I think a lot of the denial of evolution comes from misunderstanding how it works. Would anyone who denies evolution be able to explain what they think evolution believers actually believe in and how you think evolution would work if it were real*?
*(It is in my opinion)
Do you understand that an organism might mutate in some way, be it large or small? Yes? Good!
Do you understand that this mutation may either help them survive or hurt their survival? Yes? Good
Do you understand that this mutation can be passed on to the organisms offspring? Yes? Good!
If you said yes to all of these things, you understand that evolution exists and how it works on a basic level
How can God be an "intelligent designer" when every intelligent designer we’ve ever observed was a human, not a god?
In fact, every intelligent being we've ever observed was not a god. Moreover, the only "gods" we've ever observed were fantasies of some humans.
After participating in a few debates on this sub, I’ve been genuinely surprised at how much confusion still surrounds this topic. In particular, I noticed **several** people asking to see “transitional fossils”, imagining that if evolution were real, it would produce several “half-monkey-half-man” type creatures. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.
Evolution is a continuous process. Each new generation is nearly identical to their parents. They also possess several minor differences that can potentially be passed to their descendants. As such, every living species is a “transitional species” between its ancestors and its descendants.
I came across an absolutely fantastic analogy earlier today, and I want to share it because I think it will help some people gain a better understanding of evolution:
Language evolves.
As I’m sure you know, languages change over time. New words are gradually introduced: some get picked up, and some disappear after just one generation. Sometimes words get repurposed and their meaning is changed forever. Modern slang occasionally gets selected for formal use. We have some records of ancient Latin before it gave rise to French and Spanish. We have Bibles written in koine Greek, and it’s drastically different from modern Greek. However, because the changes to the language occurred so gradually, there is never anyone speaking “half-ancient-half-modern”. Each generation is its own transition forward.
Consider that analogy, such that new words/phrases/pronunciations are akin to traits, and the transition is much more intuitive!
I hope that helps!
I've been lurking here for a while and have seen different terms used, so I'd just like to clarify. By "creationist," do you mean someone who believes that God created the universe, or YEC specifically? I ask because the same words have different connotations, and I do not want to commit a word concept fallacy.
Would this view be classified under "creationist" as this term is used in this subreddit's connotation:
>For example, I am a Christian who studies physical sciences. I reject YEC. I believe that the universe is 13.8 Ga, and the Earth is 4.5 Ga. I accept evolution as a valid method that God used to create life.
This is not a spiritual/religious question - it's about whether we need to broaden our definition of intelligence.
Here are some arguments:
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--- EDIT:
When I say "search" and "goal" I don't mean it in the absolute sense, not that someone design it like this, but in the sense that it seems to have a clear direction, i.e. evolution seems to prefer more complex, sophisticated and intelligent life form that are increasingly more complex as the process continues.
The example of a river is great - and one I often use myself - I believe things don't have a goal, instead they have a "natural tendency".
The reason I ponder about these questions, is not because I'm trying to find an absolute answer, but because i'm trying to understand the nature of intelligent, and the more I think about it, the more I understand that we have a too narrow and bias definition of what intelligent really is, and this narrow definition block us from truly intelligent it.
So what I was getting at is: can we broaden our definition of intelligent to any process that produce complex structure, which implies that even evolution it self is an intelligent process, and the universe itself is intelligent at it very fundamental level
There are no clear evidence to support it - at least if we consider evolution as a "brute force search" (which for me is the same as "random walk" + "clear direction")
but if we accept that even with "brute force search", intelligent life from are extremely unlikely than it does imply of an underlying fundamental intelligent.
You probably can guess where im going at - is AI training a "brute force search" or part of the underlying fundamental intelligent of the universe, just like evolution is??
I don't have answers... just questions
--- Edit
>
Q: Why would I do that? There’s no reason to think of it in those terms.
A: This is just a metaphor, what it means is that:
We cannot build a machine that explore exponential space, therefore, we conclude that exponential space "known to be unfeasibe for brute force solution", but if we imagine the universe itself as such a machine then brute force solution become feasible
It doesn't mean that someone planed the universe as a machine - it means that if we consider the entire universe as an imaginary "machine", then things that are not feasible to us as human, become feasible as whole
İ genuinely believe that currently Michael Behe knows ID is Bull sh!t, and is just doing it for the money and the sunk cost fallacy.
This is evident by the fact that 20 years after he failed to defend ID in the Dover Panda Trial, he is just straight-up lying in cases such as the polar bear incident and this Evolution News blog post https://scienceandculture.com/2025/04/darwinism-is-a-potemkin-theory-of-evolution/ .
In my personal life experience, I have never come across anyone who questioned evolution and it wasn’t due to their religious creationist views.
As a result, to me, it feels like the bigger issue isn’t a lack of education but the prevalence of creationist indoctrination.
