Hello, and welcome to my podcast. This is an audio version of my
videos available to make listening to my stuff in the background easier than YouTube makes
it. But since my videos are primarily made for YouTube, there may be
occasional references to visual materials. If you'd liked this podcast, add free you
can join us on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Vice Rhino. Please enjoy.
Hello and welcome to my channel Vice Rhino. Here today, I'm heading
back to my roots to cover a video by none other than Eric Hovend.
This one's exciting for me because one of the criticisms that I've repeatedly levied against
Young Earth creationism is that it relies entirely on poking holes in the theory of
evolution and other science that they disagree with and like to lump into evolution as
though they are all the same and inextricably linked, rather than presenting any scientifically
backed alternative to evolution, acting as though creationism would just be the default fallback
position if they managed to discredit evolution enough. But this video is called Beyond
Darwin as signed alternative to evolution, So will this finally be the video where
a creationist actually tries to do something other than just say evolution has problems and
actually present a solution of their own. I have my doubts, but that's
what the title says, so let's go. We decided that today we'd talk
about beyond Darwin, what's the scientific alternative to evolution? Because we need one.
Well, not to backtrack this early, but you only actually need one
if evolution is wrong. And despite the fact that creationists have been chronically unable
to come up with one instead of relying on their attempts to poke holes in
evolution, they have never been able to accomplish their goal of actually proving evolution
wrong. So the next step of providing a scientifically backed alternative that is more
than just God did it has never really mattered all that much because they've never
made it to the stage where that would be necessary. Terry they think they
have, which is why bring it up when relevant, but the reality is
that they have not. For probably fifteen twenty years now, the Discovery Institute
has gathered scientist and started writing and creating ideas around the idea of intelligent design.
Yes, it was a thinly veiled attempt to sneak creationism into the classroom
after creationism itself had been thoroughly discredited. They paired down the religious language and
gave their work a superficially scientific patina, but it is still at its core
creationism. Now, historically, they weren't coming out and saying the God of
the Bible, right, and that's because it's an organization that was designed specifically
to push creationism into the classroom. So if they did just come right and
say the God of the Bible, then they'd be denied outright. As teaching
religious creation narratives in science classrooms is a big no no. Well, it
was a big no no. With the current US Supreme Court. It wouldn't
surprise me if they decided that the protection of religious expression extended to teaching their
religion as though or science in public school classrooms. Okay, now that I
have to press myself with the absolute Bonker's show that is the American judicial system.
Let's get back to Eric. One of the guys has been part of
the discovery is due for a long time, Michael Denton. It is exposing
that, look, evolution has to move beyond Darwin. The article that Eric
is showing how we move beyond Darwin to the miracle of Man is basically a
bait and switch. There is little to nothing in that article that actually has
anything to do with evolution. It's mostly just an ad for Denton's book,
and based on what is written there, it amounts to nothing more than Denton
getting confused about cause and effect. He spends a good chunk of it talking
about how amazing it is that the carbon atom is perfect for sustaining life.
Yeah, carbon based life like ours, relies on the properties of carbon to
sustain itself. In other news, the towel that I dropped into the water
is now wet. Obviously, that's because the water was perfectly designed to make
the towel wet. Right, We've got to go past what Darwin taught us,
and I'll give you a little history lesson here in just a second.
But we've got to move past this idea because it's not healthy. It's actually
hindering. It's actually hurting science because it's forcing scientists to look at the data
through the lens of Darwinian evolution being true, and then forcing them to interpret
the data with that lens rather than saying, hey, what are our options?
Yeah, that sounds all fine and good. Superficially but we're at a
point with evolution where the evidence is just so strongly in its favor that that's
just not a reasonable expectation. The time for looking at the data and seeing
what conclusion it would lead us to was way back before we had found the
conclusion that the data led us to, which was evolution. When Darwin came
onto the scene, he did not set out on his journey on the Beagle
to prove evolution right. He was just studying nature, God's creation, as
he likely would have put it at the time. But when looking at the
evidence without a predetermined conclusion, evolution became rather obvious. So obvious, in
fact, that Darwin wasn't the only person to formulate this idea. Alfred Russell
Wallace came to the same conclusion around the same time as Darwin, completely independently.
In fact, at the time when Darwin and Wallace were working, the
previous evolutionary ideas were largely considered unscientific and received extensive criticism from people like Charles
Lyle, who creationists often attacked for coming up with uniformitarianism as a way to
make extra time for evolution to happen so that he could spite God despite the
fact that it was in his book that positive Uniformitarianism where he criticized the transmutation
of species, which was the precursored evolution. And he died a devoted Christian
who believed in a worldwide flood, just one that was gentle enough to have
not left any geologic record of itself. So why is it that creationists need
to claim that we're starting with the conclusion and interpreting evidence in light of that
predetermined conclusion, rather than starting with the evidence and following it where it leads
simple it's projection. They want to pre us, claiming that that's how they
work by leveling that accusation at us first, thus poisoning the well. So
that when we make that accusation of a creationist, the people who heard the
creation side of things first, likely other creationists will hear that accusation as a
no you type of argument. Except, as I'm sure we'll see in this
video, Eric is a presuppositionalist, which literally means that he begins everything with
the conclusion that the Bible is the inerrent word of God and filters all of
his information through that lens. And he is quite explicit about admitting that,
so this accusation against those who accept evolution ends up being rather blatant projection.
In this case, I've got my own issues with the intelligent design community.
I wish they'd come out and say it's God right away. It is a
bottom up approach to try to show the existence or prove the existence of God.
I prefer the top down approach. See I'll let him make it a
bit more explicit in a bit, but this is literally what I just said.
He likes a top down approach. You start with the conclusion and work
your way backward, interpreting the evidence only in a way that would have it
lead to your conclusion, even if you do have to ignore a bunch of
it and interpret that which you don't ignore in complete isolation from the other bits
of evidence, because there's no way to make them cohesively point to your conclusion.
