Evolution is literally the most well supported theory in science to date and yet creationists are allowed to just. say whatever. and apparently they get published in nature now.

this is why it's a delusion, for the record. evolution at this point is an observable fact - we all saw it happen (COVID19 evolution, the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria, etc) and we have extensive evidence of how it happened in the past (we have the complete evolutionary sequence for both first dinosaur -> bird and hoofed mammal -> whale, among others).

I do not use that word lightly and I use it here because it is the accurate term.

sincerely, a paleontologist who had psychotic symptoms in childhood and I shouldn't have to add that to be taken seriously bc its a breach of my gd damned privacy

Just reading Genesis and now I’m thinking about how even some Christians argue that Earth can’t literally be 6,000–7,000 years because of all the varieties of animal subspecies, like microevolution doesn’t WORK that fast, it MUST be a metaphor that Creation only took seven days!

But if you’re going by the Bible, it also says people used to live over 900 years? Which def isn’t how we humans work anymore? And all humans and animals today descended from those on the Ark, yet inter-family marriage wasn’t banned by God for many centuries, suggesting intensely rich genes pools that hadn’t yet been spread out enough for closely-related unions to cause genetic deformities?

I’m just saying, we might be assuming a lot to think biology today is anywhere NEAR identical to what may have been goin’ on in the early days.

I love the ideas of young earth creationists. Don't get me wrong, they're frighteningly wrong and anti-science... I mean, six thousand years? The world is six thousand years old? Dude, there are buildings still standing nearly TWICE that. Six thousand is just so, so short... As Fred Clark loves to say, the Aboriginal Australians are still telling JOKES older than that.

But all the weird ideas they have to come up with to try to make six thousand years make any damn sense? Endlessly interesting to me.

Like "the firmament". So there's some references in the Bible to God creating the dry land by splitting the water into upper and lower parts, so some think that means there was a sea in the sky. This leads to an idea of there being a canopy of water over the world! And then using this to explain Noah's flood, since it mentions that some of the water came from the sky, as the "windows of heaven" were opened. A flowery description of extreme rainfall? Or did THE CANOPY/FIRMAMENT BREAK AND FLOOD THE WORLD?

When it gets really amusing is when people suggest that this canopy of water is why there's so many long lived people in Genesis (if you don't know, it claims Adam, Noah, and Methuselah all lived into their mid-900s). Maybe the canopy blocked the harsh radiation of the sun and cosmos, and therefore people could just naturally live multiple centuries?

That's great! They're using one theory to explain unrelated phenomena! That's science! It's, like, 15th century science or ancient Greek philosophy... But they're trying.

Plus I gotta admire the pure chutzpah of using radiation science in your YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM. Oh, radiation is real when the firmament of water is protecting ancient Hebrew dudes from cancer, but it's not real when Carbon-14 decays, because then you'd have to accept that radiocarbon dating can be used to accurately estimate the age of biological materials up to 50,000 years ago, eight times the ages of the earth? That's just amazing.

I just love this stuff. It's a perfect example of an idea that is absolutely incompatible with so much scientific fact that it absolutely should be discarded, but since there's ideological reasons why it must be kept, it means people have to get tricksy with their theories.

And now that I'm no longer a kid going through evangelical church & schooling and this shit can't hurt me anymore, it's endlessly fascinating. It's just such an amusing example of twisted logic that it's hilarious and endlessly interesting to read.

Like, I trust that most folks following this blog agree that Young Earth Creationism is bullshit, but before you go and give people a hard time about it, you've gotta understand that most people who believe that early humans and dinosaurs co-existed don't believe that because of a specific ideological commitment to YEC. They believe it because their notion of history consists of trivia without chronology, with facts sorted into three or four large buckets – typically something along the lines of "The Stone Age", "Medieval", and "The Modern Era" – and everything in any given bucket is conceived of as happening more or less simultaneously. Cave men and dinosaurs both go into the "Stone Age" bucket, therefore they were basically around at the same time. You're not gonna correct that misconception by giving them a hard time about theology because most of the time it's not founded in theology.

Just because you don't understand something or you find the implications distasteful that doesn't make it false. Reality is not obliged to make sense to you.

Extremist fundamentalists of different religions seem to have more in common with each other than they do with moderates of the same faith. They are invariably intolerant control freaks who feel they have the right to impose their wills on others. MAGA Mike Johnson would fit in well with Iran's theocrats.

Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade. The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults. Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.

There was recently a big experiment in rejecting science with the far right campaigning against COVID-19 vaccinations. That may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the US. MAGA Mike would like to apply that to all sectors of life in the US.

Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?

By doing anything other than voting Democratic in an election (i.e. voting Republican, wasting a vote on a loser third party, writing in a dead gorilla, not voting at all) people help pave the way for a fascist theocracy in the US.

Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson is already second in line for the presidency. That is WAY too close.

Voting may not always be convenient but theo-fascism is far less convenient.

this is an attack on me and on me personally

As much as I love Young Earth Creationism and other Pseudoscience take down videos I think it's important to recognize what Pseudoscientists and especially in this example, YECs, are trying to accomplish.

They're not actually trying to convince anyone of their stances. They're trying to encourage thought stopping techniques. That's why a lot of them like to say atheism or "evolutionism" is a religion in and of itself. Then they come up with a bunch of fancy sounding talk that resembles real scientific doctrine to make it seem like being an Christian that believes in a Young Earth is the same as being an Atheist that believes in evolution, and that the only thing left to choose which to follow is faith and morality, and the supposed authority of God. "See, look how silly and unsupported their side is. Now we know we're also silly and unsupported but if you don't pick us you're going to burn in hell and live in sin."