There’s so many weird ass scientific ideas and findings that people don’t care about to even have an opinion on. But the moment any idea overlaps with established creationist narratives about our origins, all of a sudden people start caring about having opinions on these ideas.
Has this been your experience too? Do you find that almost 100% of the time someone challenges evolution, it’s religiously motivated?
I'm curious if anyone here even knows any of the main arguments against macroevolution. It seems this community is just an echo chamber, bashing skeptics of evolution without even knowing their arguments.
I know you can cheat and ask AI/Google for arguments and their counter points, but at that point, you've already admitted defeat.
Sorry, folks, for the three-month hiatus!
Previously on Mr Farina:
> WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY FOUND SUGAR IN SPACE? > > WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY MADE RNA IN CONDITIONS CONSISTENT WITH THE HADEAN? > > WHAT DO YOU MEAN OUT-OF-EQUILIBRIUM CONDENSED PHASES CAN PROVIDE A SELECTION MECHANISM FOR FUNCTIONAL SEQUENCES?
And now:
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ISN'T A CHICKEN AND EGG PROBLEM?
New study from last month:
Basically, under "simulated [no, this isn't a computer simulation, it's real not-supernatural chemicals] Hadean hydrothermal conditions, acetylene, ammonia, cyanide, and carbon monoxide were reacted in aqueous solution in the presence of transition metal sulfides", and the stuff of life (uracil for RNA and amino acids for proteins) just oozed out.
Still, no magical barriers.
But, given the trending bleat, "But the experiment needed intelligence!!1!", welcome to theistic evolution, I suppose.
(If you're new to the scene, see here for why the shouting.)
I usually see many apologists use profecies in the bible to prove their beliefs are true. It's outside the scope of this sub discuss if they have logic in their sayings. It's reasonable to say that creationists believe that these arguments hold water.
You know, i'm something of a prophet myself.
I'm a writer, and when i was in my early teens i wrote a story about a "protomammal". There is this scene about him coming out of the egg and i needed to describe this egg. There was no fossil of a protomammal egg discovered at that point, maybe it not even had eggs in the first place!
So i started to think in evolution mode: Not all mammals give birth, as platypus and echidnas lay eggs. Their eggs have soft shells. In fact, all vertebrates that lay eggs with shells do it with soft shells, with the exception of those that give birth and dinossaurs (including birds), that lay eggs with a hard shell.
If you think in evolution mode, then you can say that the ancestor of these animals laid eggs with a soft shell and this is a default caracteristic of them. So, i described the egg of the protomammal as a soft shell one.
~10 years later, last month, the first egg of a protomammal is found. A little embryo encased in fetal position by an invisible shell. Hard egg shells usually are more easily preserved than the embryo. In turn, soft shells are very rare in the fossil record. This can only mean one thing: the guy was encased by a soft shell.
Very cool right? A 13yo boy with basic evolution knowledge can make predictions about the future.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Biologists do this all the time: 4 winged dinosaurs, filter feeding anomalocarids, transitional legged fish, legged snakes, bipedal monkeys, bilaterally simetric "starfish", gilled "sea urchins, gliding arboreal proto-winged insect"... Even the concept of transitional fossils itself!
All predicted before the guys were even found in the rocks of distant past.
Creation guys, please say to me: do you guys have arguments to deny all the profecies? Why your profecies matter and our don't?
If you look at this paper: https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/calvin-smith/2022/08/04/are-some-people-born-with-tails-part-1/
It’s clear that Answers in Genesis is making no sense. They try to claim the "tail" seen in human embryos is just "scaffolding" for the nervous system, but that’s like saying a foundation for a house isn't a foundation just because you eventually build walls on it. The biological reality is that we share the exact same "tail-building" genes as other primates; the only difference is that our bodies are programmed to switch those genes off and reabsorb the tissue before we’re born. Calling the tailbone "ingeniously designed" for muscle attachment ignores the fact that it is a fused, shrunk-down version of an ancestral tail. You don't get "blueprints" for a tail in human DNA by accident, it’s there because it’s a leftover from our evolutionary history that they are trying to explain away with tricky definitions.
Since we've gained thousands of new users since last year, I'd like to restate my challenge from Apr 2025 (just over a year ago) that went unanswered.
"Cell to man"
"Novel body plans"
"Micro yes, macro no"
"Animals yes, humans no"
Those highlight some of the ways the pseudoproblem of universal ancestry is parroted here. So I've compiled a list of our very own monophyletic groups (clades).
Explanation to the wider audience Darwin reconciled the 19th-century laws known as the Unity of Type and the Conditions of Existence. After the successful reconciliation, the first law was explained by the strong principle of heredity; basically: like begets like. This makes certain predictions, of which:
So without further ado My question to the science skeptics and deniers: at what point (from the list below, which is in reverse chronological order) did a radical form suddenly appear?
