How Modern-Day Young-Earth Creationism Pushes People To Atheism

But it’s also evident that a great number of people manage to find things that don’t exist. That people find merit is not good evidence that merit exists. Lots of people find credibility in Q-anon, for example.

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Hey, at least Q-anon exists :wink:

Be fair. So does Christianity.

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People leave God’s Church for different reasons. I’m sure there are those who reject Genesis, because they have been convinced it can’t be right.
But, there are others who accept God because they have been convinced that materialism isn’t right.

You are applying to many questions to the tread. Let’s break them down for me to be able to answer them without losing them.

You are forgetting that Evolution News, does not focus on the WHO created. But their interest is to provide support that there was a WHO that did create.
They don’t say God did or didn’t do it. But, they do say there’s a possibility that God did do it.
And the evidence supports a WHO DID DO IT.

And as far as universal common descent being accepted, there is doubt about this from all of the articles I have read.
Why not present one that supports your claims.

A blog is not the end all of all things. Other organizations hold what he has said at arms length and caution others as to its error.
And I wouldn’t call him prominent. I never heard of the fellow until you pointed him out, and he sounds as though he is on his to rejecting God altogether.

Prove the quotes are not valid.
Why are there quotes from the same people saying the same thing and then quotes from different individual saying the same thing?

OK.

Here are three. The first two are rather technical.

This one is written for the lay-reader.

AND something for everyone else. Baum discusses why it’s hard to get statistical tests of Common Ancestry published:

I have not forgotten ENV, but ENV doesn’t publish science, so it is hardly relevant. If you can find any example of inventions, patents, medical treatments, etc., discovered on the basis of a Design Hypothesis I will reconsider.

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Hi. It’s me again.
As a matter of fact, I support common descent. But, not universal common descent.
Look around. Dogs mate and they have dogs as their descendants. Evidence for common descent? Yes. Evidence for Universal common descendant? Not on your life.
The same can be said for any number of other lifeforms. The different kinds of lifeforms are made up of various species and subspecies. But, when you get down to the first ancestors, the logical conclusion should be that the first two, (the male and female), of the lifeform in question, would have been of the same kind as those descendants that followed them into existence.

Please provide an article that supports this.

And you’ve have done nothing but harassed.
Where is your evidence that teaching what God’s Word says has pushed anyone to rejecting God.
It’s usually the way someone says or does something. Especially if their lives are contrary to what God’s Word says.

And God’s Word says that in the last days,

I can personally testify to scores of accounts from “new” atheists who were formerly YEC. If testimony doesn’t meet your personal standard of evidence, I can direct you to a FB group where people with this experience will be happy to describe it for you.

This is why you have to provide examples of different kinds for me to respond to. Rather than show universal common descent, for which we would need data at a very deep level, possibly involving many thousands of species, I would like to try just showing common descent of some species you think belong to different kinds. That would force you to revise your idea of what the kinds are, and so doing we would sneak up on universal common descent by degrees. I just don’t know where to start, since you consistently ignore questions.

What you say about kinds is equally true of clades, except that there are no first two members of a clade, but an entire population, and that population is descended from previous generations.

I doubt there’s a single article. But of prominent IDers, Michael Behe agrees with universal common descent, Paul Nelson is a young-earth creationist who believes in created kinds (though he won’t say what the kinds are), and Stephen Meyer’s views are impossible to determine, at least from what I can see. Do you disagree with any of that?

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I’m aware of all but the first one. All of them are submitted as evidence to support universal common ancestry.

The articles are commended for adding the problems with their research.
The following are the problems.

" Here we present a simplified version of this same counterexample, which can be interpreted as a tree with arbitrarily long branches, and where the UCA test fails again. We also present another case whereby any sufficiently similar alignment will favour UCA irrespective of the true independent origins for the sequences. Finally, we present a class of frequentist tests that perform better than the purportedly formal UCA test.

Conclusion

Despite claims to the contrary, we show that the counterexamples successfully detected a drawback of the original UCA test, of relying on sequence similarity. In light of our own simulations, we therefore conclude that the UCA test as originally proposed should not be trusted unless convergence has already been ruled out a priori.
Source: Infinitely long branches and an informal test of common ancestry - PMC"
This states out and out the results could be misinterpreted.
It does state that a possible alternative answer for the findings could be caused by convergent evolution.
But, wait a minute.

" Convergent evolution is the fabricated conjecture evolutionists invoke to explain very similar characteristics between creatures that could not have been inherited from a common ancestor and that evolutionists will never accept as having been produced by an intelligently designed internal programming that is specified for common purposes.

