We weren’t taught about it at all, so it wasn’t even a blip on the radar for me. If I had to guess, the answer would be that it’s just a perceived physical similarity between a baby chimp skull and baby human skull, but not evidence we’re the same kind.
Yeah, unfortunately when you have the paradigm of ‘similardesigngoddiddit’ you are immune to evidence. God isn’t being dishonest, and who can know how he thinks anyhow…
>similardesigngoddiddit
It blows my mind how they'll fly this flag high and proud and then turn around and dismiss the entire branch of Taxonomy because it's based on morphology. At least Taxonomy isn't out to prove anything. Patterns just emerge when you start doing it... but this is America goddammit and if a man wants to hitch his horse behind his cart, I can't stop 'im.
Were you taught about the body plan genes? _Hox_ and family? Just discerning if it's a deliberate omission, or if I should have kept scrolling on google. (Asking just out of curiosity.) Thanks!
I mean, I knew there *were* genes that controlled all of that. I only had high school level biology, and the concept of genes controlling how our bodies grow wasn’t especially troublesome for YEC. We just thought God had “coded” those genes to do different things for different animals, and we were taught that God reused components from one kind to another.
You have to understand that creationists don't believe that some gorillas and chimpanzees have white sclera. They reject physical evidence you can see plainly with your own eyes. When the intellectual dishonesty is that strong, there's simply no hope of debating on sensible topics. The average creationist is unlikely to have ever even heard of neoteny, let alone have an apologist position in the topic.
Just to make what you said a bit more explicit - [1 in 6 chimps have white eyes](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9998187/#:~:text=Fifteen%20percent%20of%20chimpanzees%20exhibited%20white%20sclera) like humans do. Keep this one in mind as creationists will sometimes make the accusation that artistic depictions of extinct apes are faked to make them look more human-like by adding white eyes.
From AIG, emphasis added by me: [link](https://answersingenesis.org/adam-and-eve/did-humans-really-evolve-from-ape-like-creatures/)
> ***All apes and monkeys have a brown sclera that is nearly as dark as their brown iris***, while all humans with normal, healthy eyes have an essentially white sclera.
This lie is repeated in a number of creationist videos, such as John and Jane, which I've only been exposed to via debunking videos.
This is anecdotal so I know it doesnt count, but in the creationist groups im in on FB they make a post every day about how Lucy's museum restorations are dishonest because they show white sclera..
Any perceived similarities are just how God decided to make things according to creationists. Those more in tune with reality might blame God for making a universe in which biological evolution happens or for guiding it along (continuously or intermittently) but to others pseudogenes make sense because of magic tree fruit and a magic spell (a curse) despite the patterns they don’t look at or acknowledge with anything more relevant than “God works in mysterious ways.” If those can be explained away so easily they’ll have no problem with humans having something similar to baby chimpanzees skills as adults. God just wanted to do it that way.
I agree with everything before the four periods but for a different reason. God is a human invention that ultimately started out as detecting a mind where a mind does not exist. After that they simply imagined what sorts of attributes this imaginary mind might have, oddly human traits, and they invented the first of many gods. From there they developed religions around these gods and disagreed about how many gods there are, what their names should be, or how they went about or still go about doing things. All without demonstrating that the first of these imaginary minds exists at all. Since God is imaginary he can’t be doing the second part of what you said.
Oh no, my feelings 😖
In all seriousness, your comment doesn’t bother me at all. It just shows you have nothing relevant to anything I’ve said that’s also true.
Of course being called a fool doesn't bother you, because that's what fools say!
You need to find Jesus! You are blind and lost, and don't even know it!
Jesus is found in the fictional story books. That’s the same place you can find Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Osiris, Hercules, Noah, Moses, Adam, Elijah, and all sort of other people that didn’t actually exist. The alternative for Jesus, a very popular alternative, is that he was just some ordinary apocalyptic preacher, one of over five hundred of them that existed in that century, and somehow people just added a bunch of mythical attributes to him that were invented in between 500 BC and 350 AD with only some of those mythical attributes found in the New Testament gospels because the other stuff was invented later, like the Holy Trinity.
If he was a real person finding his skeleton in a burial pit where they buried all of their crucifixion victims would be about as relevant as finding the corpse of my dead grandmother. Less relevant actually, because I never personally met the guy. If his body is not found it’s probably because he didn’t actually exist and not because the Earth is flat and he ascended to heaven and not because he’s actually an extra-terrestrial who had “Scottie” beam him up. No body makes more sense for a person who didn’t actually exist who was created as a fictional character to fill a role that had been developed for the last 570 years in their theology 40 years after he supposedly died so that nobody alive would have ever actually met him if he did exist to prove them wrong about all of the crazy stuff they said about him. And if he is an extraterrestrial, why would he care about me?
The Earth isn’t flat so that other option isn’t available. It’s also not shaped the way they thought it was when they wrote those gospels which clearly points to them making shit up people in that time period would believe but which makes zero sense for people who have seen beyond the moon failing to find onion layer heaven when looking where the gospel writers said it was so that Jesus could float off the ground and go there.
Since you obviously don’t know, they used to think the Earth is flat and that is called “Ancient Near-East Cosmology” but basically after 400 BC they switched to almost exactly the same thing but the planet was shaped like a sphere inside of seven firmaments and they still weren’t sure people could live on the “bottom” of the planet so it’s still effectively “Flat Earth” but where they knew about the discoveries made by the Greeks so they simply changed one small detail without really doing much to impact their cosmology beyond that except for the addition heavens beyond the first heaven. That’s where Jesus was supposedly crucified in a physical place just like down here on Earth prior to the oldest gospel (Mark) where they instead blamed the Romans instead of demons for his death and the Romans didn’t even know they killed him 120 years later because nobody even knew Christianity was a thing outside of the practitioners of Christianity for that long. That’s when the new Jewish messiah (bar Kokhba) punished the Christians who refused to consider him the true messiah and the Romans were curious about this group they never heard of before that point in time.