And he apparently doesn't like the Discovery Institute's bottom up approach at looking at
the evidence first, which is fucking hilarious because the good old Disco tute also
uses a top down approach. They just pretend it's a bottom up approach in
order to infiltrate classrooms, which you'd think Eric would like, and actually,
this is one of the reasons that I think Eric is probably one of the
honest creationists out there. I think he sincerely believes what he says, which
serves to explain why he would fall for the creationist propaganda of the Discovery Institute
when they claim to be working from a bottom up approach. The next clip
is a bit long. He goes on a bit of a winding analogy in
order to explain what he means, but I'll let him finish the analogy before
responding. We relate it to a crime scene. If you walked into a
convenience store and you were the detective, and you were there to investigate a
robbery and a murder, and you walked into this crime scene and you got
your police tape all around, nobody's come in, and you start checking out
the evidence, and you see some broken glass and it looks like the guy
broke in. And then you see some of the bags of chips had fallen,
looks like some people had fall right there. Then you see the body
of the victim. You see where he's laying, there's a footprint in the
blood. That same footprint is over on the countertop. Who looks like he
had hopped over the countertop. The cash out of the cash register is gone,
so obviously a robbery. You couldn't deduce and look at the evidence and
try to figure out paint a picture of what happened here. But if somebody
else comes along and says, oh, hey, the store had a security
camera. Here, watch this, and they take give in the back room
and hit play, and you watch the murder and the robbery unfold. Now
you know exactly where each piece of the puzzle fits. Yes, but here's
the thing. Video evidence is not the be all and end all of evidence.
If the robber had their face covered, as the ones in the video
that you were showing did, then you would still need to use all of
that other evidence as part of the process of figuring out who did it.
And when it comes to court, you need to provide verification that the CCTV
footage is authentic. It's not just assumed to be so. And there needs
to be documentation about the chain of custody of the tape so that the court
can be certain that the footage was not manipulated at any point. So,
yeah, it's not merely a case of here's a video the rest doesn't matter.
The video's definitive. The video itself is merely a part of the whole
body of evidence. In the same way, I go, guys, it's
not ignorant to pull out the videotape of how God created the heavens and the
earth and say God is the creator. He told us how he did it.
Well, No, the Bible is not analogous to the CCTV tape.
In that case, if we want to hold to this analogy, the Bible
would be more like a transcript that someone who was not involved in the crime
in any way claims as the transcript of the CCTV tape. Except the store
that was robbed doesn't even have a CCTV system installed, and the person claiming
it was the transcript isn't even claiming to have directly transcribed it themselves, but
they are passing on a transcription that was compiled from several different transcripts, many
of which directly contradicted each other, and some of which were combined into one
transcript despite the contradictions. With the analogy thus corrected, we can see why
the transcript would not be admissible in court, and likewise, when it comes
to figuring out the origin of the universe and life within it. The Bible
should not be treated as authoritative. I mean, maybe, if it actually
got a bunch of stuff verifiably right, we could actually consider what it says
as a part of the body of evidence. But given just how wrong it
is about so many things, the appropriate thing to do here is to dismiss
it as irrelevant at best, well at least when it comes to sciences like
geology, cosmology, biology, astronomy, and you know, pretty much all
of the physical sciences. From an anthropological perspective, though it is undeniably an
important collection of books that gives us a glimpse into the development of a fascinating
ancient culture. But that's not what Eric is talking about here. In my
experience, young with creationists are happy to trade the importance of the Bible from
an anthropological and historical perspective in exchange for pretending that it got science right,
even though the authors of the Bible seem to have been under the impression that
what kind of sticks a goat was looking at when it had sex would determine
the pattern of the resultant babygoat's fur. So I stick, I start with
I say, the videotape, the surveillance footage of what happened God's word,
you stick with the transcript of nonexistent video footage with a severely broken chain of
custody, and all the science, all the data fits perfectly with what God's
Word actually says. If that were true, you wouldn't need to start with
it as the conclusion. In the case of a robber being caught on CCTV,
with all the evidence that you brought up, they would likely be able
to catch the guy even without the video, and given that usually a robber
will have their face covered while robbing a store, you would still need to
demonstrate that your suspect really is the person in the footage. Even if the
footage were admissible in court, even if I grant that the Bible is analogous
to the security footage, you still need to use the rest of the evidence
to show that God is in fact the being that is depicted by the footage,
and you can't do that. You only ever try to attack the integrity
of the rest of the evidence, rather than presenting any of your own.
This video is titled such that you should be presenting your own evidence, which
would be new for a creationist. But we're a quarter of the way in
and you haven't said anything that isn't just typical creation as rhetoric. At this
point, Roy when Darwin was coming out with what he was promoting, Darwin
and evolution, people were already dissensing and doubting that. Yes, like I
said earlier, the precursors to Darwin's theory of evolution were not taken very seriously
among scientists. So Lamarckian evolution, for instance, was the idea that an
organism would require a trait during its lifetime and then pass that trade on to
its offspring, with the quintessential example being of the precursor to the giraffe needing
to reach the higher branch to obtain food, stretching its neck, and when
it reproduces, its offspring will start with a slightly longer neck. This was
and remains to this day wrong the mark he's dead, and it was the
primary idea that scientists did not take seriously in Darwin's time. The fact that
the presuppositions of the scientists working in Darwin's time led them to not take evolution
seriously. But they change their minds when presented with compelling evidence does not help
your case that scientists begin with evolution as the conclusion and find ways to make
the evidence fit it. It demonstrates rather the opposite, actually one revealing the
fine tuning of nature for human existence. And there's the crux. I skipped
most of this quote. He's just reading directly from the article that he showed
earlier. But the article doesn't even have anything to do with evolution. It's
all about making the teleological argument, trying to demonstr that the universe was made
with people in mind, rather than trying to discredit evolution. Notably, Michael
Denton, the guy whose article you're quoting, accepts the theory of evolution.
