Re: How To Teach Evolution To A Creationist

On Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:47:46 -0500, RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
wrote:

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.

God knows the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally ;-)

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.

Only God knows why this essay didn't make Behe crawl back into his
irreducibly complex mouse hole.

<https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html>

@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.

It's also an evolutionary strawman;  no crocoducks need apply.

 

@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.

As if incredulity was evidence for anything but itself.

 

@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.

No wonder gap denial works; filling gaps just makes twice as many
gaps. 

 

@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.

Mentioning skin color is a such a blatant no-no nowadays, that only
the most clueless would evoke it.  OTOH T.O. has seen more subtle
versions of that line of reasoning, ex. gaslighting transgenders,
atheists, and other POVs different from their own.

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.
 

FWIW here's some of Valkai's answers:

1. Correct common misconceptions (self-explanatory).

2. Signal to other sciences.  IOW show how the study of evolution
impacts other Sciences, especially if those other Sciences impact
their lives.  Consider for example the fossil fuel industry which is
entirely reliant on the idea that we live on an old Earth full of oil
from long dead organic matter from the Carboniferous period.

3. Deviate from dogma and dualism.  Many creationists are trapped in
dogmatic thinking and for that reason they're incredibly uncomfortable
with the fuzzy complicated answers that science often provides.  When
someone's mind has been chained by dogma it can be very difficult for
them to understand this part of science. Because they look to one book
for all the answers, they assume that we do too.  Because they look to
one Creator who made everything, they think that if they can tear down
some big biologist the rest of biology will come crashing down along
with them.

4. Make it matter to them personally.  Remember that this person is
coming from a point of view that the entire universe was custom made
by hand with them in mind, and it can be pretty scary to step out of
that comfort zone and into the void with the rest of us. A person
who's used to the idea of creationism can easily equate the feelings
of freedom that I get to a nihilistic and mechanistic view of life on
Earth, or a feeling of hopelessness and despair.  It's up to us to
help them see that there is Beauty and wonderful purpose to be found
in the book of nature if only they take the time to just go and look
for it.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge