# Comments on Jeanson Accuses Duff Again

**URL:** https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/comments-on-jeanson-accuses-duff-again/11069
**Category:** Side Conversation
**Tags:** Comments
**Created:** [July 8, 2020, 4:50pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/comments-on-jeanson-accuses-duff-again/11069 "2020-07-08T16:50:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 11

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### Author: ![David\_MacMillan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/david_macmillan/32/2362_2.png) [@David\_MacMillan](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/David_MacMillan)
#### Post date: [July 8, 2020, 5:34pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/comments-on-jeanson-accuses-duff-again/11069/11 "2020-07-08T17:34:13Z")

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It goes to a deeper issue with creationism, I think.

One of the reasons I was so sold on creationism for so long was that it seemed capable of explaining everything. We always “had an answer” and that made me feel confident. It took me a long time (and a lot of exposure to real science) to understand that universal explanatory power is a bug, not a feature. A theory which can accommodate any evidence has no actual explanatory power.

If Jeanson’s proposed model is correct, then it should be useful. We could do things with it. For example, one prediction of his model might be that certain pathogens would have an inherent limit to how resistant they could become to treatment. If the speciation of _Staphylococcus aureus_ into MRSA is just God’s “created heterozygosity” breaking down into smaller and smaller phenotypes, then eventually the _S. aureus_ genotype would run out of available variation and lose its ability to resist new drugs and treatments. That’s just the first thing that comes to mind off the top of my head.

Perhaps not all predictions would be this dramatic, but surely he should be able to come up with something. He doesn’t, because he will not acknowledge anything that might actually falsify his viewpoint, due to his _a priori_ commitment to YEC.

> [@swamidass](#):
>
> It does seem that his model is inconsistent with the evidence, which would also seem to demonstrate that it is testable at least in this sense.

His model can be broadly disproven by comparison with evidence, yes. But none of the predictions he claims are proof of his model’s robustness are actually falsifiable.

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