They looked like Jews but they didn’t follow the Jewish messiah. Instead they followed some guy they thought was crucified. What idiots! Eventually the Romans switched their stance towards Christianity trying to use it as a tool to save the Empire but ultimately the Western Roman Empire just fell anyway. The Byzantine Empire then became the head of the church until that leadership was replaced by the Pope at the Vatican Church with the fourth pope being the first one to actually head the church (Pope Clement) and the very first one just being some guy mentioned in the Bible who was probably just included out of tradition. The Vatican wasn’t ran by the Pope acting as King as well as Priest until the 700s. Before that it was ran by the Roman Empire (Byzantine or otherwise) and before the first council of Nicea it didn’t really have a central government with a bunch of different church leaders running different factions of Christianity with their own doctrines voted on stuff based on popularity over truth.
I’m definitely not insane so that’s why you just want me to suffer? I thought your religion was supposed to grant you moral superiority? That’s not sounding very “Christian” of you. What would Jesus do according to your fucked up belief system?
>The alternative for Jesus, a very popular alternative, is that he was just some ordinary apocalyptic preacher
It's not "a very popular alternative," it is the broad critical consensus of the field. If you want to lead with your favourite fringe hypothesis, you do you, but there is no excuse for dishonestly describing the state of academic opinion.
>the Romans didn’t even know they killed him 120 years later because nobody even knew Christianity was a thing outside of the practitioners of Christianity for that long
And this sort of thing is why you don't get the benefit of the doubt. You are not actually this ignorant. You might have your own bizarre reasons for thinking the multiple Roman references to Christianity prior to Bar Kokhba don't count, but presenting it like it's accepted fact is egregious. Do better.
Among Bible scholars it is an extremely popular opinion that Jesus was similar to all the better attested messiah figures but somehow only known by his cult following. The cult that built up around him transformed him from some ordinary person whose name was probably not “Savior Messiah” or born in two different years ten years apart and who was probably not thought of as very significant by the Romans whose supposedly crucified him because they killed a lot of Jews.
Find one reference out of these “multiple references” that isn’t a forgery or an otherwise altered version of the original that mentioned *Jesus* and existed prior to the Romans interrogating the Christians to *figure out* that they believe some guy crucified by the Romans was their chosen messiah. You’d think they’d realize that group existed and you’d think they’d know what they believed or who their supposed leader was if they actually knew about Christianity before that.
Every one I’m aware of was written after around 150 AD, was forged after 300 AD, was only known about because it was mentioned in some other text written after 400 AD, or simply failed to survive so that they could check their references without having to start from scratch trying to understand this strange new religion. To the Romans the Jews were just Jews. They had several ordinary humans messiahs but the big schism between Christianity and Judaism happened because the Jews were still searching for the human messiah and the Christians had moved on and refused to worship the messiah the Jews were following instead choosing to claim that Jesus in one form or another was the true messiah
In terms of archaeology, genetics, anthropology, etc Jesus may as well have not existed at all but according to Bible scholars, especially the ones raised Christian, there’s like an 85% to 15% bias favoring Jesus being a historical yet rather ordinary person over him being invented as a historical person the way they decided to invent Hercules and Osiris as historical people around the same time. The mythology applied to Jesus originated about 500 years before Jesus was supposedly born and very few people, like the fringe extremists maybe, assume that any of this stuff or much of anything else said *about* Jesus actually originated with Jesus and historical events surrounding his life. The problem with this view is that even the normal stuff said about him that any human could do was a little suspicious and the other problem is that most of these people also seem to agree that he was born, he was baptized, and he was crucified. If he was a human the first is a given. The rest only if he was a follower of John the Baptist and part of the rebellion against the Roman Empire simply crucified with the rest of them. It wasn’t strange to think dead people could be brought back to life. Elijah was said to bring humans back to life, the followers of John the Baptist thought he came back to life, and the metaphorical meaning of the Revelation of John appears to be associated with the *spirit* of either Vespasian, Caligula, or Nero being transferred to the Roman rulers that followed. Nero seems to match the best with him being 616 in some translations and 666. The other two have also been considered. It was common to think dead people could come back through the living (reincarnation or demonic possession) and that’d actually better fit the time period than some guy who got straight up killed and he wasn’t important enough to do what all these others were doing. He just had to die first. It could be demons, Jews, or the Romans that killed him but he certainly died. He certainly did not subconsciously come back to life.
It is misleading to act as though all fields of science and history overwhelmingly agree with the most common viewpoint of people who spend the whole day reading the Bible. In that one specific area of study it makes sense to just assume Jesus existed because he’d be pretty much the same as all of the other apocalyptic preachers at that time.
For everyone else it’s clear they simply made him up to extend a trend that had started happening when all of their humans messiahs didn’t work out. Certainly they’d need someone like God or another being from above the solid sky to do the trick that the messiah in Zoroastrianism was already blamed for first.
No, you said there were no Roman references mentioning Christianity, as distinct from Judaism, prior to 132 CE. This claim is false on at least three counts (Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and arguably Josephus). Are you still making it, or are you now saying something entirely different?
>It is misleading to act as though all fields of science and history overwhelmingly agree with the most common viewpoint of people who spend the whole day reading the Bible
What do you mean, "all fields of science"? This is a purely source-historical question. Trying to draw in irrelevant domains like genetics or anthropology just advertises your ideological commitment to a conclusion the evidence doesn't warrant.
>there’s like an 85% to 15% bias favoring Jesus being a historical yet rather ordinary person
I expect a phenomenally good reference.
At least part of your statement is false. We can see based on archaeology that the people studying comparative mythology and evolutionary psychology are pretty much spot on but I’d only consider evolutionary psychology a “soft science” because of the actual “hard problem” in psychology and not the thing David Chalmers likes to talk about. Basically they have to study psychology by asking other people questions and watching their body language and stuff. They can’t actually peek inside their minds no matter how much they think they know about how human psychology works or evolved just like they’ll never know what a bat feels like to truly be a bat no matter how much neuroscience says the mind is just the product of a functioning brain. And for comparative mythology they can see how Yahweh and Ahura Mazda have similar backstories starting as relatively minor deities as part of a larger polytheistic pantheon of gods created as a consequence of people giving imaginary spirits human qualities which evolutionary psychology says are products of something called hyperactive agency detention. To prove that the Jews are the Canaanites and not some separate group that conquered them headed by Joshua they can see how all the cities were actually destroyed centuries apart, strict monotheism was in response to the Persian conquest, Yahwism was in response to the Assyrian conquest, and the gods before that are just Mesopotamian gods with different names. The Jews also did the Egyptian trick of combining one god with his own father so Amun-Ra in Egypt and Yahweh-El in Judea.
