"I'm treating the mutation rate as a substitution rate" - Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson

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We always tend to treat creationists in general as good-faith actors in these discussions and in the spirit of that good faith stick to the science. The problem with that is that they seldom are good-faith actors. The attention is on religion because special creationism is all about religion. Period. You can’t just pretend that isn’t there. Jeanson himself says he is looking at data through “Biblical glasses”. Modern intelligent design began not with a scientist but with a lawyer who wanted to press the evolution issue to create a wedge into which he hoped to insert very parochial religious views to replace a secular society. Between all the exhibits about floods and kinds at Ken Ham’s creation museum are exhibits about the moral decay they believe is caused by evolution.

I have no problem with people’s religion so long as they aren’t harming themselves or others in the name of those beliefs, coercing others to share those beliefs, or presenting their beliefs as something they are not. Professional creationists like Jeanson operate under the auspices of conservative fundamentalist ministries who are out to do just that and the trick they play on everyone is getting them to just discuss mutation and gene trees and sedimentary geology while insisting they ignore everything else that motivates them. We make a mistake when playing that game.

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Another reason for focusing on Jeanson is because he is deliberately abusing the credibility that comes with a university education and that ends up devaluing higher education as an institution. Someone like Ken Ham or Kent Hovind are jokes. They have no legitimate scientific experience to tout and as such it’s easier to dismiss them and harder for them to build broader credibility. Ken Ham deliberately courts like-minded believers with legitimate degrees in an attempt to lend his religious agenda wider credibility. Jeanson actively worked to leverage as prestigious an education as he could obtain specifically to further these fundamentalist religious goals. This makes it all more important to focus on his methods and his claims in particular, which at their core are complete BS but to the uninitiated look more credible because of the marketing of Jeanson as “Harvard educated”.

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Another thing that Jeanson emphasized in the course of the Traced discussion, and is a rather glaring inconsistency, is his repeated insistence on the population growth curve as an independent data set by which it is possible to evaluate the reliability of mutation rates and his model.

2:33:25 The way you independently test that, without making it circular, is this archaeology and historical records based published growth curve, that’s the reason why I’m going in certain directions.

To emphasize the primacy of the data set source, Jeanson asks (as if it really mattered),

2:34:30 Do you even know what source I’m citing for the independent data set?

Jeanson here is referencing, from his Y Chromosome paper bibliography, McEvedy, C., and R. Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Penguin Books, Middlesex, England. Although dated, this reference seems to remain a standard.

Now, ancient population numbers, even from historians and archaeologists, are understood to involve a sizable degree of reckoning, but let us accept McEvedy and Jones are close enough to serve as a test for Jeanson’s model.

I do not have access to the McEvedy book, but their global population numbers are tabled here: US Census Bureau: Historical Estimates of World Population

1000 BC 50 million
2000 BC 27 million
3000 BC 14 million

At some point between 3000 and 2000 BC, the independent global population data set presents 13,999,992 more humans than Jeanson’s family of eight. Test that. Of course, at the point where the curve no longer serves its rhetorical purpose, it loses its status as the vaunted standard. The special pleading begins, and bam, just like that, the selfsame archaeological and historical underpinnings are suddenly unreliable and dodgy and not to be believed. Jeanson holds his reference curve to be vitally important, he just thinks it to be wrong by a magnitude of ten to the six.

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attacking science (and education in general) and trying to play both sides has real world serious consequences. Some bad faith actors willfully acerbate this (especially on the NA evangelical side) to push suboptimal solutions as part of their partisan narratives. These also jump the shark on relativism (despite publicly decrying it) and identity politics to run a modern political party without an actual coherent policy platform. Whether education, or medicine, or science, they need to have manufactured and enhanced doubt in order to compete and they have found a primed population.

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You’re not one to mince words. Which I prefer. Speeds up the dialog.

Well I have to admit, for some reason I thought you were a Deist (or sorts). Now I’m thinking Atheist?
I’m also curious if you had any religious upbringing, which you obviously now reject?