Evolutionary literature often contracts convergent evolution down to its central idea and simply calls it convergence.

The Basic Notion of Convergence Is Imaginary

It is tempting to start an evaluation of convergent evolution by identifying all its problems. This is where a word of caution is necessary. Like other key elements of evolutionary theory, convergence is not an observable process but is rather “observed” only in someone’s mind as imaginary visualization. Convergence is another evolutionary mystical, mental construct.

We should not naively proceed into matter-of-fact discussions of convergence without questioning the basic premise that such a Darwinian process truly happened. If we don’t question it, we give convergence a life of its own—just like “Liz” got her investors to hand over their money for an imaginary product and thus perpetuated the misleading of other people. It is better to begin by rejecting the idea that convergence accurately explains any historical realities and then show that fanciful narratives about convergence amount to ad hoc, just-so stories."
Source: Major Evolutionary Blunders: Convergent Evolution Is a Seductive Intellectual Swindle | The Institute for Creation Research

Now, does this mean UCA is in the clear and should e accepted as scientifically sound?
Not for a long shot.
In fact the very reason why convergent evolution is stopped for running as a possible cause, is the same reason why UCA should not be.

Because considering it to have been the cause, gives it a life of its own, without subjecting it to the scientific method.

So, where are the tests for a UCA? The macro molecule test that are found among those organisms thought to have been related, have no evidence that they are there because of common ancestry.

There is another reason why they are there. HOX genes. HOX genes, form arms of the ape, and the arms of humans.
Those HOX genes, are programmed to form those similar parts of the anatomies, but, they are programmed to express them according to the kinds of organisms in question.

And there is no reason why those similarities of the macro molecule could be an expression of the DNA, to form them without there being a common ancestor.

" "To fill this gap, two recent papers have developed formal statistical arguments for CA (Theobald 2010a; W. Timothy J. White 2013). In the first of these papers, Theobald applied likelihood ratio tests (LRT), Bayes factors, and the Akaike information criterion (AIC) to the three domains of present-day life (Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya) and found overwhelming evidence for universal CA. While not questioning his conclusions, several papers subsequently raised objections to Theobald’s statistical methods (Yonezawa and Hasegawa 2010; Eugene V. Koonin 2010; Yonezawa and Hasegawa 2012; de Oliveira Martins and Posada 2014). The most compelling among these objections was that the results of the tests are a trivial consequence of significant similarity among the sequences.

There are at least two ways in which sequence similarity can mislead formal statistical tests and overstate the strength of evidence in favor of CA. First, the process of sequence alignment injects gaps into the sequences to account for an unknown history of insertions and deletions along different lineages. The gaps are selected so that the aligned sequences are maximally similar subject to some constraints. If the alignment process mistakenly separates bases in different species that should be directly compared, then the strength of evidence for CA could be overstated. However, this possible source of potential overconfidence is negligible when there is little alignment uncertainty and is easily handled by excluding regions where alignment uncertainty is relatively high. A second and more serious concern is if sequence similarity were due to a biological cause other than common ancestry. Yonezawa and Hasagawa demonstrated that Theobald’s methods favored CA over SA even when comparing unrelated mitochondrial genes (cytb and nd2 from cow, deer, and hippopotomous) that were aligned without gaps by simply truncating the end of the longer sequence (Yonezawa and Hasegawa 2010). In this instance, Theobald’s methods were misled by the distinct preferences in nucleotide base composition by codon position common to all protein-coding mitochondrial genes (Theobald 2010b). In particular, nonidentical base distributions at each site contradict a key assumption underlying the likelihood model used for SA by Theobald. One can also imagine when considering a hypothesis of SA that comparable genes with similar functions in separate species could have similar sequences due to functional constraints rather than to CA. In light of all of this criticism, the community remains without a thoroughly convincing statistical method to demonstrate universal CA, whether among all domains of life or for more specific sets of species."
Source: Statistical evidence for common ancestry: New tests of universal ancestry | bioRxiv

"But in the past couple decades, new doubt has emerged in some circles. Microbiologists have gained a better understanding of genetic behavior of simple life forms, which can be much more amorphous than the typical, vertical transfer of genes from one generation to the next. The ability of microbes such as bacteria and viruses to exchange genes laterally among individuals—and even among species—changes some of the basic structural understanding of the map of evolution. With horizontal gene transfers, genetic signatures can move swiftly between branches, quickly turning a traditional tree into a tangled web. This dynamic “throws doubt on this tree of life model,” Theobald says. And “once you throw doubt on that, it kind of throws doubt on common ancestry as well.”