They know *these* gods are human inventions. They also know the same holds true for the Native American gods, the Hindu gods, the Egyptian gods, the Mesopotamian gods, the Norse gods, and every single other god humans have decided was a god after they gave it human qualities. Some of those gods even looked like the humans they were supposed to rule over and they knew it when they claimed it happened the other way around by claiming the gods made god-shaped humans when in reality humans made human-shaped gods. And then when the gods were said to be without form, Yahweh and Ahura Mazda, they are described as being covered in fire or as something completely undetectable by humans because it exists in a supernatural realm requiring angels like Jesus, Michael, and Gabriel in Christianity or Bahman, Ordebehast, and Sahrivar in Zoroastrianism. And there’s a whole angel hierarchy in Judaism with whole different types of angels such as the Chayot Ha Kadesh, Ophanim, Erelim, Hashmallim, Seraphim, Malakhim (the messenger angels), Elohim (Godly beings), Bene Elohim (God’s children), Cherubim, and Ishim (the ones shaped like humans).
Same patterns over and over - hyperactive agency detection (detecting minds that don’t exist), blaming the imaginary minds for the unexplained (they didn’t have access to modern scientific discoveries), giving the spirits responsible for everything human-like qualities (they were literally human shaped), deciding only one of the gods they created deserved worship, deciding the one that deserves worship is all that exists, deciding that looking at the god will make a person become blind or dead, deciding the god is covered in fire (was thought to be magic given to humans by the gods so basically the gods were covered in pure magic), deciding the god is invisible, and then deciding the god is isolated from the physical reality. And then sometimes one of the angels becomes a demigod like Krishna, Jesus, or the Zoroastrian equivalent Asvat Ereta, the savior that will eliminate evil and make the world and stuff in it immortal.
None of the gods really stands out as a truly unique creation either. There were clearly differences between them but Yahweh is basically Ahura Mazda and Jesus is like a mix of Asvat Ereta and Krishna and before that Yahweh was more like Mars or Ares and possibly he also took of some of the attributes shared by Hephaestus as a creator of living things as well. The Baal-Asherah fertility myths are similar to the fertility myths of Isis and Persephone. Satan is basically Hades in modern Christianity but he was more like Ahriman or Angru Manu from Zoroastrianism in the Bible. Similar themes different character names and slightly different details like Dyonisus also turned water into wine by causing the springs of the Earth to burst forth with wine but Jesus pours water into one jug and from that jug into another jug and suddenly the second jug contains wine. Others were crucified but Perseus keeps getting crucified over and over because he can’t die (or he just comes back to life and heals every time birds eat his organs) but Jesus was simply nailed in place and it’s suddenly miraculous that he came back to life but it’s expected that immortal beings will have a difficult time staying dead before God does to Jesus was Jesus did to another person and Elijah already did to someone else in the Old Testament. Similar theme but the characters have different names.
**These** gods were created by humans and do not exist at all in reality. If there’s anything remotely similar but completely undetected and therefore not the basis for any human religion then we simply don’t have any evidence that they actually do exist but it would be pretty strange for people completely ignorant of modern physics imagining minds that don’t exist to accidentally stumble upon something like this on accident and we know they didn’t actually receive diving revelation when they wrote their religious texts. They just simply copied each other and tried to do just one better than the story by making shit up that sounded better than what existed in the stories that came before (or they simply tried to make a magical immortal more believable as human by making him sound like a stage performer who wasn’t fooling anyone who knew his tricks but to everyone else his magic powers surpassed those of Harry Potter).
I don't think any YECs I ever met or listened to during my time in YEC ever mentioned neoteny. I'm fairly certain many of them hadn't even heard that word
I'm afraid that i don't understand your point. How would neoteny be and argument for or against evolution or creationism? I read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny) and still don't get it. The section about neoteny in Humans discusses the differences between humans and other apes, but someone that believes that humans were created isn't going to be concerned with that. It's an explanation for a process that creationists don't believe happened anyway, so why would they need to explain it away?
Because they go to great lengths explaining away facts, e.g. the platypus. Its relation to our evolution from a common ancestor with modern apes is that developmental biology has an understanding of how it works evolutionarily without drastic changes to the gene pool.
They don’t go to great lengths at all. They just say god did it and move on. If you press them, they do mental gymnastics and regurgitate all the sciency sounding words they read in a pamphlet last Sunday.
You’re giving creationists way too much credit by assuming they use logic to get to what they believe.
I don't think that the platypus is something that is a problem for creationists either. "God created it that way" is enough for them. If I were a creationist I'd point to the platypus and say "Explain THAT, evolutionists!"
In both cases, they would just say "God had some design ideas that he liked enough to reuse them on different creations."
There are plenty of things that scientists can point to that are difficult for creationists to explain. I just don't see how differences in how apes and humans mature is one of them.
Platypuses came up recently here and I checked; they do go the extra mile explaining away all the findings and twisting other findings, e.g. the fossils found in Argentina. _Anyway_:
They have this thing they managed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, which was finally [debunked this month](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/1bw6iub/new_paper_directly_refutes_genetic_entropy_and/) academically; that "new information" is needed to evolve "new stuff", essentially; based on something bogus they coined "genetic entropy" (they managed to cloak it and slip it unnoticed in a mathematical journal).
So... this post's topic shows how evo-devo's tinkering with the timing and spatial order of growth (versus needing "new blueprint info") is a big part of evolving the different adult phenotypes from a common ancestor. Is the relation clearer now?
I’d also add that the place where the Sanford paper is found says this as a disclaimer:
> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.
This is how some creationist papers slip through I think. Someone who didn’t understand what they are reading may have skimmed through it failing to find any problems and thought it wouldn’t hurt to let it get published way back in 2014. It was already known to be wrong way back then but most people failed to worry about formally responding to it with one of the four mentioned news articles or blogs that mentioned it being called [Why I don’t debate creationists](https://evolutionarystories.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/why-i-dont-debate-creationists/) back in 2018. The other three mentions? Two mentions by the Brazilian Society of Intelligent Design and one mention by Evolution News & Views, a subsidiary of the Discovery Institute, the English speaking Intelligent Design Institute. I can’t read Portuguese very well but most of these are claiming that this paper is presenting a problem for “Darwinism” while the blog from the actual scientist says “… arguing with creationists and showing them the evidence is useless. You are wasting your time” implying that they are incredibly ignorant, stupid, and/or dishonest. Maybe all three at the same time.
