Two individuals I have never heard of* but have a YouTube channel, Standing for Truth, went on a 3 hour 45-minute live rant about my views of YEC hyperspeciation last night. They went line-by-line, well sort of, through a talk I (and Gregg Davidson my coauthor) gave at the American Scientific Affiliation’s annual meeting a couple of years ago. They claimed they were going to utterly destroy me in this debunking. Sounded fun, so I decided to tune in:-)
There is no need to go into many details about this video** so here are just a few things that stuck out to me.
All the worst sorts of debate tactics are on display here. Complete demonization of their opponent and using every possible humanist strategy ever developed for “winning” a debate. Don’t look for any fruits of the Spirit in this video, you will find them completely lacking but sadly for many today this is what counts as a defense of Christian views in Ham-infused Christian circles.
The fun starts right from the start when they never introduce who I am. They just say they are going to debunk everything I have to say. Others in the corresponding chat point out that I am a Christian and point out my experience with the topic but they never acknowledge those things or even say where the speech whose recording they are debunking took place.
Comically, they spent a long time talking about how I don’t know, understand or apparently even read the creation science literature including the most important “technical” literature by Dr. Jeanson who is a real biologist and Christian and for whom they seemed to have an inordinate amount of blind faith. Interesting that one of my biggest sins is not knowing anything about creationism and yet daring to talk about it, but they apparently did not bother to learn anything about me. They don’t appear to have read any of my other works or listened to the extended video (see below) or others I have made based on this talk as was pointed out to them repeatedly in the chat.
I ended up interacting with some chatters after watching for the first two hours and at the behest of my son who was listening and was so shocked by what he was hearing (not about me but their circular logic) and he said I should respond to a few things. Well, my son got a life-lesson in why chats are an intellectual cesspool and why it is useless to get involved. The number of times he said “wait, young-earth creationists believe that!” was remarkable given he has been taught YEC ideas in his Christian school. He saw the full craziness on display including a breakout of a flat-earth discussion with several people there essentially calling non-flat-earthers compromisers.
Another highlight was being called a chicken, among many other names, by many chatters and forum leaders for not taking up the challenge to a debate. All I have to say to that is that I know a chicken is smart enough to know when he is being chased by a wolf who has no intention to sit down and have a rational conversation. Yes, run away because no good will come of feeding the wolves in sheep’s clothing.
All the while people are donating money to the YouTube channel presumably to help them to continue to create this extraordinary content. Who knew it could be so easy to make money simply by regurgitation AiG talking points and articles and talking in tangents and circles for nearly four hours?
Yes, it was an exciting evening. I would say it was one of the best comedies I’ve watched in a while except the whole things is really quite sad and tragic. What have I just been talking about here on this blog? I have been discussing differences between various types of YECs and noting that traditional creationism spawns a certain type of rhetoric that ultimately turns people away from true Christianity. We get a heavy dose of that rhetoric here.
These two individuals are exhibit A and B of the type of next generation YEC that Ken Ham is producing. They are the natural next step in the evolution of creationism if it follows the path of Ken Ham and his form of YEC apologetic.
I will have more to say about this last point when I make my wrap-up video for the series on The New Creationists.
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*Most of you will recognize this as notable given how much time I spend keeping track of dozens of established YEC ministries but also reading little-known YECs who want to be the next generation of opinion influencers.
**What about the scientific merits of their claims? Really not worth the effort here. If they can’t spend any effort to read my other writings or read other critics it is not worth my time restating things they have heard but not heard before or are have refused to hear before. In the end, they didn’t say anything that I haven’t heard before and they just ended up confirming most of what I have been saying in my recent posts. I feel sorry for them in many ways. I would love to help them understand their insecurities and misplaced faith in fallible men but unfortunately they are too far down the rabbit hole to hold out much hope for them.
Naturalis Historia 
Joel, I’m very sorry these misguided individuals attacked you, and in such underhanded ways, without even doing their homework. but I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve had it done to me many times on YouTube and elsewhere over the Paluxy tracks and other matters. And as you note, it’s astounding how some superficial, self-proclaimed YEC experts (Ian Juby being a classic example) can garner a following and funding on YouTube and elsewhere despite spouting countless unfounded and outlandish claims, all while mocking all “evolutionists” as supposedly ignorant and dishonest hacks, then receive praise from many commenters who see it as doing God’s work. It is all quite sickening.
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How totally sad. And disgusting.
