to the truth. And weakest of all, it’s also used to refer to the unknowing propagation of falsehoods.
Maybe that’s something worth bringing up, should you next hear a YEC accuse scientists of lying: Do they mean knowingly propagating falsehoods, or unknowingly propagating falsehoods?
If the latter, whose falsehoods?
It might be worth pointing out that YECs have studied science, and gotten degrees — and they do not accuse all of the science being a deliberate lie by scientists; they talk about having those differing assumptions.
If could get them to agree to that, the next step is the example assumptions (entire universe is an undetectable deliberate deception, or not) I offered above. But they may not be ready for that. Heck, I’m not sure most AIG YECs are ready for that.