The design argument that he proposes is one where a universe was designed in order
to make the evolution of human beings possible. So is your new thing that
you accept evolution? If it's not, why are you using an article written
by an evolutionist to make your point? Already people were going away a minute,
this universe is perfectly designed, and they've really helped develop the fine tuning
argument, how the gravitational force has to be absolutely perfect, and all these
different scientific laws that they say are on a Raiser's edge, and yeah,
there we go. See that version of the fine tuning argument is all about
getting a universe where evolution of carbon based life is possible. So if that's
the one you want to use, go for it. But it assumes old
ages evolution and that there is room for metaphorical interpretation in the j us A
story. Also, it's got its own problems. For one, you're showing
that the life permitting range is tiny compared to the whole spectrum of values for
these constants and laws and whatnot. But have you demonstrated that it is possible
for them to be different? Does your little graphic there take into consideration the
fact that there's quite a bit of variation that the constants could have that would
still allow for a universe with lifelike ours. Have you ruled out the possibility
of other combinations resulting in universes that would be hospitable to life that is not
like ours. And on top of that, there are some changes that we
can be fairly certain would result in a universe that is more hospitable to life
than the one we live in. The cosmological constant, for instance, is
ever so slightly positive if it were slightly negative That would encourage a great amount
of galaxy and star formation, resulting in more matter that is available for life
to use. So we know that the universe is not fine tuned to be
optimal for life, despite being possible for life. And in addition to all
of that, the ultimate problem with the fine tuning argument is the very existence
of the argument meant itself. If there were no god, what kind of
universe would you expect to find life in? One in which life is possible?
Obviously, But if there were a god, what kind of universe would
you expect to find life in? Then any damn universe that that God wanted
to put life in. If the universe were clearly not fine tune for life
and yet life existed in it any way, that could potentially be evidence that
some supernatural being exists and is keeping things going. But that's not what we
see. We merely see that life is sustained in a universe where it's possible
for life to be self sustaining. And then they go listen, if you
were to move just a little bit this way, an inch this way,
or an inch this way, out of this hundreds of miles or thousands of
miles you don't get life, and any way they present this and show it
looks like life was designed to get. They're coming from the data, from
the facts, from the information, and trying to do news what happened,
So apologies that I keep cutting back to him at times that seem awkward,
like he might be in the middle of saying something. But this seems to
have originally been a live stream, so he's not exactly at his best here.
But he is talking about a graphic that's used to represent fine tuning,
a ruler that is thousands of miles long with a little tiny spot in the
middle where life is possible, which I already addressed when I talked about his
little graphic there. But what I want to mention here is that no,
those graphics and the people who make them are not starting with the data and
deducing God from it. They are starting with God and going data mining,
ignoring the times when it looks like the universe is not fine tuned, ignoring
how much variation there is in what these constants could be that would still allow
for life, and pretending like it's even possible for anyone to know at this
point in time whether variation of these constants, is possible, or whether there
have been other universes that have existed with variations in the constants, with the
universes with the constants that allow for life being the ones in which life develops,
looks around and says, Wow, this universe must have been designed for
me, because I wouldn't exist otherwise. The amount of knowledge they have to
pretend to have in order to draw that conclusion is serd. And that's even
if I ignore the amount of knowledge that they have to pretend not to have
in order to not have their conclusion undercut before it begins. I go the
other direction. But he goes on. He says, as the Darwinian paradigm
tightened its grip on mainstream biology and science, all vestiges of the old heliological
organismic universe, all notions which place humankind or life on Earth in any special
or privileged place in the order of things, were banished from mainstream academic debate.
And that ladies and gentlemen is a problem. No, that's not a
problem. When we find out that something is true and is well supported by
the data, and makes testable predictions and consistently holds up to scrutiny. Even
when entirely new fields of science are discovered that had the potential to completely falsify
it, like genetics, it ceases to make sense to not start with the
idea that this well supported theory is accurate. We don't expect astronomers to begin
every single one of their papers with the section demonstrating that the Earth is not
flat and that geocentrism is false. Those ideas are so thoroughly disproven at this
point that it would be ridiculous to expect that from astronomy and astronomers have better
things to spend their time doing than reiterating millennia old bits of evidence for the
globe Earth that is the equivalent here. In order for evolution to be false,
most of what we know about several entire fields of science would have to
also be false. But these fields of science continue to produce accurate and useful
discoveries. Add the young Earth into the mix, and the number of scientific
fields that have to be completely thrown in the bin and started over increases well
past the biological and paleontological areas into geology, astronomy, physics, anthropology,
history, cosmology, and more so. Yeah, I don't expect biologists to
prove evolution in every paper, just as I don't expect geologists to prove that
the Earth is four point five billion years old every time they publish a classification
of a rock sample, or an anthropologist to prove that humanity has existed for
longer than six thousand years when discussing ancient Native American cultures and so on.
When we are looking at the world and saying we are not going to allow
the supernatural to come into the scientific debate, the supernatural has nothing to do
with it at this point, Madude. The teleological argument is still popular among
apologists, even the ones who accept science, because at its core, as
with most arguments for God, it relies on scientific unknowns in order to work.
We don't know why the constants are what they are, Therefore God must
have made them that way. It is a classic God of the gaps.
But with evolution you don't get to exploit the gaps because evolution is very well
understood. Sure, sometimes there are gaps with the specifics of how some feature
evolved or how some fossil fits into the overall evolutionary picture, and creationists love
to latch onto those when they appear, but when the gap is inevitably closed,
they always either ignore the fact that we have an explanation or they rationalize
it away, trying to figure out why the answer or isn't actually the answer.
The only time creationists have ever had a point about something is when they
talk about how science communicators will often hypothesize about what environmental factors existed in the
past that would have led to the selection pressures that favored certain characteristics over others.