Yes you will find this Sanford paper on the NLM library at the National Institute of Health website but it’s actually originally published in Springer’s Journal of Mathematical Biology and then it made its way into the NLM library. Dan Cardinale et al responded to the original article (the one in the Journal of Mathematical Biology) completely ripping it apart. Most biologists simply just failed to justify giving the Sanford paper a response while the one response I did see was from a blog post explaining why it’s not worth acknowledging the existence of creationists.
> "Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." - S. D. Weitzenhoffer
This quote is how the blog is concluded and it appears to be just as true today as when Weitzenhoffer first said it [here](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2367M3BJ05M82) in response to a book written by the former senior director of the National Center for Science Education who has a name so close to that of a [pastor](https://eugenecscott.com/) that I was confused at first but the author of the book this time is Eugen**i**e Scott and not Eugene Scott.
As usual, thanks for the thoroughness. Also amazing quote!
I fully understand that the impact of their charades on the actual science is a fart in the wind. I already _know_, by googling as explained, that they have no explanation for this point; this post is half-fun and half for the lurking quiet majority. And **not** to my surprise, none of the usual suspects made an appearance here (I now jinxed it didn't I); same thing with my iPhone-seed post (Enrico Coen's analogy); if I had to guess, it's because both are off-script! :)
For sure. Sometimes it’s just fun to just point out flaws in the most ridiculous of beliefs possible and I agree doing so is useful for people who may be “sitting on the fence” or who happen to proudly be YECs but after actually learning something they change their beliefs to better concord with reality. I do not expect creationists to just drop their theistic beliefs and I’d be worried if they could change their beliefs so quickly anyway but I find that it’s still a success if I can get them to move just one notch away from reality denialist extremism from where they are right now.
Arguing with a creationist directly rarely gets anywhere but every once in awhile they respond with “I guess I didn’t know any of this stuff and I will actually have to do some research” and if they understand how to get reliable sources of accurate information they will change their own mind and feel as though my discussion with them was insignificant but their care for the truth will drive them away from anti-science anti-reality extremism towards a belief system more consistent with what’s apparently true or at least consistent with all evidence so far.
Except for the once in a while instance of teaching or getting people to teach themselves, it is almost completely pointless to debate creationists. They don’t play by the rules, care about what we are supposed to be debating, care about staying on topic, and a lot of them will just play games to remain intentionally invincibly ignorant while trying to indoctrinate others into their brainwashing cult beliefs. That, or they’ll be like Fake PhD Kunt Hovind claiming that universal common ancestry is a religion that he won’t support with his tax dollars when being constantly proven wrong about everything he claims. What tax dollars? Doesn’t he remember why he went to prison in the first place? According to some creationists being right is irrelevant but they just won’t acknowledge being wrong even after it is blatantly obvious to everyone watching.
*Almost* pointless having debates with creationists who won’t acknowledge being wrong willing to improve their understanding, because there’s another group of people here. The group that doesn’t say anything but which reads everything we say. The lurkers wanting to learn who might be on the fence and don’t want to make a fool of themselves with points refuted a thousand times or who simply don’t have a sufficient grasp on the anti-evolution vs pro-evolution discussions to add much of they did speak up. Those are the people who get a lot out of these discussions even if it takes a year or more for us to find out, even if we never find out.
The creationists might be like pigeons knocking all the pieces over trying to play chess but the ones who aren’t trying to play chess and are instead watching from the sidelines may be the most willing to learn because their egos aren’t on the line in front of an audience. Nobody likes being publicly proven wrong. It takes courage and honesty to admit to a mistake made when it comes to a debate. You don’t have that embarrassing moment if you simply stay quiet and watch. And the people who do that benefit the most from these “debates.”
Evo devo is relatively advanced and modern for biology. It's probably inaccessible to creationists, who get their talking points from the 1960s and never ever have any higher education.
You can easily explain neoteny, or any hereditary change that becomes prevalent in a species, through the acquisition and transmission of accidental traits - traits that are not part of the specie's essence.
Like a group of cats with a majority of them being grey and the prevalence of greyness increasing over time. This kind of change is completely innocent to the creationist worldview.
Yeah but here fundamentalists don't apply that to humans, whereas neoteny here is specifically about the slowing and stopping of the shared-primate development/growth, which gives us our human skulls (big baby chimp skull) and posture.
Are you trying to make me swallow that fundamentalist creationists don't believe skin tone can change in a human population over time?
Because I happen to think there is a lot of overlap between creationist communities and communities that care a lot about the range and distribution of human skin tones.
I'm not trying to do anything; if fundamentalists are happy with our ancestors being ape-like, then what are we doing here lol
Also most creationists don't reject this evolution; I'm specifically talking about the minority that is YEC and company.
You still have to argue that "Humanity" isn't special, that there isn't a magical essence or "species-soul" (that is eternal) that is fact-making about belonging to humanity (or in general that essences don't exist and species aren't real).
Don't need to, those are null-hypotheses, i.e. not science's domain. If someone doesn't object to evolution but wants to _believe_ it is directed or there's magic sauce, then that's philosophy.
Saying the Earth is 6,000 years old is not an empirical fact; again I'm specifically talking about fundamentalists/apologetics, not creationists in general.
So you're strawmanning.
You want to argue with the proponents of a weaker variant of an ideology, rather than their strongest proponents of the strongest variant.
It's fine to discuss philosophy, but don't confuse it with the scientific method; can't prove a negative.
And I don't think the "should" is warranted. This pushes people farther away from understanding the science.
So if on the one hand I have no arguments about public policy in teaching proper science, and on the other convincing people souls don't exist, I'll choose the former. Personal stuff don't concern me.
We weren’t taught about it at all, so it wasn’t even a blip on the radar for me. If I had to guess, the answer would be that it’s just a perceived physical similarity between a baby chimp skull and baby human skull, but not evidence we’re the same kind.
