Re: How To Teach Evolution To A Creationist

On 3/28/2025 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:

Here's a link to a 32-minute Youtube video I found both entertaining
and informative:
 <https://youtu.be/hJvv2-Ky9Ck>
 Sponsored by Center For Inquiry.  Forrest Valkai identifies specific
examples of some standard Creationist anti-evolution arguments, and
then gives his answers to them.  For those allergic to clicking on
Youtube videos, here are his first few examples:
     ***
 @2:47 Is it just me or is it impossible to line up animals in the way
they "evolved"?

Could be one of the reasons why the Top Six best evidences for IDiocy, that were given in the order in which they must have occurred in this universe, killed ID-creationism on TO.  It is why Sewell dropped the flagellum as a designed machine and the Cambrian explosion out of the Top Six.  IDiots can't deal with the fact that life evolved on this planet in a different order than that depicted in the Bible.  For YEC there was no period of time over a billion years ago when bacteria were evolving the flagellum.  There was no Cambrian explosion over half a billion years ago that resulted in a multitude of sea creatures over a hundred million years before land plants evolved.  The Biblical order of creation doesn't match up with what actually happened.  The angiosperm plants described in the Bible were not created before sea creatures. They were created after terrestrial tetrapod vertebrates had evolved, and after Dinos were walking around.
As written this isn't the usual creationist argument against evolution. It is a no brainer that you can just take the human lineage and work back through the types of animals that would have needed to exist. Humans then apes, then monkeys, then prosimians, and then primates like tree shrews.  Normally they have the argument about why these obvious links still exist.  "If we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?"  I do recall the claim that we can't line up evolutionary examples from existing species.  There has always been the fossil gap stupidity, but the claim is that things like apes and monkeys should not exist if evolution were true.  Creationists do not understand the concept of descent with modification from a common ancestor.

 @3:36 So, if we're taking that view of Darwinism we can ask how could
something like this, something like a mouse trap, be put together one
tiny step at a time?

The failure of IC was likely one of the main reasons why the ID perps decided to start running the Bait and switch instead of teach their "ID science" in the public schools.  The ID perps already knew that their junk like gaps in the fossil record, fine tuning, and Cambrian explosion god-of-the-gaps denial had already failed as scientific creationism.

 @3:48 There are transitions within kinds but not from one kind to
another kind.  A cat doesn't evolve into a dog or vice versa.

Just a failure to understand descent with modification from a common ancestor.  Carnivores like cats and dogs evolved from hooved mammals.

 @3:56 Both humans and squid have a lens that projects an image onto a
retina.  That means that a very similar eye had to evolve twice.

The creationist denial is that the eye could not have evolved.  It is the science side that has noted that the camera lens eye has evolved independently twice, and that mollusca (squids) have a better designed eye.  The vertebrate eye started to evolve in cordates, and their simple brains were organized with the support cells for photoreceptors in front.  This created forward pointed photoreceptors to have the support cells on the wrong side.  The support cells and blood vessels created a layer in front of the photoreceptors, and a blind spot was needed to be created in order to get this backwards network to the rear of the eye. For mollusca the support cells and blood vessels evolved to be behind the photoreceptors so that no blind spot was needed to be created.  So the eyes evolved independently, and we know that in cordates with rudimentary "eyes" with no lens or eye structure, they have the support cells in front of the photoreceptor cells.  So the position of the support cells was just an accident of evolution in the ancestors of vertebrates.

 @4:04 No way! An eye is so amazing!  It seems impossible that it could
have evolved in the first place.  But now they believe it happened
twice?  Yep, that would be impossible times two.

This is the usual eye argument.

 @4:15 The discovery of information at the foundation of life in even
the simplest living cells provides strong grounds for inferring that a
designing intelligence played a role in the origin of life.

Gap denial that is still in use by creationists like MarkE, but the Top Six means that the origin of life on earth is not Biblical.  MarkE found this out when he was trying to define the gap well enough to claim that life could not have originated on this earth by natural means.  Just what he put together meant that the Bible was wrong about the origin of life, and order of creation of life.

 @4:26 We didn't like evolve from anything.  That doesn't make any
sense.  I mean how can like an African-American person evolve from a
white person?  We're different skin.

Weird argument that was almost nonexistant on TO.  Most Biblical creationists understand that all the races on earth evolved from Noah's family that survived on the Ark.  There have been some stupid creationists that claimed that African Americans had the "mark of Cain", but only the righteous were allowed on the Ark.
Ron Okimoto

      ***
 It's almost certain that T.O. readers have heard/read arguments
similar to those above.  No matter how one might respond to them, ISTM
the answers Valkai provides are, from an evolutionary perspective
"good enough".

 And in response to the "Someone is wrong on the Internet" trope,
Valkai offers the following:
      ***
 @31:39 Teaching evolution to creationists is an uphill battle that's
been raging for hundreds of years.  You're not going to win it
overnight.  But if you can win over just one person, you will be
freeing that person from the shackles of dogmatic thinking, and you'll
be protecting the future from a population that would burn the world
around them out of ignorance and fear.  And that is a very worthy
endeavor.