Often those scenarios are imaginative storytelling, meant to capture your attention or to
get you to learn something about the actual hard science. And if you ask
any scientists who is actively researching anything to do with evolution, they will readily
tell you that we can only speculate about those types of things, but evolution
does not rest on these stories. Evolution rests on the hard data that underlies
those stories. So even when creationism does have a point, it would be
like them getting upset when a parent tells a toddler that babies happen when two
parents love each other very much and do a special kind of hug. Instead
of explaining every detail about sex and reproduction, you got to consider the target
audience. Your average Joe will be way more interested in hearing about those dinosaurs
we're fighting each other in this made up scenario that will result in them having
a rudimentary grasp of the situation. Then if you just started presenting straight up
facts and data to them, And yes, I did just imply that if
you're not deeply interested in evolution, you're the same as a toddler who doesn't
know where babies come from. Evolution is cool as fuck, and it's not
my fault. You can't do the ADHD hyperfixation thing like I can. That's
a problem. It's certainly not scientific to do, so, no, you
know it's not scientific. It's not scientific to ignore that. Literally every field
of science says that you are dead wrong. Letting a biologist not prove the
basics in every paper they write is fine unless you think that in math class,
before solving the quadratic equation, the kids should be required to demonstrate all
the fundamentals of math that make the quadratic equation possible, and not just once
every single time they have to use it. It would get incredibly tedious and
would just be a colossal waste of time, just like proving evolution in every
biology paper would be Darwin one. Eric, time that you accepted that my
name is Darwin, daru and they'll argue, well, science can only deal
with the natural world. I get it, but then you need to stick
with just the natural world we do. There's nothing supernatural about evolution, and
you need to stop trying to explain how things came into the natural world.
Oh you're talking about cosmology again. Okay, Sorry, I was operating under
the assumption that this would be a video mostly about evolution, given that he
references Darwin in the title and keeps coming back to comparisons with Darwin, Well,
Eric, have you ever asked a cosmologist about whether they think the origin
of the universe was supernatural? To quote Sean Carroll from his debate with William
Lane Craig, Well, you know what it's recorded, so let's just hear
Carroll himself say it. The discussion we're having tonight does not reflect a debate
that is ongoing into professional cosmology community. If you go to cosmology conferences,
there's a lot of talk about the origin nature of the universe. There is
no talk about what role God might have played in bringing the universe about it
is not an idea that is taken seriously and modern physics. You open a
quantum field theory textbook or a general relativity textbook, you will not find the
words transcendent cause anywhere. What you find are differential equations. This reflects the
fact that the way that physics is known to work these days is in terms
of patterns, unbreakable rules, laws of nature. Given the world at one
point in time, we will tell you what happens next. There's no need
for any extra metaphysical baggage like transcendent causes. On top of that, it's
precisely the wrong way to think about how the fundamental reality works. So yeah,
cosmology is very much a field of science that works within the bounds of
naturalism. And you now, and you're just going to stick with a natural
world. You now can't explain things like logic and morality and the very science
theory are using. Oh god, he's just jumping all over the damn place.
Now, Okay, behind the scenes stuff, sometimes you can tell how
far ahead I watch in a video before I start scripting, because I will
often reference things that are happening later. But I usually don't watch the full
video all the way through, and for whatever reason, I just don't go
back to my script to change things. If I predicted something wrong, I
will go back to fix factual errors. And if I predicted something wrong enough
to change my overall approach, I might go back then. But usually it's
little things like this that I don't fix. It's usually subtler than this.
But Eric is all over the place, so I just can't keep up.
Okay, here we go. Logic. The laws of logic are descriptive laws
that we use to describe how the world works. If the world worked differently,
we'd have different laws of logic to describe that world. No God needed
morality. Morality is more of a problem for people like Eric who believe that
a god wrote morality on all our hearts, because it's painfully obvious that different
cultures have different moral codes, and even different individuals within this same culture will
have moral differences. The only moral precepts that approach anything like universal agreement are
things that have a clear evolutionary advantage. Don't kill, don't steal, stuff
like that, and even then the agreement is only mostly universal. We will
disagree about circumstances in which killing or theft could be morally permissible. So even
in morality that is mostly universally agreed on, there will be differences of opinion
when you get down to the details. As to science, the science that
we're using was specifically designed to be a workaround for our fallible senses, and
by its very nature, it will over time correct any errors to be more
in line with reality. Sure, science does have its issues, but it
is the best system that we have for learning about reality, and so far
it has consistently produced reliable and useful results. Science. The laws of science
are not material in nature. Not material does not automatically mean supernatural. You
can't just assert that you've got to connect those dots. Don't say they're just
a product of the universe. Why you're just saying that, No, they're
human inventions. Science and logic were invented by humans to describe the universe,
and morality is essentially the result of how we feel about certain actions. But
regardless of the source of our morality, one thing is certain. It is
subjective. Because if universe existed without thinking beings subjects for morality to act on,
then morality itself would not exist. It would be meaningless. To say
that something happening in that universe is moral or immoral, because there are no
subjects to which morality would be applicable. So, despite the apologious protestations,
morality is in fact subjective. We've got to move beyond Darwinian evolution. Yeah,
no, no, no, what you just said has anything to do
with evolution, except maybe morality as our moral compasses, seem to have evolved
to help us survive as a social species. So we ask questions like,
hey, we're humans created or did we evolve? We evolved? If animals,
if there are animals, were the animals created or did those animals evolve?