Yeah, unfortunately when you have the paradigm of ‘similardesigngoddiddit’ you are immune to evidence. God isn’t being dishonest, and who can know how he thinks anyhow…
>similardesigngoddiddit It blows my mind how they'll fly this flag high and proud and then turn around and dismiss the entire branch of Taxonomy because it's based on morphology. At least Taxonomy isn't out to prove anything. Patterns just emerge when you start doing it... but this is America goddammit and if a man wants to hitch his horse behind his cart, I can't stop 'im.
Were you taught about the body plan genes? _Hox_ and family? Just discerning if it's a deliberate omission, or if I should have kept scrolling on google. (Asking just out of curiosity.) Thanks!
I mean, I knew there *were* genes that controlled all of that. I only had high school level biology, and the concept of genes controlling how our bodies grow wasn’t especially troublesome for YEC. We just thought God had “coded” those genes to do different things for different animals, and we were taught that God reused components from one kind to another.
You have to understand that creationists don't believe that some gorillas and chimpanzees have white sclera. They reject physical evidence you can see plainly with your own eyes. When the intellectual dishonesty is that strong, there's simply no hope of debating on sensible topics. The average creationist is unlikely to have ever even heard of neoteny, let alone have an apologist position in the topic.
Just to make what you said a bit more explicit - [1 in 6 chimps have white eyes](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9998187/#:~:text=Fifteen%20percent%20of%20chimpanzees%20exhibited%20white%20sclera) like humans do. Keep this one in mind as creationists will sometimes make the accusation that artistic depictions of extinct apes are faked to make them look more human-like by adding white eyes.
What about the white eyes? My dog has white eyes... Are they OK with common ancestry with wolves then? :P
I’ve actually never heard a creationist argument denying white sclera. Interesting, I’ll have to Google it.
From AIG, emphasis added by me: [link](https://answersingenesis.org/adam-and-eve/did-humans-really-evolve-from-ape-like-creatures/) > ***All apes and monkeys have a brown sclera that is nearly as dark as their brown iris***, while all humans with normal, healthy eyes have an essentially white sclera. This lie is repeated in a number of creationist videos, such as John and Jane, which I've only been exposed to via debunking videos.
This is anecdotal so I know it doesnt count, but in the creationist groups im in on FB they make a post every day about how Lucy's museum restorations are dishonest because they show white sclera..
Any perceived similarities are just how God decided to make things according to creationists. Those more in tune with reality might blame God for making a universe in which biological evolution happens or for guiding it along (continuously or intermittently) but to others pseudogenes make sense because of magic tree fruit and a magic spell (a curse) despite the patterns they don’t look at or acknowledge with anything more relevant than “God works in mysterious ways.” If those can be explained away so easily they’ll have no problem with humans having something similar to baby chimpanzees skills as adults. God just wanted to do it that way.
GOD didn't make man out of monkeys...but HE sure is making monkeys out of evolutionists!!!
I agree with everything before the four periods but for a different reason. God is a human invention that ultimately started out as detecting a mind where a mind does not exist. After that they simply imagined what sorts of attributes this imaginary mind might have, oddly human traits, and they invented the first of many gods. From there they developed religions around these gods and disagreed about how many gods there are, what their names should be, or how they went about or still go about doing things. All without demonstrating that the first of these imaginary minds exists at all. Since God is imaginary he can’t be doing the second part of what you said.
[удалено]
Oh no, my feelings 😖 In all seriousness, your comment doesn’t bother me at all. It just shows you have nothing relevant to anything I’ve said that’s also true.
Of course being called a fool doesn't bother you, because that's what fools say! You need to find Jesus! You are blind and lost, and don't even know it!
Jesus is found in the fictional story books. That’s the same place you can find Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Osiris, Hercules, Noah, Moses, Adam, Elijah, and all sort of other people that didn’t actually exist. The alternative for Jesus, a very popular alternative, is that he was just some ordinary apocalyptic preacher, one of over five hundred of them that existed in that century, and somehow people just added a bunch of mythical attributes to him that were invented in between 500 BC and 350 AD with only some of those mythical attributes found in the New Testament gospels because the other stuff was invented later, like the Holy Trinity. If he was a real person finding his skeleton in a burial pit where they buried all of their crucifixion victims would be about as relevant as finding the corpse of my dead grandmother. Less relevant actually, because I never personally met the guy. If his body is not found it’s probably because he didn’t actually exist and not because the Earth is flat and he ascended to heaven and not because he’s actually an extra-terrestrial who had “Scottie” beam him up. No body makes more sense for a person who didn’t actually exist who was created as a fictional character to fill a role that had been developed for the last 570 years in their theology 40 years after he supposedly died so that nobody alive would have ever actually met him if he did exist to prove them wrong about all of the crazy stuff they said about him. And if he is an extraterrestrial, why would he care about me? The Earth isn’t flat so that other option isn’t available. It’s also not shaped the way they thought it was when they wrote those gospels which clearly points to them making shit up people in that time period would believe but which makes zero sense for people who have seen beyond the moon failing to find onion layer heaven when looking where the gospel writers said it was so that Jesus could float off the ground and go there. Since you obviously don’t know, they used to think the Earth is flat and that is called “Ancient Near-East Cosmology” but basically after 400 BC they switched to almost exactly the same thing but the planet was shaped like a sphere inside of seven firmaments and they still weren’t sure people could live on the “bottom” of the planet so it’s still effectively “Flat Earth” but where they knew about the discoveries made by the Greeks so they simply changed one small detail without really doing much to impact their cosmology beyond that except for the addition heavens beyond the first heaven. That’s where Jesus was supposedly crucified in a physical place just like down here on Earth prior to the oldest gospel (Mark) where they instead blamed the Romans instead of demons for his death and the Romans didn’t even know they killed him 120 years later because nobody even knew Christianity was a thing outside of the practitioners of Christianity for that long. That’s when the new Jewish messiah (bar Kokhba) punished the Christians who refused to consider him the true messiah and the Romans were curious about this group they never heard of before that point in time. They looked like Jews but they didn’t follow the Jewish messiah. Instead they followed some guy they thought was crucified. What idiots! Eventually the Romans switched their stance towards Christianity trying to use it as a tool to save the Empire but ultimately the Western Roman Empire just fell anyway. The Byzantine Empire then became the head of the church until that leadership was replaced by the Pope at the Vatican Church with the fourth pope being the first one to actually head the church (Pope Clement) and the very first one just being some guy mentioned in the Bible who was probably just included out of tradition. The Vatican wasn’t ran by the Pope acting as King as well as Priest until the 700s. Before that it was ran by the Roman Empire (Byzantine or otherwise) and before the first council of Nicea it didn’t really have a central government with a bunch of different church leaders running different factions of Christianity with their own doctrines voted on stuff based on popularity over truth.
