An atheist friend posted this video on facebook, so I thought I'd share some of my main problems with it here. What do you think?
He attempts to argue against Young Earth Creationism by claiming that just because you can’t witness something occurring doesn’t mean you can’t have evidence that it occurred. Duh, no one’s claiming that you can’t have evidence something occurred. Obviously Young Earth Creationists believe there’s evidence a global flood occurred, and creation geologist, Andrew Snelling, wouldn’t have sued the Grand Canyon to be allowed to do his research if he believed you couldn’t have evidence of something happening in the past. This is just a stupid straw man argument.
He also says that it goes without saying that no one was around to observe the “creation myth”. No that doesn’t go without saying, we say that God observed his act of creation and the Bible records his eye-witness account. He’s just asserting his atheist bias, which is not an argument.
He claims that the only people who understand evolution and reject it do so for religious reasons. No one rejects all of evolution outright. Even Young Earth Creationists agree to some extent with evolutionists, as can be seen in the very article he’s responding to which says that natural selection is a part of the biblical world view. What we reject is the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, and this certainly isn’t rejected for solely religious reasons. Highly respected scientists and mathematicians such as Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldgrege, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Lancelot Law Whyte, David Berlinski, Murray Eden, Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger, C.H. Waddington, Sir Fred Hoyle, among many others have rejected it for entirely scientific and mathematical reasons.
He claims that evolution isn’t a historical science! Do not the titles, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man imply otherwise? One of the most respected evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr, wrote, “Darwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science - the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.”
He objects to Answers in Genesis using the word “design” even though that word is found in Richard Dawkins’ very own definition of biology! “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
This blew my mind, he actually claimed that evolutionary scientists NEVER use similarities between animals as evidence for evolution! What?! Evolutionists are always appealing to homology, whether it’s fossils to genetics. Homology is defined as, “the state of having the same or similar relation, relative position, or structure.” Here’s an evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, appealing to homology, “The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 per cent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity while seeing themselves as stepping-stones to the Almighty. To an evolutionist this cannot be so. There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.” The fact that he said evolutionists don’t do that is stunningly stupid.
He thinks that Young Earth Creationists believe, “Every single living thing had a sudden, distinct origin less than a few thousand years ago.” I’m not sure what he means by “thing”, I can only assume he’s referring to species. That’s wrong. We believe that God created different kinds of animals that cannot breed with each other. Most kinds probably fit in the classification of family not species. Literature exists on this topic that he clearly hasn’t read so he has no idea what he’s talking about.