I hope you don’t mind the question. In my personal circle, I don’t come across many so opposed to religion. It makes me curious as to the source of that sentiment.

And I want to emphasize again, my questions are sincere, coming from a point of understanding.

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Honestly, what I believe is not relevant. People agree on evolution and common ancestry as science across a variety of different religious beliefs and none at all. Science is agnostic. I can talk to people about evolution and agree with them on everything and end up knowing nothing with regards to whether or not they believe in God. We don’t do science by mixing religious affirmations with explanations of empirical evidence.

That said I have no idea if there’s a God or not or if there is I couldn’t tell you what that affirmation even means. I don’t have an issue with believing in God in some general sense and maybe sometimes I might believe that, and sometimes I don’t. To me, it’s not a question anyone can really answer so it’s not all that interesting to me. Like Einstien and Spinoza however, I find the idea of a personal God as described in some literal interpretation of the Bible a little silly for me. I fully recognize however that many people NEED specific religious beliefs and I’m perfectly OK with that. I get it. I for the most part however don’t have any use for those sorts of beliefs in my personal life and no scientist should have use for those beliefs in their professional lives.

I was raised in a Southern Baptist household filled with Bibles, church on Sundays and Wednesdays, and all the sorts of stories I’m sure Jeanson was brought up with as well about Moses and Noah’s Ark and Jesus and his disciples.

Probably by the time I was ten I found the idea of people going to hell because they didn’t believe in Jesus a little ridiculous for me especially given millions of Native Americans and other indigenous people died of smallpox before even learning the language that they would need to learn about Jesus. I also had a deep interest in natural history and from a very early age the idea of putting every animal on an ark to ride out a global flood was silly for me from the beginning. And please don’t bother trying to convince me of some argument for theodicy or some convoluted arguments about the inerrancy of the Bible etc. I’ve heard them all before and I’m not interested.

There is a lot I gleaned from that upbringing however that is important to me still today. Chief among them is the Golden Rule which is probably among the most genius philosophical achievements humans have ever come up with. It doesn’t matter to me whether it comes from a God or from people. It just works regardless.

There probably should be a category of secular Christian like there is for secular Jews. People should be able to identify culturally with their Christian background without being held to every belief.

That’s more or less my history but again it doesn’t matter because unlike Jeanson I’m not placing some religious beliefs first and foremost and bending science to fit those beliefs and if you think he’s not doing that you are simply wrong.

I also however have no interest in turning anyone into an atheist or agnostic. Religion is a deeply rooted cultural need for most of humanity and expecting people to abandon that, for the most part, is unrealistic. However science and religion have no common ground in my opinion and mixing them is like mixing crap and ice cream, doing so doesn’t make one any better and invariably ruins the other (and it works that way whether or not you consider religion the crap or the ice cream).

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Very few of us here are opposed to religion. What we are opposed to is bad science.

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Let’s be honest here. There are some that are opposed to religion, and some that are pro religion, and some that are neutral.

The commonality many of us have is a commitment to rigorous and honest science.

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I’m opposed to mixing religion and science, coercing others to share your religious beliefs, presenting religious beliefs as if they were something other than beliefs (scientific conclusions, absolute truth, political affiliations, etc), denying others rights in the name of a religious belief, replacing secular public governance with religious commitments, those are the things I’m opposed to but personal expression of religious beliefs are perfectly fine by me so long as, again, you aren’t coercing anyone to share those beliefs, hurting yourself or others in the name of those beliefs, or presenting religious beliefs as something they are not.

That to me is not opposing religion but rather simply asking religious people of all types to respect the pluralistic secular society we live in and their neighbors who don’t happen to share their beliefs. That’s not opposing religion rather it’s opposing the undue imposition of religion on the rest of us.

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I’m willing to say that I am, for example. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has not been and is not now a net force for good. Your mileage may vary.

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It’s pretty difficult to argue with this.