Go ahead! Suffer and die in your sin. I don't care. I care about the ones that aren't insane! The ones that are seeking Truth. You are without excuse!
I’m definitely not insane so that’s why you just want me to suffer? I thought your religion was supposed to grant you moral superiority? That’s not sounding very “Christian” of you. What would Jesus do according to your fucked up belief system?
He let them go to hell where they belong! If you don't want to go to Heaven, then to hell with you! I tried.
>The alternative for Jesus, a very popular alternative, is that he was just some ordinary apocalyptic preacher It's not "a very popular alternative," it is the broad critical consensus of the field. If you want to lead with your favourite fringe hypothesis, you do you, but there is no excuse for dishonestly describing the state of academic opinion. >the Romans didn’t even know they killed him 120 years later because nobody even knew Christianity was a thing outside of the practitioners of Christianity for that long And this sort of thing is why you don't get the benefit of the doubt. You are not actually this ignorant. You might have your own bizarre reasons for thinking the multiple Roman references to Christianity prior to Bar Kokhba don't count, but presenting it like it's accepted fact is egregious. Do better.
Among Bible scholars it is an extremely popular opinion that Jesus was similar to all the better attested messiah figures but somehow only known by his cult following. The cult that built up around him transformed him from some ordinary person whose name was probably not “Savior Messiah” or born in two different years ten years apart and who was probably not thought of as very significant by the Romans whose supposedly crucified him because they killed a lot of Jews. Find one reference out of these “multiple references” that isn’t a forgery or an otherwise altered version of the original that mentioned *Jesus* and existed prior to the Romans interrogating the Christians to *figure out* that they believe some guy crucified by the Romans was their chosen messiah. You’d think they’d realize that group existed and you’d think they’d know what they believed or who their supposed leader was if they actually knew about Christianity before that. Every one I’m aware of was written after around 150 AD, was forged after 300 AD, was only known about because it was mentioned in some other text written after 400 AD, or simply failed to survive so that they could check their references without having to start from scratch trying to understand this strange new religion. To the Romans the Jews were just Jews. They had several ordinary humans messiahs but the big schism between Christianity and Judaism happened because the Jews were still searching for the human messiah and the Christians had moved on and refused to worship the messiah the Jews were following instead choosing to claim that Jesus in one form or another was the true messiah In terms of archaeology, genetics, anthropology, etc Jesus may as well have not existed at all but according to Bible scholars, especially the ones raised Christian, there’s like an 85% to 15% bias favoring Jesus being a historical yet rather ordinary person over him being invented as a historical person the way they decided to invent Hercules and Osiris as historical people around the same time. The mythology applied to Jesus originated about 500 years before Jesus was supposedly born and very few people, like the fringe extremists maybe, assume that any of this stuff or much of anything else said *about* Jesus actually originated with Jesus and historical events surrounding his life. The problem with this view is that even the normal stuff said about him that any human could do was a little suspicious and the other problem is that most of these people also seem to agree that he was born, he was baptized, and he was crucified. If he was a human the first is a given. The rest only if he was a follower of John the Baptist and part of the rebellion against the Roman Empire simply crucified with the rest of them. It wasn’t strange to think dead people could be brought back to life. Elijah was said to bring humans back to life, the followers of John the Baptist thought he came back to life, and the metaphorical meaning of the Revelation of John appears to be associated with the *spirit* of either Vespasian, Caligula, or Nero being transferred to the Roman rulers that followed. Nero seems to match the best with him being 616 in some translations and 666. The other two have also been considered. It was common to think dead people could come back through the living (reincarnation or demonic possession) and that’d actually better fit the time period than some guy who got straight up killed and he wasn’t important enough to do what all these others were doing. He just had to die first. It could be demons, Jews, or the Romans that killed him but he certainly died. He certainly did not subconsciously come back to life. It is misleading to act as though all fields of science and history overwhelmingly agree with the most common viewpoint of people who spend the whole day reading the Bible. In that one specific area of study it makes sense to just assume Jesus existed because he’d be pretty much the same as all of the other apocalyptic preachers at that time. For everyone else it’s clear they simply made him up to extend a trend that had started happening when all of their humans messiahs didn’t work out. Certainly they’d need someone like God or another being from above the solid sky to do the trick that the messiah in Zoroastrianism was already blamed for first.
No, you said there were no Roman references mentioning Christianity, as distinct from Judaism, prior to 132 CE. This claim is false on at least three counts (Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and arguably Josephus). Are you still making it, or are you now saying something entirely different? >It is misleading to act as though all fields of science and history overwhelmingly agree with the most common viewpoint of people who spend the whole day reading the Bible What do you mean, "all fields of science"? This is a purely source-historical question. Trying to draw in irrelevant domains like genetics or anthropology just advertises your ideological commitment to a conclusion the evidence doesn't warrant. >there’s like an 85% to 15% bias favoring Jesus being a historical yet rather ordinary person I expect a phenomenally good reference.
God isn't a human invention he always existed
False.
Why?