By chance? They evolved? And he never mentions if a planets did
two by chances. An interesting addition here, though, certainly there are aspects
of evolution that have a degree of randomness to them, but evolution itself is
not a random process by any means. Well, if we got a question
about humanity, we got a question about animals, we got to ask a
question about this whole planet. Was planet Earth created or did planet Earth evolve
by itself? And now we've left the realm of the theory of evolution and
have entered into Eric's Daddy's Six kinds of evolution. The Earth did not evolve
in the biological sense of the word. No, the Earth formed through the
conglomeration of material in our son's protoplanetary disk. It to me is mind boggling
to watch Cosmos and how they'll show the Moon forming. They'll just show all
these comets coming and making the Moon, and it was two hundred thousand miles
close the Earth. Well's what So we're talking about a moon seventy three seventy
three thousand miles away from Planet Earth. Do you realize what kind of problems
you have there? The inverse square law would take effect in the Moon and
the Earth would just crashed into each other. Anyway, what he's trying and
failing to say is that with large orbiting bodies like planets and moons, there
is a limit to how close they can get to each other before the effects
of gravity become catastrophic, resulting in one of them being torn apart. It's
called the Rosh limit. Unfortunately for Eric, this is something that we can
calculate. The ross limit for the Earth is eighteen thousand, four hundred and
seventy kilometers or eleven thousand, four hundred and seventy miles, which means that
using your seventy three thousand miles number, the Moon was at its formation more
than six times farther away from the Earth than the Rosh limit, meaning that
there would be no catastrophic tearing up of lunar material. And this may seem
like a petty point to add on here, and it is, but I'm
bringing it up anyway, the inverse square law would not take effect. That's
just the math of how gravity works over distance, always in effect. Was
the Earth created or did the Earth evolve? When you watch these shows,
they make it just sound like, of course it evolved, of course that
happened. No, it's not, of course it evolved. It's of course
our planet formed in the way that planets form in the universe. We have
no reason to believe that our planet is special in its formation. And when
you pay close attention, you're going it's absurdity. It's fairy tales that they're
making this stuff up. It is not scientific whatsoever. I mean. You
can read all about it in scientific papers, which includes mathematical modeling verified through
computer simulation, observations of extrasolar planetary disks, the study of the composition of
primitive meteorites, and a whole host of other highly scientific endeavors. Surely to
call all of that unscientific, you must have a model that better explains the
data and can similarly be confirmed through computer simulation, right, Or is this
just an argument from personal incredulity where you personally find it hard to believe and
so dismiss it without doing any of the appropriate research. Because I know you're
not going to want to hear this. But if I need to apply the
label unscientific to one of these two approaches, it's not the one that's working
with data physics, math, and astronomical observations that's going to get that label.
What about the entire universe? Was it created or did it evolve?
Again? Neither as far as the theory of evolution is concerned. The universe
does not reproduce as far as we can tell anyway, So evolution does not
apply here. Though I am sure someone after enough drugs, has hypothesized that
the universe is like a living thing. Man, What if it totally is
reproducing and there's like baby universes that we don't even like know about. But
as far as I can tell, this is not one of the series contenders
for the origin of the cosmos. What I can tell you, though,
is that the contenders that we do have well, admittedly more speculative than the
origin of the solar system, also involved of math and simulation and data.
While your simplistic answer of God did it fails to adequately account for any of
that. As I've said in previous videos, even if God did do it,
that still leaves us with the question of how he did it, what
mechanism did he use to get it done? Sure, the Bible says he
spoke and things happened, but even granting that magic spells like that are possible,
what mechanism did it use? Did God have to speak out loud?
Does that mean that there existed a medium through which sound waves could pass in
order for God to be able to speak? Did God create that medium first?
Did he speak silently? Is speak just a metaphor for thought? Here?
These are the kinds of questions you need to answer if you want your
model to be taken seriously, and as far as I can tell, there
hasn't even been an attempt to answer these questions. Also, this is the
periodic reminder that in this video we're nearly halfway through and there still has not
been a scientific alternative to evolution that has even been mentioned, let alone supported
with evidence of any kind. If I grant everything Eric has said thus far,
we get to a position of we don't know how the universe or planets
formed, and we don't know how life got diverse, and that's the end
of it. That's not an alternative, that's a gap that Eric hopes to
stick God into. What about the properties that make up our universe time space,
matter, and energy? We're time, space, matter, and energy.
Were they created or did they evolve? Again? Neither, But where
they did come from depends on which cosmological model we're going with, And realistically,
we probably haven't discovered the cosmological model that accurately describes the origin as of
yet. But of all the models that we do have which work with our
current understanding of physics, not a single one has them being created by an
untestable, unfalsifiable super being. And this brings us to the two basic world
views that are out there. Some people look at this world, they say,
a big bang is what made this world from absolutely nothing? No,
that is a massive oversimplification of one specific cosmological model that isn't even the most
popular model of cosmologists. And if you actually want to posit your own cosmological
model, it would be super helpful to you if you could demonstrate that you
have an understanding of the existing cosmological models, at least if you want to
be taken seriously by cosmologists and aren't just trying to appeal to Christians in an
attempt to turn some of them into Young Earth creationists and to provide simplistic thought
stopping techniques to the ones who already are Young Earth creationists. Because if you
repeat often enough that cosmologists believe this one ridiculous thing about the origin of the
universe, then when someone who listens to you encounters one of the other cosmological
models being presented by another lay person like me, they don't need to actually
work to understand what is being said. They can just rest easy knowing that
surely that model amounts to nothing more than believing that the universe came from nothing
in a big bang, because after all, every cosmological model takes the Big
Bang seriously because you know it demonstrably happened, and the more sophisticated apologists who
use the teleological argument that Eric attempted to use earlier in this very video,
even from a starting point that includes the Big Bang, because the whole thing
with that argument for God is that the universe was set up by God in
the Big Bang to be optimal for eventually allowing the evolution of humans. So
that includes Eric's evolution of the planet Earth. And since I'm convinced that Eric
is sincere in his belief, I'm also leaning towards a position where, rather
than Eric actually understanding it and choosing to misrepresent it in order to make his
point, I think Eric himself engages in these thought stopping techniques, and so
despite the fact that these things have been repeatedly explained to him in great detail,
he has managed to not understand them through his use of these thought stopping
techniques. It's actually kind of sad, but I mean, it wouldn't exactly
shock me to my core if I found out that he was just lying for
Jesus and money this whole time. I can't tell what's going on inside his
head, but if he is lying, he does a better job of pretending
to be sincere than a lot of the other apologists who I know for a
factor, lying like Matt Powell, and this idea came out because who's the
guy look at those telescope the hubble Hobble's looking through his telescope, and he's
realizing galaxies are getting further and further away. No matter which direction he looked,
the galaxies seemed to be getting further and further away from where we're at.