With the discovery of archaea as the third major domain of life—in addition to bacteria and eukaryotes—many microbiologists became more dubious of a single common ancestor across the board."

“In the course of his research, Theobald had been bumping against a common but “almost intractable evolutionary problem” in molecular biology. Many macromolecules, such as proteins, have similar three-dimensional structures but vastly different genetic sequences. The question that plagued him was: Were these similar structures examples of convergent evolution or evidence of common ancestry?”

"“I really took a step back and tried to assume as little as possible in doing this analysis,” Theobald says. He ran various statistical evolutionary models, including ones that took horizontal gene transfer into consideration and others that did not. And the models that accounted for horizontal gene transfer ended up providing the most statistical support for a universal common ancestor.

Source: RTMCDGE and "Dissent from Darwin" Petition - #63 by rtmcdge"

These are other articles that list problems the researchers were confronted with.
In all of them, one must assume common ancestry is the cause. But, when they are looking for what would support the UCA, what ever is found, must be weighed against whether or not it can be proven that it was due to an evolutionary event of some UCA.

One did mention the fact the UCA has never been identified.
And this must be the case.

The evidence, the empirical evidence, what can be supported with fact, is that humans give birth to humans. This is what the science of biology must specify this. And only when the fake science of evolution is consulted is when the POSSIBILITY of there being a UCA brought into the picture.
But, there is no empirical evidence that humans ever shared a common ancestor with any other kind of life form.
And there is no evidence that any other kind of lifeforms shared a common ancestor.
Because what is observed, is contradicting UCA.

Ah. But you tube videos and other creationist blogs are?

Of course they do. What do you expect, since he is calling them out on their blatant falsehoods?

So you are as ignorant of creationist “science” as you are of real science. That does not surprise me.

Todd Charles Wood Articles | Answers in Genesis

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Maybe so. Although I’m not sure who would ever allow anyone to understand that they knew everything about every topic. That they knew everyone that believes the same thing they do.
Are you say you are familiar with everyone of those evolutionists who believe what you believe.
No, I don’t think you’d be that ignorant. You just think that I would be that ignorant right?
Listen, are you going to set aside your bias and discuss this logically or not.
If your bias is going to be getting in the way, just don’t bother to follow me. I’ve got very little time, and I’d rather spend it with someone who will actually recognize what many good scientists do. “I don’t know everything”. And “Science is all about learning and it has the potential to change”.

You do not realize it, but Organizations like AIG, Evolution News, ICR, the Discovery institute, have previous evolutionists working on their staff.
This alone is good enough reason for me to reject UCA. And since I have been studying evolution. I’ve found it to be less scientifically supported than it is possible to be.

Mediocre ones at best. Selling falsehoods is a lot easier than doing science.

I’ll take that as an admission that you are afraid to look at the evidence.

So why are those organizations not doing actual biomedical research based on the assumption that common descent is false? Wouldn’t improving human health be far more convincing than mere rhetoric?

Or are you unable to distinguish between them?

Again, kinds are all around you. But, why don’t you have any problems with the term species. It has been said to be a confusing term.
““There is no general agreement among biologists on what species are,” says Jonathon Marshall, a biologist at Southern Utah University. At last count, there were at least 26 published concepts in circulation.”
Source: What Is a Species? | Scientific American

" Why Are Species So Confusing?

The central difficulty when studying species is that, even though all species are kinds of organisms, all kinds of organisms are not species. For example, birds are a kind of organism, but birds are not a species --there are many thousands of species of birds."
Source: Why Should We Care about Species? | Learn Science at Scitable.

And it is easy to see that scientists recognize their failure with using species in place of kinds.
This is demonstrated when a new discovery of a species has been made.
The discovers never simply announce a new species has been discovered. They will ultimately always announce the KIND OF LIFEFORM THAT HAS BEEN DISCOVERED.

“A new species of spider, or shrimp, or whale or shark, or whatever”
So the ability is there, the refusal of the evolutionists to submit to the use or at least admitting they understand where the term Kinds is more than adequate to meet the discription.

So, again, your question is easily answered by what is observed.
There are kinds of lifeforms, (this is where the term species is wrongly used), And there are species that make up the different kinds of lifeforms.

Allow me to talk with them myself and then let’s talk.
Still, that has no change in the fact that Genesis is historically accurate and must be accepted as God’s Word.

How do you reconcile the different orders of appearance of plants and animals between 1 and 2?

But you are trying to pass off your interpretation of it as God’s Word. Your interpretation is shared with only a tiny sliver of Christianity.