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Welcome to the exciting world of SFT & Raw Matt, Joel! Ain’t they a hoot? Since I was alluded to along the way by Matt, let me fill you in on more of their context. Both are exceedingly superficial but intensely confident YEC parasites, copying from a limited set of apologists (notably Sanford, Jeanson, Tomkins & Carter), and both have written “books” that are models of credulity and sloppy scholarship.
I debated SFT on several occasions, one of the more hilarious occurring in 2019 regarding whether humans and dinosaurs coexisted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niO6gds-hWc. Watch the fun when I tried to get SFT to pony up sources, which didn’t turn out well for him.
Part of the science reaction network I circulate in includes YouTubers who attend to SFT’s “Brain Trust” gang, and respond with proper analysis in their disciplines (Erika “Gutsick Gibbon” on primate matters, Rutgers professor Dan Stern Cardinale’s “Creation Matters” pieces coming from his field of genetics, etc).
Jackson Wheat and I alluded to lots of the hyperspeciation baraminology muddle (and your work on it) in “The Rocks Were There,” and we plan to include an appendix in Vol 2 doing a break-down analysis of the Ark Encounter’s list of kinds aboard their barge (a list which curiously enough they do not document at their various outlets).
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It was quite a trip. I could laugh it off if it weren’t such an offense to the gospel. This is just a game for them even if they think they are doing some righteous act. At the end of the day any faith they have appears to be in their own works and that of their AiG heroes rather than in Christ as their personal savior. Yeah, they are a confused mess in their science but that is just a by product of a their falling prey to bad theology.
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I’ve been tempted to get a piece of that pie myself. Perhaps if these sheep get fleeced hard enough, they might have to engage in some actual critical thinking.
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At the end of the day, they answered the title question “Does YEC Require Hyperevolution?” demonstrably in the positive, whether they realize it or not. They showed themselves to be more “evolutionist” than the so-called “evolutionists” whom they caricature. Their mode of refutation was “Well, we just don’t want to call it that, whatever the century-plus conventions of nomenclature may be.”
Wow, if only I could get out of paying taxes by redefining “income” and telling everyone I just refuted the IRS…
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“Their mode of refutation was ‘Well, we just don’t want to call it [evolution], whatever the century-plus conventions of nomenclature may be.’”
!!!
If that is true (I haven’t taken the time listen), that would be horrendously embarrassing, indeed . . . not only to them, personally, but–especially if and as they hold themselves out to be paragons of righteous Christianity–to the Christian community as a whole.
Ouch!
For the larger community, here: Is Jon’s characterization accurate?
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Hyperspeciation was a ticking time bomb in YEC because of their self-imposed parameters.
Traditionally kinds were families, which is pretty much what it remains in baraminology today, except for the glaring and necessary exception of our species, which must never be lumped in at the primate family level.
Had there not been the Noah’s Ark problem, creationists could have gone for species as kinds, and marvel at the fecundity of the designer and their half a million beetle or nematode species. But having to cram the animal kinds onto the Ark forces them to trim down the number to avoid overloading. That’s why abstract creationists (Woodmorappe etc) were able to ballpark kind numbers an order of magnitude higher than the Ark Encounter, where they literally have to keep track of where they’re planning on parking them in their physical model.
Scholars of the topic can observe the consternation of people fretting over this as the number of species known (living and fossil) climbed in the 18th and 19th centuries. As I recall even Linnaeus thought there were too many species to pull it off if kinds were species.
The limitation of the kinds to not overload the Ark sets a second and third bottleneck problems that creationists have yet to properly appreciate: first, how to get the diversity of the fossil forms from them in the constrained timeframe between the Creation week and the Flood only some 1700 years. And second, that in principle all the tools of modern genetics can be brought to bear to retroengineer the putative genomes of the original created ones for at least extant kinds, with humans being the most vexing example. The haplotypes and “created heterozygosity” (a phrase SFT is ever so fond of) of Noah and the kids, and Adam & Eve living only 1700 years earlier, from which that cluster MUST have derived, would all be capable of calculation in principle (or positively refuted as impossible in principle, based on the extant genetic data).
Don’t expect Sanford, Tomkins, Jeanson or Carter to work this one out any time soon (or ever), and therefore only expect the secondary SFTs to mantra wave the issue away.
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I wrote something but it didn’t get posted. in these things whatever is right or wrong in discussions must be decided by the individual person. Everybody says the other guy does a bad job. maybe they did! publicity is the important nthing in origin subjects. So one should welcome the attention. Indeed why not agree to a debate as long as its decent enough?Usually creationists will give a kinder smarter debate platform in at least these lower level ones.
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