So he said, it looks like the universe is expanding. Well they
drew from that. Well maybe if we go back in time, that means
it used to be closer together. It's possible that everything started off as a
singularity and then expand it. Okay, horrible explanation of how we discovered the
Big Bang aside. I'm willing to bet that he doesn't mention that the guy
who actually came up with the model that became known as a Big Bang was
a Catholic priest George LaMeta, because if the guy who had developed Big Bang
theory believed in God, that would throw a pretty big wrench into the works
of his idea that scientists are desperately working from a presupposition of naturalism in order
to figure out how everything could work without a God. Hubble is much easier
to disparage that way, as he was raised a Christian, but seemed to
shy away from professing any sort of actual belief, choosing instead to deflect anytime
he was asked. Also well, Hubble did discover shift, which is the
fact that galaxies that are moving away from us have their light waves stretched out
as a result of the Doppler effect, making them appeer shifted toward the red
side of the electromagnetic spectrum. The key part of that discovery was not the
red shift itself, but the fact that the amount of redshift corresponded to the
galaxies distance from us. The further away something is, the more red shifted
it's em radiation is. Actually, now that I think on it, red
shifted is probably not a great term for it, but it's one that's so
intrenched now that doesn't really make sense to change it. Because if you shift
microwave radiation towards the visible red light end of the spectrum, that would actually
be violet shifting it unless when it passes the visibly red part of the spectrum
it's still called red for some reason, in which case, when you listen
to the radio you're listening to it in red. None of that matters though.
That's just my random, irrelevant observation of the day. By the way,
scientists are now beginning to reject the Big Bang idea. Do you have
a citation for that? Which scientists? Come on, Eric, If you
make a claim like that, you gotta name names and give sources. Just
stated it like it's a fact and move on. That'd be like if I
just said, by the way, Young Earth creationists are now beginning to reject
the global flood idea. If I said that, wouldn't you want to know
who? And yes, I did just cut him off there, but I
did watch far enough ahead to verify that he never actually provides anything to support
that assertion. So it's Hitchin's razor time that which can be asserted without evidence
can be dismissed without evidence. Problem is this worldview comes from the perspective of
there is no God. Nope, it sure does not. Refer back to
my previous comments about a Catholic priest being the guy who formulated the Big Bang
theory, or Charles Lyle being okay with the idea of a worldwide flood.
There's also the example of Charles Darwin himself. He began his career with the
goal of becoming a clergyman, and to that end he attended the University of
Cambridge in order to get the Bachelor of Arts degree that the Anglican Church required
at the time in order to become clergy Upon his graduation from Cambridge in eighteen
thirty one, he set sail on the Beagle for a five year mission to
seek out new life and new civilizations. Hey, that kind actually fits there,
except in the Star Trek context. New life and civilizations would literally be
life and civilizations that are younger than Earth's civilizations, while different civilizations on Earth
would probably be roughly the same age. They'd just be newly encountered life and
civilizations. But I digress. On his voyage, his goal was to discover
the centers of creation, which would explain the diversity of life in terms of
God creating life with a limited capacity for adaptation in different locations throughout the Earth.
But the evidence he collected on his voyage convinced him of the opposite.
So tell me, Eric, how exactly was Darwin looking for an explanation that
would exclude God? If he literally went on his foundational voyage with the intention
of finding evidence for God's creative acts. Some people try to blend this there
is no God idea with well, maybe God used evolution. That's not how
blending ideas works. What's happened is that Christians who actually put in the effort
to understand science have come to the conclusion that the evidence for revolution is undeniable,
and so try to make it fit within a biblical framework by not insisting
on a selectively literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories. And I say selectively
literal here for a reason. Ask Eric if he believed that the snake was
really just a snake, as it literally says in the story, and he
will likely tell you that, no, it's the devil in snake form.
Ask Eric if the line warning in Genesis two seventeen that if you eat of
the Tree of knowledge of good and evil in that day, you shall surely
die is literal, and he'll probably tell you that it's actually talking about a
spiritual death, not a literal death, despite the story not even implying that.
Also, I'd like to know how Adam managed to literally name every single
non marine animal. If we take the creation to set their word. The
creation account in Genesis, too, is actually just giving a more detailed look
at day six of the Genesis One creation account not a separate story, despite
the fact that God creates plants in this story when that happened on day three
and the other one. But creationists say that that's what happened on day six,
and these days are literal twenty four hour periods. So in less than
twenty four hours, Adam named every single non marine animal and every single bird.
According to answers in Genesis, there were about one three hundred ninety eight
kinds of animals that fit that description, which means that if Adam had the
full twenty four hours to name them all and didn't take any breaks to eat
or sleep, he had less than one minute to come up with a new
name for each kind of animal. Now, sure you might be able to
get through a few pretty quickly, but eventually the creative juices just stopped blowing
and you need some time to think. So does Eric think that that's what
literally happened or is that part metaphorical? And what language is he naming them
in? Do we still have these names today? Was there even a point
in Adam naming all the animals if he did so in a language that was
doomed to die out, and we'd have to come up with new names anyway.