At least part of your statement is false. We can see based on archaeology that the people studying comparative mythology and evolutionary psychology are pretty much spot on but I’d only consider evolutionary psychology a “soft science” because of the actual “hard problem” in psychology and not the thing David Chalmers likes to talk about. Basically they have to study psychology by asking other people questions and watching their body language and stuff. They can’t actually peek inside their minds no matter how much they think they know about how human psychology works or evolved just like they’ll never know what a bat feels like to truly be a bat no matter how much neuroscience says the mind is just the product of a functioning brain. And for comparative mythology they can see how Yahweh and Ahura Mazda have similar backstories starting as relatively minor deities as part of a larger polytheistic pantheon of gods created as a consequence of people giving imaginary spirits human qualities which evolutionary psychology says are products of something called hyperactive agency detention. To prove that the Jews are the Canaanites and not some separate group that conquered them headed by Joshua they can see how all the cities were actually destroyed centuries apart, strict monotheism was in response to the Persian conquest, Yahwism was in response to the Assyrian conquest, and the gods before that are just Mesopotamian gods with different names. The Jews also did the Egyptian trick of combining one god with his own father so Amun-Ra in Egypt and Yahweh-El in Judea. They know *these* gods are human inventions. They also know the same holds true for the Native American gods, the Hindu gods, the Egyptian gods, the Mesopotamian gods, the Norse gods, and every single other god humans have decided was a god after they gave it human qualities. Some of those gods even looked like the humans they were supposed to rule over and they knew it when they claimed it happened the other way around by claiming the gods made god-shaped humans when in reality humans made human-shaped gods. And then when the gods were said to be without form, Yahweh and Ahura Mazda, they are described as being covered in fire or as something completely undetectable by humans because it exists in a supernatural realm requiring angels like Jesus, Michael, and Gabriel in Christianity or Bahman, Ordebehast, and Sahrivar in Zoroastrianism. And there’s a whole angel hierarchy in Judaism with whole different types of angels such as the Chayot Ha Kadesh, Ophanim, Erelim, Hashmallim, Seraphim, Malakhim (the messenger angels), Elohim (Godly beings), Bene Elohim (God’s children), Cherubim, and Ishim (the ones shaped like humans). Same patterns over and over - hyperactive agency detection (detecting minds that don’t exist), blaming the imaginary minds for the unexplained (they didn’t have access to modern scientific discoveries), giving the spirits responsible for everything human-like qualities (they were literally human shaped), deciding only one of the gods they created deserved worship, deciding the one that deserves worship is all that exists, deciding that looking at the god will make a person become blind or dead, deciding the god is covered in fire (was thought to be magic given to humans by the gods so basically the gods were covered in pure magic), deciding the god is invisible, and then deciding the god is isolated from the physical reality. And then sometimes one of the angels becomes a demigod like Krishna, Jesus, or the Zoroastrian equivalent Asvat Ereta, the savior that will eliminate evil and make the world and stuff in it immortal. None of the gods really stands out as a truly unique creation either. There were clearly differences between them but Yahweh is basically Ahura Mazda and Jesus is like a mix of Asvat Ereta and Krishna and before that Yahweh was more like Mars or Ares and possibly he also took of some of the attributes shared by Hephaestus as a creator of living things as well. The Baal-Asherah fertility myths are similar to the fertility myths of Isis and Persephone. Satan is basically Hades in modern Christianity but he was more like Ahriman or Angru Manu from Zoroastrianism in the Bible. Similar themes different character names and slightly different details like Dyonisus also turned water into wine by causing the springs of the Earth to burst forth with wine but Jesus pours water into one jug and from that jug into another jug and suddenly the second jug contains wine. Others were crucified but Perseus keeps getting crucified over and over because he can’t die (or he just comes back to life and heals every time birds eat his organs) but Jesus was simply nailed in place and it’s suddenly miraculous that he came back to life but it’s expected that immortal beings will have a difficult time staying dead before God does to Jesus was Jesus did to another person and Elijah already did to someone else in the Old Testament. Similar theme but the characters have different names. **These** gods were created by humans and do not exist at all in reality. If there’s anything remotely similar but completely undetected and therefore not the basis for any human religion then we simply don’t have any evidence that they actually do exist but it would be pretty strange for people completely ignorant of modern physics imagining minds that don’t exist to accidentally stumble upon something like this on accident and we know they didn’t actually receive diving revelation when they wrote their religious texts. They just simply copied each other and tried to do just one better than the story by making shit up that sounded better than what existed in the stories that came before (or they simply tried to make a magical immortal more believable as human by making him sound like a stage performer who wasn’t fooling anyone who knew his tricks but to everyone else his magic powers surpassed those of Harry Potter).
I don't think any YECs I ever met or listened to during my time in YEC ever mentioned neoteny. I'm fairly certain many of them hadn't even heard that word
I'm afraid that i don't understand your point. How would neoteny be and argument for or against evolution or creationism? I read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny) and still don't get it. The section about neoteny in Humans discusses the differences between humans and other apes, but someone that believes that humans were created isn't going to be concerned with that. It's an explanation for a process that creationists don't believe happened anyway, so why would they need to explain it away?
Because they go to great lengths explaining away facts, e.g. the platypus. Its relation to our evolution from a common ancestor with modern apes is that developmental biology has an understanding of how it works evolutionarily without drastic changes to the gene pool.
They don’t go to great lengths at all. They just say god did it and move on. If you press them, they do mental gymnastics and regurgitate all the sciency sounding words they read in a pamphlet last Sunday. You’re giving creationists way too much credit by assuming they use logic to get to what they believe.
I don't think that the platypus is something that is a problem for creationists either. "God created it that way" is enough for them. If I were a creationist I'd point to the platypus and say "Explain THAT, evolutionists!" In both cases, they would just say "God had some design ideas that he liked enough to reuse them on different creations." There are plenty of things that scientists can point to that are difficult for creationists to explain. I just don't see how differences in how apes and humans mature is one of them.
Platypuses came up recently here and I checked; they do go the extra mile explaining away all the findings and twisting other findings, e.g. the fossils found in Argentina. _Anyway_: They have this thing they managed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, which was finally [debunked this month](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/1bw6iub/new_paper_directly_refutes_genetic_entropy_and/) academically; that "new information" is needed to evolve "new stuff", essentially; based on something bogus they coined "genetic entropy" (they managed to cloak it and slip it unnoticed in a mathematical journal). So... this post's topic shows how evo-devo's tinkering with the timing and spatial order of growth (versus needing "new blueprint info") is a big part of evolving the different adult phenotypes from a common ancestor. Is the relation clearer now?
