I agree. The only way you could be convinced is by the extensive reading of serious academic historians, conducted with a genuinely open mind, without arms crossed and harrrumphing. As long as you insist on fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants argument, based on quick internet lookups to grab talking points, you will never be convinced. Sustained reading and reflection is the only way to truth on such subjects. But from watching your exchange with Paul Nelson, I’m now getting the impression that you are a pretty hardened partisan and that you are unlikely to be really intellectually open to anything positive about Christianity, and I think it unlikely that you will invest the hundreds of hours needed to really chew on the authors and ideas I’ve pointed you to. So be it.
That is an ad hominem attack, not a reasoned rebuttal of his argument. Another evasion from Paul Nelson.
n his most recent writings, Michael Lynch, for instance, has called natural selection a “religious commitment” on the part of evolutionary biologists.Citation please.
You clearly did not read the bit after you quoted me: “… other than that I should perhaps avoid you.”
Consider yourself avoided. 
The horse is not only dead now, it is composted and a very pretty rose is growing on the spot. Other than that there is no evidence that the horse even existed. Please don’t flog the rose bush.
“Second, a pervasive problem in biology is the religious adherence to the idea that natural selection is solely responsible for every feature of biological diversity.”
From here:
lynch2020evcellbiointroduction.pdf (430.4 KB)
Now that’s interesting. What predictions does it make? Please list them.
Given that Evolutionary Biology has known, since the 1930s, that Genetic Drift (among other mechanisms) contribute to biological diversity, the fact that “natural selection is [not] solely responsible” is hardly revolutionary or iconoclastic. It does not equate with “skepticism about the efficacy of natural selection” that your letter to Coyne claims. This would seem to compound your misrepresentation, rather than disprove it.
- If God deployed a single genetic template on which to construct the Human kind and great ape kind, it follows that we might share genomic “similarities” as well as “dissimilarities”, largely due to shared homologies, passions, and experiences.
- A global Flood several thousands of years ago might speak of local catastrophes, but over large regions, it would translate into a gradual rising of flood waters around the globe signaling a slow layer-by-layer kill of animals based on eco systems and internal clocks and internal thermal regulators, producing precisely the layered fossilized Animalia we see in sedimentary rock literally in every region around the globe.
Those two are good enough to show that evolutionary theory does not have a corner on this market. I will only comment on the other two.
- Creationists have no problem with classifying animals based on physical traits and similarities (something actually predicted by created “kinds”), but UCD and CA for clustered groups is a narrative only, not at all proven by nested hierarchies.
- The geographic distribution of species – that’s a small mystery we are still working on but have every confidence that, given our paradigm’s predictive ability to date, we will ultimately resolve. Some ideas might include human intervention in post-Flood transport, enormous floating post-Flood log and debris mats, and animal migration.
To the surprise of absolutely no one all the Creationists in this thread squawking about science using MN once again ducked the question of how to do science using the supernatural. It’s like they have no answer and are too embarrassed to admit it. 
Wow. If making up ad hoc stories were an Olympic event you’d sweep the podium.
Tell us again why pterosaur fossils are found all over the globe on all continents just as are extant birds yet not a single member of any of the hundreds of known pterosaur species managed to fly to ground above the K-Pg boundary layer. Equally surprising is not a single member of any extant species of birds got trapped in sediment below the K-Pg boundary layer. Your explanation is…?
What do you mean by this?
Would you agree that these observations are empirical?
What predictions?
Sounds easy enough.
- God exists
- God creates everything from nothing
- God creates Man in his image
- Man begins an investigation into God’s creation
- Man devises a causal and systematic approach to the methods employed by God to create
- Man ultimately terms their model “science” and “scientific modeling” and “empiricism”
- The preexistent all powerful Creator God is found to be the wellspring, the very origin, of science
Why would you predict a single genetic template, and why would you predict that it would produce a nested hierarchy?
What predictions does that make about the pattern of morphological characteristics shared between fossils?
The theory of evolution predicts a nested hierarchy, which is observed. Creationism makes no such prediction.
Show us that approach. How does it work?
That doesn’t answer the question. How do you allow for unpredictable and undetectable supernatural influence on your scientific experiments and still get reliable reproducible results?
It might be termed a post-diction. Just as powerful as prediction.
We all live on the same planet, or exist in the seas, or fly through the air. Earth is our geographic landscape. God created accordingly.
Creation makes a better prediction. It predicts similarities based on kind.
There are lots of potential discoveries which would falsify UCD and CA. What evidence if found would falsify the prediction of “kinds”?
It is termed ad hoc.
What predictions does that make about the pattern of morphological characteristics shared between fossils?
Then all eukaryotes are one kind because all eukaryotes share features.
Excuse me? From whence cometh this absurd idea? What God preloaded in the Universe has produced a beautiful system without a hitch thus far. Are you suggesting that he could not enact that same pre-functionality in biological systems?
You dodged the question again.
How do you allow for unpredictable and undetectable supernatural influence on your scientific experiments and still get reliable reproducible results?
How would you test a COVID-19 vaccine if Loki God makes it 100% effective one day and a deadly poison the next?
What method do you use to determine if something is the product of supernatural preloading?