If you agree that at no point a radical form appeared, but you still question the process, then on what grounds do you question the process? We are basically looking at a long list of microevolution steps - speaking of which, a research from last month that I shared here with no "skeptic" in sight in the comments.
Basically I'm demonstrating that without the straw man, the science deniers have got nothing. (If anyone tries to dodge the title question, feel free to ignore them, and if dear "skeptic" picks off menu, a la origin of life, then they've just conceded all their issues with evolution; sucks to have no straw man.)
(A really cool resource for learning what synapomorphies define each clade above, Aron Ra's playlist, Systematic Classification of Life on YouTube, would be my recommendation.)
For all the rhetoric of creationists that annoy me for being fallacious, I never get what is the purpose of this: "random quote by random dude". Yeah, very cute, how does that relate to the change in allele frequencies again? And who spread this behavior? You can search older posts here and see some examples of this.
Background Info:
In 1973, Nobel Prize-winning biologist **Francis Crick**, along with chemist **Leslie Orgel**, published a provocative paper in the journal *Icarus* titled "Directed Panspermia."
Crick, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, began to question how such a complex molecule could have chemically evolved so rapidly and multiple times on early Earth. His hypothesis suggested that life didn't emerge here spontaneously, but was intentionally "seeded" by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
Dr. James Tour, Synethic Organic Chemist, Rice University
Dr. Edward Peltzer, Ocean Chemist, Retired
*Source Link*: https://youtu.be/\_LWqGVgr9J0?si=5kE72sEAF92Rw3AU
Dr. Tour:
You need constrained chemistry as John Sutherland says. You can’t use what comes in a meteorite. They are not providing the stereocontrolled compounds that you need and also there is millions of different compounds on meteorites so it becomes useless. People think if it’s there you can use it. NO YOU CAN’T.
Dr. Peltzer:
I do understand what you’re talking about. There is a very strong community that is protecting the status quo. And it’s the organic chemists that have the expertise to see the folly in some of these abiogenesis schemes.
Chemist Ed Peltzer, a former student of Jeffrey Bada and Stanley Miller, discusses the deep challenges of origin-of-life research. He critiques hydrothermal vent and Miller-Urey models, highlighting the overwhelming chemical complexity and hurdles of achieving life’s building blocks without guided intervention.
Bring these up next time you debate Kent Hovind.
Canine transmissible venereal tumor - The most famous one. It took place in an American dog 6000 - 11000 years ago. And since you cant evolve out of a clade, this is just as much a dog as a Husky.
Devil facial tumor disease - A cancer which affects the faces of Tasmanian devils.
Contagious reticulum cell sarcoma - A cancer which affects the structure of the cells of Syrian hamsters.
Okay so, I just want to preface this by saying I respect everyone’s individual beliefs and opinions. I personally am a Christian but also a firm believer in Evolution. I have been getting into this topic lately of evolution vs creationism, and majority of the time when I see arguments and debates on Reddit or YouTube or whatever about this topic, creationists seem to have this really condescending attitude towards people who believe in evolution, as if they are just simply “dumb” or “brainwashed”. Like, no room for nuance at all, if you believe in evolution you are ignorant and brainwashed, despite all the evidence to support it.
Where does this attitude come from? What is the consensus amongst creationists on why the theory of evolution exists? Is the general attitude that the theory itself and all of the extensive evidence to support it is some type of grand conspiracy theory amongst all of the world scientists and academic institutions to discredit Christian beliefs? Or is the belief that scientists are just dumb and have misinterpreted all of the evidence that we have found pointing towards human evolution and an old earth?
It's not possible to debate evolution, It's been said that we can't directly observe evolution because it happens over millions of years. The only way such a theory can be falsified is it to wait millions of years and see if the current organisms will change. I have a strong feeling nothing will change, some species will probably die out, but that won't be used as proof that they evolved into similar organisms that will remain.
I'm an agnostic atheist, the human mind has limitations. We can't understand everything, the origin of species is one of those things.
İ saw this argument in an Aron Ra video, and im not sure how to refute it. He dodged the question, instead of answering where the information came from, he just said the genetic code is inefficient. However, that's not what the person asked. They asked about how so much information could come about without an "intelligent being", not about whether or not the design was any good or not.
Original question: https://youtu.be/NBTW0fMxAKg?si=urf4uR5Gxl06AJkj&t=560s
İm just kidding of course. İ know exactly how to answer this question. The answer is mutations. Duplication mutations to be more precise. While macromutations such as duplications, inversions and deletions are comparatively far rarer than point mutations, they still happen a lot on geological time scales.
Curious what folks here think of this lesser explored tension between an organic, process-relational understanding of evolution and intelligent design, which helps make apparent how intelligent design and reductive neodarwinian approaches to evolution actually share basic paradigmatic assumptions.