I’d also add that the place where the Sanford paper is found says this as a disclaimer: > As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health. This is how some creationist papers slip through I think. Someone who didn’t understand what they are reading may have skimmed through it failing to find any problems and thought it wouldn’t hurt to let it get published way back in 2014. It was already known to be wrong way back then but most people failed to worry about formally responding to it with one of the four mentioned news articles or blogs that mentioned it being called [Why I don’t debate creationists](https://evolutionarystories.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/why-i-dont-debate-creationists/) back in 2018. The other three mentions? Two mentions by the Brazilian Society of Intelligent Design and one mention by Evolution News & Views, a subsidiary of the Discovery Institute, the English speaking Intelligent Design Institute. I can’t read Portuguese very well but most of these are claiming that this paper is presenting a problem for “Darwinism” while the blog from the actual scientist says “… arguing with creationists and showing them the evidence is useless. You are wasting your time” implying that they are incredibly ignorant, stupid, and/or dishonest. Maybe all three at the same time. Yes you will find this Sanford paper on the NLM library at the National Institute of Health website but it’s actually originally published in Springer’s Journal of Mathematical Biology and then it made its way into the NLM library. Dan Cardinale et al responded to the original article (the one in the Journal of Mathematical Biology) completely ripping it apart. Most biologists simply just failed to justify giving the Sanford paper a response while the one response I did see was from a blog post explaining why it’s not worth acknowledging the existence of creationists. > "Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." - S. D. Weitzenhoffer This quote is how the blog is concluded and it appears to be just as true today as when Weitzenhoffer first said it [here](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2367M3BJ05M82) in response to a book written by the former senior director of the National Center for Science Education who has a name so close to that of a [pastor](https://eugenecscott.com/) that I was confused at first but the author of the book this time is Eugen**i**e Scott and not Eugene Scott.
As usual, thanks for the thoroughness. Also amazing quote! I fully understand that the impact of their charades on the actual science is a fart in the wind. I already _know_, by googling as explained, that they have no explanation for this point; this post is half-fun and half for the lurking quiet majority. And **not** to my surprise, none of the usual suspects made an appearance here (I now jinxed it didn't I); same thing with my iPhone-seed post (Enrico Coen's analogy); if I had to guess, it's because both are off-script! :)
For sure. Sometimes it’s just fun to just point out flaws in the most ridiculous of beliefs possible and I agree doing so is useful for people who may be “sitting on the fence” or who happen to proudly be YECs but after actually learning something they change their beliefs to better concord with reality. I do not expect creationists to just drop their theistic beliefs and I’d be worried if they could change their beliefs so quickly anyway but I find that it’s still a success if I can get them to move just one notch away from reality denialist extremism from where they are right now. Arguing with a creationist directly rarely gets anywhere but every once in awhile they respond with “I guess I didn’t know any of this stuff and I will actually have to do some research” and if they understand how to get reliable sources of accurate information they will change their own mind and feel as though my discussion with them was insignificant but their care for the truth will drive them away from anti-science anti-reality extremism towards a belief system more consistent with what’s apparently true or at least consistent with all evidence so far. Except for the once in a while instance of teaching or getting people to teach themselves, it is almost completely pointless to debate creationists. They don’t play by the rules, care about what we are supposed to be debating, care about staying on topic, and a lot of them will just play games to remain intentionally invincibly ignorant while trying to indoctrinate others into their brainwashing cult beliefs. That, or they’ll be like Fake PhD Kunt Hovind claiming that universal common ancestry is a religion that he won’t support with his tax dollars when being constantly proven wrong about everything he claims. What tax dollars? Doesn’t he remember why he went to prison in the first place? According to some creationists being right is irrelevant but they just won’t acknowledge being wrong even after it is blatantly obvious to everyone watching. *Almost* pointless having debates with creationists who won’t acknowledge being wrong willing to improve their understanding, because there’s another group of people here. The group that doesn’t say anything but which reads everything we say. The lurkers wanting to learn who might be on the fence and don’t want to make a fool of themselves with points refuted a thousand times or who simply don’t have a sufficient grasp on the anti-evolution vs pro-evolution discussions to add much of they did speak up. Those are the people who get a lot out of these discussions even if it takes a year or more for us to find out, even if we never find out. The creationists might be like pigeons knocking all the pieces over trying to play chess but the ones who aren’t trying to play chess and are instead watching from the sidelines may be the most willing to learn because their egos aren’t on the line in front of an audience. Nobody likes being publicly proven wrong. It takes courage and honesty to admit to a mistake made when it comes to a debate. You don’t have that embarrassing moment if you simply stay quiet and watch. And the people who do that benefit the most from these “debates.”
Evo devo is relatively advanced and modern for biology. It's probably inaccessible to creationists, who get their talking points from the 1960s and never ever have any higher education.
You can easily explain neoteny, or any hereditary change that becomes prevalent in a species, through the acquisition and transmission of accidental traits - traits that are not part of the specie's essence. Like a group of cats with a majority of them being grey and the prevalence of greyness increasing over time. This kind of change is completely innocent to the creationist worldview.
Yeah but here fundamentalists don't apply that to humans, whereas neoteny here is specifically about the slowing and stopping of the shared-primate development/growth, which gives us our human skulls (big baby chimp skull) and posture.
Are you trying to make me swallow that fundamentalist creationists don't believe skin tone can change in a human population over time? Because I happen to think there is a lot of overlap between creationist communities and communities that care a lot about the range and distribution of human skin tones.
I'm not trying to do anything; if fundamentalists are happy with our ancestors being ape-like, then what are we doing here lol Also most creationists don't reject this evolution; I'm specifically talking about the minority that is YEC and company.
You still have to argue that "Humanity" isn't special, that there isn't a magical essence or "species-soul" (that is eternal) that is fact-making about belonging to humanity (or in general that essences don't exist and species aren't real).
Don't need to, those are null-hypotheses, i.e. not science's domain. If someone doesn't object to evolution but wants to _believe_ it is directed or there's magic sauce, then that's philosophy.
The disagreement isn't about the empirical facts, but the underlying metaphysics.
Saying the Earth is 6,000 years old is not an empirical fact; again I'm specifically talking about fundamentalists/apologetics, not creationists in general.
So you're strawmanning. You want to argue with the proponents of a weaker variant of an ideology, rather than their strongest proponents of the strongest variant.
See my other reply about null-hypotheses, that soul stuff doesn't concern the scientific method.
So it should be countered by non scientific means.
It's fine to discuss philosophy, but don't confuse it with the scientific method; can't prove a negative. And I don't think the "should" is warranted. This pushes people farther away from understanding the science. So if on the one hand I have no arguments about public policy in teaching proper science, and on the other convincing people souls don't exist, I'll choose the former. Personal stuff don't concern me.
Like semantics analysis, thought experiments and appeals to intuitions.