Truly Young Earth Creationists are some of the most vile and manipulative people on the planet

"One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist”

-- Francis Crick

evolution is when you have body segments, and the more segments you have, the more evolved you are

I've been watching a lot of fossil hunting and paleontology videos recently and it's so crazy how many people in the comments arguing that dinosaurs aren't real and stuff. Like it's not even just dinosaur fossils either,the person in the video will find a crab fossil and say it's approximately 1 million years old or something,and people will say it's fake because earth is only 2,000 years old like ??? There's also a lot of people saying the fossil is actually a sculpture that was planted,a YouTuber I watch finds a lot of crab and ammonite fossils because the area he lives in used to be an ocean and people say he sculpted it or planted it

I CURSE YOU WITH LOVE FOR CREATIONISM

what an odd thing to say to a Jewish paleontologist

did you know

young earth creationism was never the jewish interpretation of that text; those jews today who believe it have been influenced by xtians. classic commentary showcases vagueness as to the timing of the creation event, with one talmudic commenter suggesting the time may have been millions of years

YEC'ism, as a result, is filled with antisemitism, as many philosophies that require jewish people to be wrong about their own books are

not a single aspect of the Torah is meant to be taken literally. it is a multifaceted work where higher level interpretations are the bulk of the meaning of the text (Pardes method)

many jewish scholars over the years have pointed out how living things change over time

the amount of evidence we have that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and the universe 13 billion years old is overwhelming

the amount of evidence we have that living things have changed over long periods of time is overwhelming

the amount of evidence we have that populations change over short periods of time (which would then add up to those long changes) is overwhelming

the amount of extremely accessible evidence we have that evolution via natural selection happens is greater than the evidence we have for the force of gravity

many things we deal with today, in our anatomies, geographies, and ecologies, are only explicable with a knowledge of deep time

understanding evolution has been linked with more tolerant attitudes and a better ability to critically evaluate new information (ie, if you're a young earth creationist, you are more likely to be racist and stay that way)

understanding evolution is key to actually fixing many social and ecological problems and ignoring it is, in fact, a self defeating action

the history of the earth is not actually a debatable subject. people who believe in young earth creationism are one thing: delusional.

anyways, I know you didn't read any of that, so have fun sticking your head in a pile of sand. Ostriches don't do that, but you do.

How do YECs handle Jesus' constant parables? Do they argue his followers were going around with literal planks in their eyes, or do they make an exception for Jesus as the inventor of figurative language?

I know people love to make "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" into figurative language but I want to extend the charity of believing that these aren't necessarily the same people.

yeah this is something I've wondered about too, and I've never gotten a good answer. I don't really know how they reconcile "the bible is inerrant and literal" with "Jesus showed up and 90% of what he did was tell stories and make up a guy to teach a story"

Leviathan and Behemoth as dinosaurs

So we know that a lot of Young Earth Creationists interpret Leviathan and Behemoth in the Book of Job as descriptions of dinosaurs or large marine reptiles. While science tells us that those creatures are extinct, YE creationists interpret their inclusion in the bible as proof that humans coexisted with them and conclude that earth must be younger than science tells us.

There's a lot of problems with interpreting those creatures as saurians, but let's suppose that they are. Let's imagine that Behemoth is a Sauropod or a Ceratopsian or something like that, and that Leviathan is a Mosasaur or something similar.

Both creatures are mentioned in Job 40:15 - 41:26. Everything from Job 40:7 through 41:26 (and some other parts in the last chapters of Job) is God speaking to Job about things that are far out of Jobs or any humans reach, things only God can comprehend or control, in order to establish how much more powerful He is compared to a mere human.

And this is where YE creationists arguments for human/dinosaur coexistence and a young earth fall apart. God specifically says, regarding Behemoth, in Job 40:19: “He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!"

Most versions interpret "first" as "most powerful", but I've also seen translations that interpret it as God's first creation, i.e. something pretty old.

And even if that is not true, everything God says about Behemoth and Leviathan is very far removed from human reality, something only God could know. You know, like the dinosaurs, which lived 250 - 65 million years before any human and which would only be discovered as fossils thousands of years after Job's time (regardless of a scientific or YE timeline).

If God created the world and is omniscient, it's not a stretch of the imagination to say that he would know about dinosaurs even if they have been extinct for millions of years, because he made them and he was there when they existed. God talking about dinosaurs as something that Job as a mere human couldn't mess with is by no means proof that dinosaurs coexisted with humans. If anything, it's proof that Leviathan and Behemoth, whatever they may be, are far removed from a humans reality in the present day.

I just think homology obliterates intelligent design purely because structures that serve radically different functions have exactly the same parts in them and yet structures with the same function are composed of totally different parts.

Why do whales have finger bones?? What could they POSSIBLY need them for?? Primates use them to grasp, carnivorans use them for walking and running. In whales they're still there but hidden uselessly inside flippers.

Why are bird wings so different from bat wings if they're both used for flying?? Why are both of these completely different from insect wings??

Why do ALL of these except insects have the same layout of bones?? Humerus, radius + ulna, carpals and metacarpals.

It's like building planes out of boat parts.