As with most things in apologetics, if you take them seriously, they
lead to far more questions than they answer, which isn't inherently bad. After
all, there are plenty of things in science that's once you start understanding them,
they raise more questions than the answer. But the problem is that if
the questions raised by taking apologetics seriously are answered, they make everything more absurd
rather than given clarity. See I look at the world, and I say,
no, this world is incredibly designed. God was a smart designer.
He's a very very intelligent designer. That's the creation is the world being.
Yeah, okay, But if you're providing an alternative to evolution, you can't
just say, hey, I'm personally of the opinion that it sounds silly.
Therefore God is the less silly option. That's not how alternatives work. You
have to provide an alternative that is at least as good at explaining the data
as evolution, ideally better at it, and you have to be able to
demonstrate that scientifically, not just through assertion. And personal incredulity. As I
expected, this video has just been an attempt to poke holes in our current
understanding of science without actually providing any reason why creationism would be the better alternative,
just assuming that if enough holes are poked, creation and specifically Eric's version
of Young Earth, creationism is the default fallback position. That's not how this
works. Also, he now goes on this huge rant about Christians who accept
evolution. I'm going to skip most of that bit. It's not relevant to
this topic, let alone what the James Webb Space Telescope is discovering. They're
like, oh, galaxies that are supposed to be just now forming, We're
seeing them fully formed, fully functional. We got a problem. James Webbs
based telescope is destroying classic astronomy and cosmology. It's destroying and many of the
things that they held dear about about how the world began. It is doing
no such thing. Discovering the old galaxies it is discovered was one of the
primary missions that it was launched for, and according to astrophysicist Brandt Robertson,
the observations that it has made match what astronomer is expected to find based on
current models of galaxy formation. Now, sure, if you just read the
coverage of these discoveries on whose outlets like The Guardian, you'll see them talking
about how these are universe breaking galaxies that would require us to completely revamp our
understanding of cosmology. But if you read the actual papers that spawned these news
articles, you find phrases like preliminary indications have suggested these candidate galaxies may be
more massive and abundant than previously thought. However, without confirming distances, their
inferred properties remain uncertain. And however, none of such candidates has yet been
confirmed spectroscopically, leaving open the possibility that they are actually low redshift interlopers.
Notably, the galaxies discovered, if the redshift measured ages are accurate, are
metal poor and extremely young, which is exactly what we'd expect of a galaxy
that formed immediately after the Big Bang. Also, this is the classic creationist
dilemma. Even if what we learn about these galaxies turns out to be incompatible
with current models of galaxy formation, requiring us to revamp those models, the
creationists like Eric are left with a problem if they accept the science that shows
these galaxies to be too young for our current models, then they are necessarily
also accepting the science that tells us that the light emitted from those galaxies has
been traveling towards us for over thirteen billion years, far longer than would be
possible if the universe were a mere or six thousand years old. This is
one of those things where in order for you to make Young Earth creationism scientifically
feasible, you need to throw out and explain away all of the data that
is collecting, not just selective bits of it. Because hey, we found
a galaxy that is thirteen point four billion years old, which is older than
we expected. Is not something that supports your claim that nothing in the universe
is older than six thousand years. But guys, it's time to move beyond
Darwin. Let me share with you a couple more reasons why we need to
move beyond Darwin and get a scientific alternative to evolution. Oh, I see
this video was entirely bait and switch shocking. I know I could have never
predicted that, But yet here he is admitting that they don't actually have a
scientific alternative. They still need to get one. Here's a new flash for
you, Eric. If you actually want there to be a scientific alternative to
evolution, and you want that alternative to be widely accepted, you have to
develop it independently of your attempts to poke holes and evolution. Sure, poking
holes and evolution would necessarily be a part of the process, but it can't
just be poking holes. It has to be here's something that is not adequately
explained by evolution, and this is the reason why my explanation is a better
fit for the data. So far, you've only been engaged in here is
something that is not adequately explained by evolution anyway, moving on, And what's
more, the things that you claim are not adequately explained are usually pretty well
explained. Your impression that they aren't explained stems from a lack of understanding,
not from the explanation actually being inadequate. Are you familiar with the sent from
Darwin dot org. Yeah, that's where a creationist organization, namely the Discovery
Institute, got a bunch of scientists to sign their agreement to a statement that,
on the surface level, is actually kind of in line with how science
works. The statement was, we are skeptical of claims for the ability of
random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life, careful examination
of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. Skepticism is the basis for
all of science. It is a withholding of acceptance of an idea until sufficient
evidence is presented. And random mutation natural selection alone are not the only processes
through which evolution works. So yeah, I would be skeptical of anyone who
claimed that. And careful examination of the evidence is always encouraged in science,
so of course that should apply to the evidence for the theory of evolution.
Notably, on their most recent list, there are over a thousand signatories.
I'm not counting the exact number, and for some reason the Discovery Institute seems
hesitant to give it live updates. But it's still going and scientists can currently
still sign the list if they like. They've been collecting signatures for twenty two
years now, and notably they defined scientist pretty loosely and allowed basically anyone with
an advanced science related or apparently science related degree to sign. There are plenty
of engineers, computer scientists, dentists, aviation experts, philosophers, and more
in unrelated fields. As of two thousand and seven, when they only had
seven hundred signatures, Fewer than twenty five percent of them were from biologists.
There are also people with no scientific qualifications who are allowed to sign, like
Bernard Diabrera, who has never worked as a scientist and has no formal scientific
qualifications, having an undergrad degree in the history of philosophy of science. Some
of the people that signed it later asked for their names to be removed,
feeling misled when they realize that the list was being used to promote creationism.