If there’s one thing to be said about human beings is they really can’t be trusted with a good idea. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and love thy neighbor were really just not enough for people.

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Dr. Mays, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to post that. That was helpful in my “understanding”.

For what it’s worth, I’m a ‘classic’ YEC, similar to Dr. Jeanson.

Well I do wish you would consider faith in Christ, as I would for anyone. By the sound of it though, I doubt I could offer you any new ‘nugget’ you haven’t already heard.

But I do appreciate you dialoging with me. Again. Thank you!

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Btw I wanted to comment on this one after pondering it a little, but not until I heard your “story”:

This statement surprised me because I gather you’ve dialoged with YECs a good bit, all who would not agree to those terms. For us, God is not just a part of the origins discussion, He’s CENTRAL to it.

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“Bad science” - agreed. Personally I’d also include bad theology.

Greetings @T_aquaticus , good to dialog with you again…

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I was careful to say that there are very few who are opposed to religion. Perhaps we could squabble over how many “very few” is. I suspect that there are probably many different opinions of what “opposing religion” means as well.

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Nor, I think, are they original to religion.

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We are often told that YEC’s are looking at the same evidence we are, but they arrive at a different conclusion. To me, this means we should be able to follow the evidence to what the YEC’s are claiming. We shouldn’t have to include God in anything since we are supposedly looking at the same evidence which is the empirical, objective, scientific evidence.

But . . . I think we all know this isn’t the case. YEC’s aren’t YEC’s because they followed the scientific evidence. They are YEC because that is what their theology demands of them. This is what so often leads to bad science, when you are wholly committed to a conclusion no matter what the evidence is.

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People like Jeanson have an agenda. They aren’t simply there to talk science. It’s about furthering their religious goals but they are less forthcoming about that agenda. That’s what I mean by not participating in the discussion in good faith.

God has nothing to do with science. At all. So while I’m happy for you that these beliefs give your life some purpose and meaning it really doesn’t matter if we are talking about a scientific question.

Having this discussion and insisting your beliefs about god be central is exactly the sort of conflating science and religion I’m talking about.

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But God isn’t CENTRAL. It’s really about your TRIBAL commitment to treating the poetry in two tiny parts of the Bible as literal, rejected by most Christians. You’re conflating your tribal membership with believing in God.

The specifics are essential. Predicting that you’ll eventually be shown to be right is arrogant pseudoscience, not science.

In science, we formulate hypotheses in sufficient detail that the hypotheses, not people, make clear predictions about what we’ll directly observe. That helps us to avoid wishful thinking.

Jeanson clearly isn’t doing that; he’s embracing wishful thinking.

I have zero respect because those words are textbook pseudoscience, and Jeanson isn’t testing his hypothesis. It doesn’t even meet the initial requirement of being consistent with all the data.

Pointing out that Jeanson is wrong, with extensive explanations of why he is wrong (with which you have not engaged), is in no way an ad hominem fallacy.

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Right as usual John. They are not necessarily original to religious traditions but for many people, that’s where those values come from.

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First I must add that this very discussion has been had plenty of times, by many others (and will continue to be). Which make me question the value of jumping on that merry-go-round. But… I finally found a free moment to reply, so FWIW, let me jump on for at least a round.

For us, the following sentence works both ways if we replace YEC with Methodological Naturalism:

I think what’s important is willingness to look at it. When I came here (to PS) I was told that Nested Hierarchies (NH) was a compelling category of evidence for evolution. I chose to do my very best to “see” that evidence as others did. I honestly tried (including praying for God to open my eyes about it. That statement may mean nothing to you, but it’s huge to me). However when I studied NH, along with the Tree of Life, I didn’t find it quite so compelling. We were both “seeing the same evidence”, and “arriving at a different conclusion”.

And I can make similar statements about Cosmic and Chemical Evolution. I don’t believe either side can declare being free and void of “bad science”.

I always find such statements ironic.

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