What's more, the list is not a good representative sample. It cast its
net far and wide and a mass a total of a thousand signatures, which
amounts to about zero point zero one percent of all scientists worldwide. Meanwhile,
the National Center for Science Education has a similar list of people who sign a
statement affirming the theory of evolution, and in order to sign that, you
not only have to be an active scientist. Notably, the descent from Dharminism
will accept signatures from former scientists, people with scientific sounding degrees that aren't actually
scientists. But you also must be named Steve to sign this one or some
variation of Steve. Currently there are one four hundred and ninety Steves who have
signed, and since only about one percent of scientists have a name that is
a variation of Steve, it can then be extrapolated that this represents about one
hundred and forty nine thousand scientists who would have signed if they were not forbidden
because of their name discrimination. I know it's wild anyway, This means that
their petition accurately represents the opinions of at least one point seven percent of scientists
worldwide, a couple orders magnitude more than the descent from Darwinism. It still
doesn't prove anything as far as the actual theory of evolution is concerned. At
best, a successful petition of this kind would be an argument from authority,
But it does show that it's far easier to find scientists who will agree that
evolution is a thing than to find ones who disagree about evolution. For example,
he shows a picture of an alligator and a fossil alligator. Now,
according to the Old Earth in ger and according to the evolutionary interpretation, this
fossil alligator would be somewhere between fifty four and thirty seven million years old.
So a couple things here. Firstly, was this fossil alligator examined closely and
found to be morphologically identical to modern alligators. I doubt it. Sure,
it looks superficially similar, but superficial similarities do not make something identical. It
is quite possible, likely even that evolution did happen in that time, but
the overall body plan remained fairly stable. In fact, we know that the
crocodilian body plan has existed for about two hundred million years now. And while
it does appear that crocodilians evolve slowly compared to other types of animals, the
fact of the matter is that they do evolve, and there have been hundreds
of species of crocodilians that are known through the fossil record in the course of
that time. So yeah, crocodilians as a category are weirdly evolutionarily stable.
After all, in the same time span that we went from the first crocodilians
two hundred million years ago to today, we wound up with the twenty four
species that made it to modernity, while birds ended up with about ten thousand
species over that same time period. But just because something evolves slowly does not
mean that it does not evolve. Nothing about evolution says that all species must
change over time. If the environment is stable with no new selection pressures,
and the organism is already well adapted to that environment, then there is no
evolutionary driving forces aside from genetic drift, and genetic drift on its own moves
very slowly. This one's from Germany. Now, when they examine the crocodile
from somewhere between thirty seven million and fifty four million years ago, they notice
something. It hasn't changed. Where is that examination published? And is it
a crocodile or an alligator? I've been referencing crocodilians, which is a category
that includes both. But a crocodile is a specific type of crocodilian, as
is an alligator. And can we really trust you to say that it hasn't
changed if you can't tell the difference between the two anyway. He goes on
with more examples of the so called living fossils, but the response is basically
the same for all of them. Not only have there been evolutionary changes,
albeit minor ones, to every single one of his examples, but evolution does
not demand that an organism must change in order to survive. It is simply
that the organism that is the best fit for the environment will survive to reproduce.
If an organism is a good fit for an environment and that environment remains
relatively stable, then there is no reason that that organism should not also remain
stable. It is time for us to move beyond Darwin and say Darwinian evolution
doesn't make sense. There's got to be a better way. Well, unfortunately
for you, not only does evolution make sense, but thus far nobody has
been able to come up with a better way. Maybe Eric will be the
one to do it, but I doubt it, as in order to supplant
an existing scientific theory, you must first actually understand it, and Eric clearly
does not. There's got to be a better way. I happen to know
that better way is a matter of fact. I'm going to share with you.
I know the better way. I've got a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution.
Oh okay, then maybe this video wasn't debate and switch after all.
Maybe in the last two minutes and twenty six seconds of the thirty one minute
video, he will present the case for a scientific model that accurately accounts for
all of our observed data. Better than evolution does, and so is worthy
of consideration. Let's hear it, Eric, But first I need to talk
about what evolution means. I need to talk about Andy Stanley, and then
I'm gonna have time just at the end to give you the summary of what
a scientific alternative is to Darwinian evolution. I don't understand this is the end.
There are two minutes and ten seconds left, where like ninety five percent
of the way finish this video. How can you still have more to go
over before getting to it? Before I do that, though YouTube and basebook,
I've got to let you guys go. I'm so sorry. I'd love
you guys to catch the rest of this program. It's available at creations at
eight. Oh. Okay, there it is. There is a scientific alternative
to evolution, but in order to find out what it is, you have
to send me money. I stopped the video before he got super grifty,
but that is indeed where he goes with this. Unfortunately, Eric, if
you want the scientific community to take what is supposedly your scientific idea seriously,
you can't hide up behind a paywall like that. You gotta actually present it
publicly. That's it for this one. Today's comment to the day comes to
us from mister Rusty one oh three, who says Western Canada checking in could
pick anywhere in the city you're within a fifteen minute walk of a weed shop.
They're fucking everywhere here, although I think I might low key be in
the city with the most dispensaries per capita. Well glad to hear that Western
Canada's embracing the concept of a fifteen minute city. Well done, Thanks for
watching. I'll be back next Friday with more, but if you need to
get your Rhino fix in before then. I live stream with service every Wednesday
at eight thirty Eastern on my other channel, The Watering Hole, and I
stream with my partner every Tuesday at one pm Eastern. Here thanks to Tim
Robertson for being my Patreon and sponsorship's manager, and special thanks is always to
my patrons, who are the scientific replacement for the current consensus that is my
channel. If you'd like to be hidden behind a paywall rather than shouted from
the mountaintops, you can join us on Patreon for as little as a dollar
per week over at patreon dot com, slash vice Rhino, or by supporting
the channel and one of the other methods that can be found at links dot
vice rhino dot com, which is also where we find links to my other
projects. If for whatever reason, you want to send me stuff, my
po box addresses in the description. See you next time. Your average Joe
will be way more interested in hearing about how those dinosaurs we're fighting with each
other in the made up scenario that will result in them having a rudimentary graph
with the situation. Oh, I should breathe more.